Sealed his fate with the Romans, sure enough. As the attack was clearly directed at Rome and the use of Roman coinage. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Caesar and his coinage belongs in Rome, not in Israel, and certainly not the Temple.

Jesus was openly received and hosted everywhere he, his wife, his brothers and companions went. Never caused any riots. Yet, everywhere Paulus Tarsus goes, that Roman spy, liar, Imperialist propaganda agent, he causes riots in the Jewish community.

How’s this for a “baldly” statement:

Tarsus Paul was an Imperialist Roman agent, a Roman spy, a conniving Roman liar, thief, and murder. He was not a Pharisee. He was not a Jew.

Even though I agree with you for the most part, your comportment has been so boorish and self-satisfied that you have probably done more to alienate people here than has anyone other than the odious C4.

Communication depends on finding an initial common ground. Baldly asserting that Paul was not a Pharisee etc., and then ridiculing anyone who disagrees, is stupidity of the highest order. Please go away until you learn some basic Derech Eretz.

****

However, Paul was unlikely to be a Pharisee, for at least two reasons. First, the Pharisees and the Sadducees (the faction that controlled the Temple) were enemies; it is inconceivable that a high-ranking member of the Temple police would be a Pharisee.

Second, in four places in his Letters, Paul attempts an a fortiori argument, which is a staple of Talmudic logic and can be seen on nearly every page of the Talmud. In three of these places, the argument is flawed. This is akin to someone claiming to be a trained mathematician, and then forgetting the quadratic equation.

Paul claimed to be a Pharisee because at the time, the Pharisees were held in high esteem throughout the Near East for their scholarship, whereas the Sadducees were just one more ruling elite.

Well, we’re talking here about the founding moment of the Christian church, an institution that has survived and grown for 2000 years
==

How come Jesus never caused any riots? How come everywhere Tarsus Paul goes he causes riots in the Jewish community?
……………
actually Jesus attack on the money changers in the temple sealed his fate.

The Gospel of John gives the most detailed account of the event.

“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the Temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the Temple, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said: ‘Get out of here.’ (John 2:13-16)

Matthew’s gospel does not detail the kind of animals that were being sold for slaughter, but it gives the same order of events.

“Jesus entered the Temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. ‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer but you are making it a den of robbers.’” (Matthew 21:12-13)

The same account is given in the gospel of Mark who, like Matthew, also reports that Jesus accused those at the Temple of making God’s house into a “den of robbers.”

Mark 11:15-17

15On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, 16and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. 17And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written:
” ‘My house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations’[a]? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’

The “house of prayer for all nations” is a reference to
Isaiah 56:7
the ‘den of robbers’ is a reference to Jeremiah 7:11

How come Jesus never caused any riots? How come everywhere Tarsus Paul goes he causes riots in the Jewish community?

Many moons ago, I myself used to be a pacifist. I guess age done made me mean. My attitude now is more or less in the ballpark of … pray for your enemies, yes, but smoke ‘em if they make a move towards you.

There is also a fourth strategy: up the ante well past the point your foe can even hope to match and thereby defeat him.

Once upon a time this is how all wars ended. And, “if certain trends are not reversed”, who’s to say it won’t one day be that way again?

Regarding “collective morality”, you’re absolutely right. I reject anything like Rousseau’s notion of a “general will” governing a nation. What collective conscience? It does not exist! What you have read reflects my inability to recall another nifty Latin formula from the philosophy of jurisprudence, so I carelessly expressed myself with the term “collective”. What I meant to say was that human laws are never formulated for individuals but for groups of individuals. The US Congress does not legislate laws for this individual John Smith, but for the nation as a whole, “the collective”; which unfortunately connotes collectivism, but that is far from my thinking. I agree that morality is of individual consciences. Now the individual leader (e.g., Truman) still has a moral and personal problem to resolve: he must either drop the a-bomb or do something else. However, as an individual VESTED WITH DIVINE AUTHORITY, he is in a fundamentally different category than the individual man acting without such authority. If our Truman makes an honest mistake, neither should his conscience torment him nor (I believe) will the Just Judge hold him to the same degree liable as He would an unauthorized man (like Judas). This I think is clear from John 19.

As to your second point: I think again you’re right on. But it is so far beyond my possibilities right now to come up with a comprehensive theory for moral action in the situation of war… That is what I would have to do to answer to my satisfaction (and probably to yours) the problems you raise. Who is the legitimate leader? FDR? Hitler? Emperor Hirohito? Again, you are right on about the centrality of reason’s judgment in the moral act, and this raises another difficulty, the soundness of our knowledge of the consequences of our actions. How can Truman be sure that the a-bomb is really going to be more merciful than a land invasion? He cannot possibly foresee all the consequences and complexities. And for the same reason, his conscience and God should not hold him to account in the same manner as the individual who kills in self-defense. Moreover, as one conscious of being God’s instrument that tries to do the divine WILL, he is psychologically and spiritually more capable of making some of the hard decisions that leadership sometimes requires. (Example: the captain of a stricken ship that must seal off watertight compartments still filled with hundreds of his men to save the rest of his ship; a terrible decision to have to make, which will torment him later unless he knows by Faith that he is not God and that only as a humble agent of Divine Authority he acts, imperfectly, for the best of all.) This is part of the reason that I brought up the analogy of the two supertankers: their captains cannot be held responsible, not in the same way, as two individuals without authority.

