Getting Arrested for Jesus

[micatala]

http://www.twincities.com/newsletter-mo ... i_13346147

The article describes the actions of a nun who was arrested during the Republican National Convention in St Paul MN last year.

Questions for debate:

1) Are these actions consistent with the gospel of Jesus?

2) Is the nun's interjection of her faith into the political process appropriate? Comparisons with anti-abortion protesters and others who act on their faith with respect to political issues would be relevant, I would think.

[McCulloch]

Are these actions consistent with the gospel of Jesus?

Did you mean the recorded teachings of Jesus or would you include the doctrines of Paul and others who claim to speak in his name?
Clearly the example of Jesus driving out the money changers from the Temple could be brought to bear. But Paul's teachings about submission to governing authorities seems also relevant.

Is the nun's interjection of her faith into the political process appropriate?

No. She should protest the war because she believes that it is wrong, not because it offends her religion. "I can do this because God told me to" is not a justified legal defense.

[Nilloc James]

No. She should protest the war because she believes that it is wrong, not because it offends her religion. "I can do this because God told me to" is not a justified legal defense.

Imagine what would happen if the "the bible told me so" defence was acceptable.

Stonings would become legal in certain cases!

[Sjoerd]

I remember a story about a Greek monk called Telemachos who interfered during gladiator games in Ancient Rome. The angry mob stoned him, but the emperor was so impressed that gladiator fights were abolished from that time on.

So she didn't act without precedent

Still, if you are willing to break the law for your conscience, you should be willing to face the consequences and go to jail, with a clean conscience.

[East of Eden]

If the nun is saying all wars are wrong, she's going against her church's teaching. Strange she would be against 50,000,000 Iraqis being liberated. Wondering if she's protesting our action in Afghanistan today.

[micatala]

If the nun is saying all wars are wrong, she's going against her church's teaching. Strange she would be against 50,000,000 Iraqis being liberated. Wondering if she's protesting our action in Afghanistan today.

This is an overly simplistic statement.

Being against the invasion of Iraq does not necessarily mean one is against the Iraqis having a less despotic ruler.

To answer McCUlloch's first question, ideally I would let the nun speak for herself. However, failing that, let's go specifically with the teachings of Jesus found within the gospels.

[MagusYanam]

If the nun is saying all wars are wrong, she's going against her church's teaching. Strange she would be against 50,000,000 Iraqis being liberated.

Try 25,000,000. And if the price of 25,000,000 people being 'liberated' is that one out of every twenty-five is killed and one out of every five has her father and mother taken from her before she turns 16, that is a price no Christian should accept, whatever denomination they happen to be.

[East of Eden]

Try 25,000,000.

Actually, we're both wrong, its 31,000,000.

And if the price of 25,000,000 people being 'liberated' is that one out of every twenty-five is killed and one out of every five has her father and mother taken from her before she turns 16, that is a price no Christian should accept, whatever denomination they happen to be.

The figure of 1,000,000 killed in the aftermath of the liberation of Iraq is completely bogus. Even the Iraqi Health Ministry estimates 87,000 dead from 1/1/05-2/28/09. This number is far fewer than those killed by Saddam, who killed more Muslims than anyone on recent history save for the French in Algeria.



Christians are supposed to prefer this?

"Documented human rights violations 1979-2003
Human rights organizations have documented government approved executions, acts of torture, and rape for decades since Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979 until his fall in 2003.

In 2002, a resolution sponsored by the European Union was adopted by the Commission for Human Rights, which stated that there had been no improvement in the human rights crisis in Iraq. The statement condemned President Saddam Hussein's government for its "systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law". The resolution demanded that Iraq immediately put an end to its "summary and arbitrary executions... the use of rape as a political tool and all enforced and involuntary disappearances".[citation needed]
Full political participation at the national level was restricted only to members of the Arab Ba'ath Party, which constituted only 8% of the population. Therefore, it was impossible for Iraqi citizens to change their government.
Iraqi citizens were not allowed to assemble legally unless it was to express support for the government. The Iraqi government controlled the establishment of political parties, regulated their internal affairs and monitored their activities.
Police checkpoints on Iraq's roads and highways prevented ordinary citizens from traveling abroad without government permission and expensive exit visas. Before traveling, an Iraqi citizen had to post collateral. Iraqi women could not travel outside of the country without the escort of a male relative.
The activities of citizens living inside Iraq who received money from relatives abroad were closely monitored.

