John,
To avoid any AH, it will suffice to say that printing out your arguments and letting a high school logic class dissect them for contradictions and fallacies would be both beneficial and time consuming. Notice that is an comment addressing your arguments.

This was a good post. I agree that sending women to fight war is morally wrong. Although I am not completely sure where I stand on the four views of God/war, I do believe that most any view is compatable with Denny’s post. So, you guys are arguing on the wrong blog.

That would not be called a “war” if we stopped them. Also, there is such a thing as a non-violent protest. We could have easily stopped them without killing them. Defending the weak is good; taking human life created in God’s image is not.

Also, Darius, is a war just if the means that lead to it are unjust? Other than that, your view of the violence of God and Jesus is so abysmal and void of any sort of historic orthodox claim I’m left speechless. Give me your Bible; I’ll let you have it back when you learn to read it.

Jesus was not a pacifist, and there are some NT verses that show this. It is true that some believers choose pacifism, but not all do.

“Fighting a war to preserve life is contradictory & paradoxical.”

So you think that WWII was immoral as regards America’s participation?

“Also, the Bible has accounts of all sorts of things which we know are wrong, so your argument does not work. The Bible has rape in it, does that make it okay?”

No, obviously not. But it does make it okay if God shows that he supports something as morally and ethically right. And clearly, based on an honest and complete reading of Scripture, God seems to have no problem with defending human life and morality via war.

“Whatever concession God made in that era, we now know him fully as revealed on the cross, which is a picture of a God who absorbs violence and does not inflict it. As Christians we read the OT in light of Jesus & his message, and he was pacifistic to the core.”

This doesn’t appear at all faithful to Scripture. God was quite merciful in the OT and Jesus was depicted as quite violent at times in the NT (His whipping in the Temple and the Book of Revelations come to mind). God never said that violence was inherently evil. Otherwise, God would be guilty of evil.

I’m not really interested in engaging this debate, just wanted to remind you how very unethical and horrible it can be to fail to engage an enemy as well. I cannot justify war using only the Sermon on the Mount. Neither can I justify standing idly by while 1,000,000 people were killed while politicians argued about the legal shades of the technical term “genocide.”

First and foremost, women are in the greatest danger in the home, from injury from their intimate partner. We should perhaps propose that women live in all female compounds protected by women, in order to protect women from injury and keep them nicely protected.

Or, on the other hand, we can admit that there is no ideal safe way to live. No, women do not want to go to war. No, women do not want to send their sons to war. No, a thousand times no.

However, I do think that, on average, men are more suited to combat than women. So, I think it should be an exception that women go to war. However, in the English Civil War, when many wealthy men were imprisoned, their wives took over command of their estates and personally, with the help of their servants, defended their land, on behalf of their husbands.

Let women be real human beings, who love their sons and their husbands.

And as the wife of an active duty Marine and Iraq War Veteran, I don’t think women should be serving in any combat capacity.

I was not aware that anyone had determined exactly what a majority of Jews or Christians believe about those texts. Seriously, Darius, can you think of any reason that adherents of a religious view might want to reinterpret passages in their religious text that might put their deity in a bad light?