Week 1 Non Violence: A Dangerous Idea!

I know its only the first week of 2011, but here's my best book so far in the new year:

Non-Violence:The History of a Dangerous Idea @ Mark Kurlansky.

Maybe as we start a new year we need to revisit how we live in a world that annually is growing more violent than the years/centuries before.

Kurlansky is not writing from a Christian perspective but he does quote a powerful divine decree "those who take the sword shall perish with the sword."

Does it not seem ironic that a nation that purports to hold to Christian heritage holds the most powerful military force in the history of humankind!

The classic pamphlet on this subject was written in 1815 by David Low Dodge, the man who is considered the first American peace activist. A devout Christian, who at the end of the 1812 war formed the New York Peace Society. Risking the accusation of being disloyal and unpatriotic (how things never seem to change) he postponed his publication until the war was over. It's title was "War Inconsistent With The Religion of Jesus Christ."

Here's a most thought provoking quote from his writing:

"The professed object of war generally is to preserve liberty and produce a lasting peace; but war never did and never will preserve liberty and produce a lasting peace, for it is a divine decree that all nations who take the sword shall perish with the sword. War is no more adapted to preserve liberty and produce a lasting peace than midnight darkness is to produce noonday light."

Perhaps the most fascinating and disturbing insight that Kurlansky reveals is that throughout history though most religions shun warfare and hold nonviolence as the only moral route toward political change - governing people have always shunned nonviolence and co-opted religion and its language into their violent campaigns.

"If someone were to come along who would not compromise, a rebel who insisted on taking the only moral path, rejecting violence in all its forms, such a person would seem so menacing that he would be killed, and after his death he would be canonized or deified, because a saint is less dangerous than a rebel. The first and most prominent example was a Jew named Jesus!"

Ouch!!!

Gets you thinking about what it means to be a follower of the rebel Jesus.