Chemical weapons which were used by Saddam killed and injured numerous Iranian and Iraqis.Halabja poison gas attack:The Halabja poison gas attack occurred in the period 15 March"19 March 1988 during the Iran"Iraq War when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces and thousands civilians in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja were killed.[1]
Al-Anfal Campaign: In 1988, the Hussein regime began a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq. This is known as the Anfal campaign. The campaign was mostly directed at Shiite kurds (Faili Kurds) who sided with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran War. The attacks resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 100,000 people), many of them women and children. A team of Human Rights Watch investigators determined, after analyzing eighteen tons of captured Iraqi documents, testing soil samples and carrying out interviews with more than 350 witnesses, that the attacks on the Kurdish people were characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants, widespread use of chemical weapons including Sarin, mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands, the arbitrary imprisoning of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months in conditions of extreme deprivation, forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers after the demolition of their homes, and the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations.[1][2]
In April 1991, after Saddam lost control of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, he cracked down ruthlessly against several uprisings in the Kurdish north and the Shia south. His forces committed wholesale massacres and other gross human rights violations against both groups similar to the violations mentioned before. Estimates of deaths during that time range from 20,000 to 100,000 for Kurds, and 60,000 to 130,000 for Shi'ites.[3]
In June 1994, the Hussein regime in Iraq established severe penalties, including amputation, branding and the death penalty for criminal offenses such as theft, corruption, currency speculation and military desertion, while government members and Saddam's family members were immune from punishments ranging around these crimes.[4]
On March 23, 2003, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iraqi television presented and interviewed prisoners of war on TV, violating the Geneva Convention.
Also in April 2003, CNN revealed that it had withheld information about Iraq torturing journalists and Iraqi citizens in the 1990s. According to CNN's chief news executive, the channel had been concerned for the safety not only of its own staff, but also of Iraqi sources and informants, who could expect punishment for speaking freely to reporters. Also according to the executive, "other news organizations were in the same bind."[5]
After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, several mass graves were found in Iraq containing several thousand bodies total, and more are being uncovered to this day[citation needed]. While most of the dead in the graves were believed to have died in the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein, some of them appeared to have died due to executions or died at times other than the 1991 rebellion.
Also after the invasion, numerous torture centers were found in security offices and police stations throughout Iraq. The equipment found at these centers typically included hooks for hanging people by the hands for beatings, devices for electric shock, and other equipment often found in nations with harsh security services and other authoritarian nations.
[edit] Collusion of foreign powers in Saddam-era human rights abuses
During his rule Saddam Hussein was aided by foreign powers; the great bulk of Iraq's conventional weapons (such as tanks and artillery) were supplied by the Soviet Bloc, China, France, and Egypt, all of whom helped arm the Ba'athist government throughout the 1980s. Western relations with Iraq seem to have been motivated mostly by the potentially larger threat of an Iranian styled Islamic Revolution, which might have threatened foreign investment and disturbed the strategic balance in the region. It was hoped that an appropriate amount of foreign aid would allow for an Iraqi victory over Iran in the Iran"Iraq War, but be insufficient to allow for Iraqi expansion into Iran and other countries in the region. Western relations with Iraq after the Iran"Iraq War demonstrated a continued interest to support Iraq in an effort to balance the power of Iran and other actors. As late as July 25, 1990, a week before the invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, assured Saddam Hussein that the U.S. "wanted better and deeper relations."[6]

Number of Victims
According to The New York Times, "he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants " friends on friends, circles within circles " making an entire population complicit in his rule".[7] Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war vary from 500,000[8] to 1.5 million.[9] Others have estimated 800,000 deaths caused by Saddam not counting the Iran-Iraq war.[10]"

From Wikipedia

[MagusYanam]

The figure of 1,000,000 killed in the aftermath of the liberation of Iraq is completely bogus. Even the Iraqi Health Ministry estimates 87,000 dead from 1/1/05-2/28/09. This number is far fewer than those killed by Saddam, who killed more Muslims than anyone on recent history save for the French in Algeria.

