[quote=afx114][quote=Allan from Fallbrook]Praying for God’s mercy and protection as a Christian is not the same as seeking God’s blessing to kill my enemies[/quote]
I understand this as the case Allan, but would the person dying at the hands of a soldier? If the last thing they saw was a cross hanging from the neck of their killer, what would they think? Is it really any different than a Christian hearing “Allahu Akbar” as his last words?
The point I’m trying to make is that how these symbols are interpreted depends entirely on where you’re coming from. So while hearing “Allahu Akbar” as you die is certainly a horrible thing for a Christian, so too is dying at the hands of a cross-bearing Christian for a Muslim — regardless of intent.[/quote]
Afx: As much as I’d like to disagree with you on this, I can’t. I’m reminded of German soldiers in WWI wearing belt buckles reading “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) as they invaded Belgium and then France in 1914.
Hitler repeatedly invoked God, and Germany’s “divine” mission (which, I guess, included killing all the Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and mentally handicapped). Of course, Hitler also admitted privately that he did this solely to engage the German people and didn’t really believe it himself.
One of my COs was a hard shell Baptist who loved Jesus, and hated Communism (I hated Communism, too, but not as a Catholic, but as an American) as a result. This was the same guy that kicked off operations with the expression, “Let’s go break things and hurt people”.
War, by its nature, is a filthy, nasty business and between trying to get soldiers to kill and rationalizing that same killing, pretty much anything goes in the “motivational” department. As a Catholic and an American, I’m alternately horrified and proud of those two histories. But both the Mother Church and the US Government are made up of people and thus flawed and fallible. Just like I am.
