The Holy Scriptures tell of war and provocation.

The R A N T of G L E N N glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
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War and the Holy Word

Letter to the editor;

Why do the Holy Scriptures contain so many chapters about war?

Is it because religious people need to know how to fight wars? No, a book cannot help anyone there, because every war is different from every previous war.

Is it because religious people need to know how to keep their countries out of wars? Maybe. Wars happen. But there remains a thread of hope that people can insist that their governments not stir up wars. (I don’t know of any instance of this.)

Possibly the Scriptures go on and on about war because wars are going to happen and our nations are going to be involved in them and people of faith need to survive mentally-whole as well as physically. The scant word of comfort is that this is not the first nor only time that millions of men (and women) have practiced with deadly weapons and deliberately organized to slaughter one another with them.

Nearly everyone agrees that every people be prepared to defend their nations and their nationalities. The problem comes when politicians tell them that the best defense is a good offense – the “pre-emptive attack”. (“They’re going to attack us sometime anyway. We’d better attack them first, before they can get ready.”)

For their own nefarious and unknown reasons, many American politicians practically salivated over the prospects of getting the US into World War One.

They flaunted the passenger ship Lusitania in the German face, shipping ammunition to England in open defiance of our declared neutrality. The Germans put a full-page ad in the New York Times pleading with people not to go for a ride on the Lusitania.

That ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean with destroyer escorts, zig-zagging and laying smoke screens. However, when they got to the area of maximum submarine activity, the Lusitania was sent alone, in a straight line. The Germans sank it to keep their enemies from receiving untold tons of ammunition.

You can check this out. It was a deliberate provocation to get us into that war. (The politicians liked it so much they actually called it “The Great War”.)

Glenn Jacobs / Eagar, Arizona