I never understood the "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" saying. It's pretending like there aren't selfish assholes (with both eyes) out there striking first and going for the eyes of others. Defending yourself and striking back is going to make everyone blind how exactly?
The only way for it to be possible to break the cycle of reciprocal violence is for people to abstain from participating in it, even at the cost of martyrdom.
Completely wrong. Both on a conceptual level and a practical one. On a conceptual level, there is no perpetual cycle of reciprocal violence. Reciprocal violence is a minor fraction of all violence in the world and is never 100% elastic (I.E. some proportion of people decline to reciprocate, so retaliation over time trends to zero), the much greater majority of violence is impulsive/uninstigated.
And on a practical level, advocating absolute pacifism in those disinclined to instigate violence only guarantees the egregious applications of violence only get worse, because that makes anyone inclined to instigate violence the automatic survivors, at which point they'll just keep doing what both came naturally and was successful ever more.
If you want overall violence to go down you want people unwilling to instigate violence over nothing but willing to punish instigating violence with even more overpowering violence, and for those people to be a greater force than the people willing to instigate violence for their own purposes
And on a practical level, advocating absolute pacifism in those disinclined to instigate violence only guarantees the egregious applications of violence only get worse
That's your view. For clarity, I'm going to call you a Heinleinist, an adherent of the theory of deterrence.
Christ's view was the contrary.
I'm not going to argue the merits of the respective philosophies.
I'm just going to emphasize that you CANNOT be BOTH a Heinleinist and a Christian. They are mutually incompatible philosophies. Heinlein tells you to deter. Christ tells you to leave it to god; all men WILL die, and the question is whether you die with bloody hands or clean.
"You're going to die young because you smoked thirty cigarettes a day since you were fifteen. And you're going to go to hell, because of the life you took. You're fucked." -Gabriel, Constantine
I never understood the "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" saying. It's pretending like there aren't selfish assholes (with both eyes) out there striking first and going for the eyes of others. Defending yourself and striking back is going to make everyone blind how exactly?
Because it perpetuates the cycle.
The only way for it to be possible to break the cycle of reciprocal violence is for people to abstain from participating in it, even at the cost of martyrdom.
Completely wrong. Both on a conceptual level and a practical one. On a conceptual level, there is no perpetual cycle of reciprocal violence. Reciprocal violence is a minor fraction of all violence in the world and is never 100% elastic (I.E. some proportion of people decline to reciprocate, so retaliation over time trends to zero), the much greater majority of violence is impulsive/uninstigated.
And on a practical level, advocating absolute pacifism in those disinclined to instigate violence only guarantees the egregious applications of violence only get worse, because that makes anyone inclined to instigate violence the automatic survivors, at which point they'll just keep doing what both came naturally and was successful ever more.
If you want overall violence to go down you want people unwilling to instigate violence over nothing but willing to punish instigating violence with even more overpowering violence, and for those people to be a greater force than the people willing to instigate violence for their own purposes
That's your view. For clarity, I'm going to call you a Heinleinist, an adherent of the theory of deterrence.
Christ's view was the contrary.
I'm not going to argue the merits of the respective philosophies.
I'm just going to emphasize that you CANNOT be BOTH a Heinleinist and a Christian. They are mutually incompatible philosophies. Heinlein tells you to deter. Christ tells you to leave it to god; all men WILL die, and the question is whether you die with bloody hands or clean.
"You're going to die young because you smoked thirty cigarettes a day since you were fifteen. And you're going to go to hell, because of the life you took. You're fucked." -Gabriel, Constantine