Well then, I'm afraid the Iraqi Health Ministry is off by about an order of magnitude. The cluster-survey method used by The Lancet and other non-governmental sources is far more accurate.

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/deathcount/explanation

These numbers are not ultimately meaningless, but they are secondary next to the fact that war itself is contrary to the duties of a Christian life as defined by the words and life of Jesus Christ. Jesus told us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us even to our deaths. Jesus resisted Rome with non-violence even to his death; and so Christians are called to resist the thinking and methods of imperial Rome, even when imperial Rome promises 'liberation'.

[East of Eden]

Well then, I'm afraid the Iraqi Health Ministry is off by about an order of magnitude. The cluster-survey method used by The Lancet and other non-governmental sources is far more accurate.

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/deathcount/explanation

I'm aware of the Lancet findings, and stand by my statement they are bogus.


"Document drop: A new critique of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study
By Michelle Malkin July 25, 2007 11:01 AM Update 9:30pm Eastern. Shannon Love at the Chicago Boyz blog called foul on the Lancet 2004 study early on and, with vindication, reacts to David Kanes new analysis of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study: Kane shows that if the Falluja cluster is included in the statistical calculations, the confidence interval dips below zero, which is a big no-no. Since the studys raw data remain a closely guarded secret, Kane cannot be absolutely certain that the inclusion of the Falluja cluster renders the study mathematically invalidbut thats the way to bet. In science, replication is the iron test. I find it revealing that no other source or study has come close to replicating the original study. All my original points still stand. Ah, vindication is sweet.

One of the most useful roles of the blogosphere is its service as an open-source intelligence-gathering medium. You can draw on the expertise of people around the world at the touch of a button. We saw this with typography experts during the Rathergate scandal; Photoshop experts during the Reutersgate debacle; and military experts during the Jesse Macbeth unmasking.

Now, its the statisticians and math geeks turn. Remember that massively-publicized 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study? It was cited in nearly 100 scholarly journals and reported by news outlets around the world. 100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq blared the Washington Post in a typical headline.

There were attempts made by lay journalists to debunk the 2004 study (as well as the 2006 follow-up study that purported to back up the first). But none of those dissections comes close to a damning new statistical analysis of the 2004 study authored by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. I read of Kanes new paper at this science blog and e-mailed him for permission to reprint his analysis in its entirety here so that a wider blog readership could have a look. He has given me his permission and adds that he welcomes comments and feedback. Hell be presenting the paper at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Salt Lake City on Monday " the largest conference of statisticians in North America.

Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kanes bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged. Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.

An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology). The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.

Kane has sent his paper to Lancet. But the blogosphere need not wait for Lancet to complete its review. If youve got a statistics background or know someone who does, have a look. Kanes e-mail address is dkane-at-iq.harvard.edu. Hes a blogger himself at EphBlog."


Whatever the true number is, many of those killed were jihadists criminals who got what was coming to them, or Iraqi victims of the jihadists.

These numbers are not ultimately meaningless, but they are secondary next to the fact that war itself is contrary to the duties of a Christian life as defined by the words and life of Jesus Christ. Jesus told us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us even to our deaths. Jesus resisted Rome with non-violence even to his death; and so Christians are called to resist the thinking and methods of imperial Rome, even when imperial Rome promises 'liberation'.

Christianity is not a religion of pacifism. Had we followed your advice Europe would still be ruled by the Nazis. Jesus never condemned anyone for being a soldier, and said 'Render to Caesar what is Caesar's'. It is like saying in order to love your children you can't discipline or punish them. While I support our war on Islamofascism, I do pray for them, and for Christian revival in the Muslim world, and financially support ministries working to that end.