Moralists distinguish between ante bello (before the war breaks out) and in bello (in or during the war or in combat). Truman is in bello and evil is happening no matter what he does. NECESSITIES IMPOSE THEMSELVES. There is a fundamental moral law that where there is no freedom (due to necessity), there is no human (moral) act. For an act to be moral, it must be free, deliberate and its object good as such. But the necessity of in bello situations can, I think, attenuate freedom; and this my friend, the moral theologian, does not take into account. He demanded that the object be good in itself (but Truman’s act of bombing is not good in itself). I think that my friend abstracts the object from war’s chaos and rampant evil. If the house is burning down, I do not commit vandalism (an evil object) if I axe a door down so as to escape. Therefore, I do not think it is very fair to Truman to accuse him of deliberate murder as if he had a-bombed Japan in peace time. In bello situations often present us with options all of which are evil, and WHERE NOT TO CHOOSE IS ALREADY AN EVIL, AN EVIL WORSE THAN NOT TO CHOOSE (especially when charged as leader with the duty to govern and lead, one desists from leading so as not to do evil: this is a cop out, a culpable betrayal of duty). I hold that such a global necessity mitigates or even eliminates freedom to choose moral objects that are good per se, consequently and necessarily mitigating the evil in a moral action by attenuating one of its qualifying dimensions, that of freedom to choose (the other two are deliberation-awareness of the act-object, and the goodness or non-evilness of the act-object).

Now, do I think this global necessity removes all moral content from the a-bombing? Certainly not. But my friend did not duly take this in bello context into account, treating it as an ante bello context.

In all this argument with my friend, I have tried to attenuate his rigorist application of just war theory. My interest in doing this is not that of revisiting WWII. I am at bottom searching for a theoretical justification of the cruel war we must now wage against Islamo-fascism. It is a war to the death against patient fanatics, slaves of an ideology that teaches them to be ready to wait centuries to finally destroy our civilization and culture. I hold it impossible to win a war against such types unless we can morally justify exalting what used to be considered the warrior’s virtues: enthusiasm in effectively attacking and killing the enemy. What has happened to us that we are incapable of celebrating and exalting authentic military heroism? If we are not able to show a fanatical enemy that we are not only willing to kill him and all he holds dear, but that we ENJOY doing it, relish doing it, celebrate doing it, even organizing parades on 5th ave, NYC to rejoice in his ruin, then we will not be able to convince him that his fight and death is vain. AND WE ARE DOOMED, for we will never be able to defeat him definitively. We must eventually lose and die. That, not incidently, is the impact that Truman’s a-bombing had on the militarist Japanese fanatics. They looked to their future and saw the void. That destroyed their will to kill. War is of wills. Weapons and fists are secondary. But we have disarmed ourselves in our wills, and stand helpless and naked before the implacable will of the Islamo-fascist fanatic.

Bush killed many people, our mortal enemies, so he did evil? No! We must be able to say that he did good, and that our soldiers do good when they put down the enemy. Can you imagine going to a highschool football game and not cheering on your boys to victory because they “hurt” the other team’s players? How can our team win without enthusiasm in they’re hitting and tackling? But we have turned enthusiasm in war into an evil. We’re sunk, unless we can discover again the goodness and honor of soldiering and fighting for what we hold dear.

How can we recuperate our values and the enthusiasm necessary for their defense, even to the point of killing for them? The just war theory at most will show us how not to sin by excess in war. It is not about enthusing us for killing Huns, or Nips, or Islamo-fascists. I can think of only one way to see good in the grim task of war, and that is returning to seeing war as St Paul in Romans 13 and St Augustine in his own just war theory. The soldier, like Pontius Pilate, carries the sword on God’s behalf, and as God’s will should always be obeyed with joy and enthusiasm, so too should the soldier obey God’s will (expressed through his superiors) in pursuing and killing the enemy.

I hate writing all this. I too am a child of our too gentle culture. But I am being led to this conclusion by the bitter struggle we face against a remorseless enemy. I will be challenged: How can a God of love desire the death of an enemy? I won’t try to engage that here. But you can project ahead to see that my line of reasoning leads to a re-Christianizing of our culture so that we can fight such stern enemies. This probably elucidates some of my other posts above, my interest in religion, authentic, not inauthentic. Religion is the fundamental value that buttresses all other values, and justifies even war for its defense. The Islamo-fascists know this well, and hold a dangerous advantage over us with their inauthentic religion. It may be inauthentic, and therefore both absolute and irrational. But we right now have no religion, and therefore have neither the absolute nor rationality. We must get back some of that “good ole religion”.

You mention in passing another issue: that of capital punishment, basically offering me a penny for my thoughts. My personal conviction is that justice requires commensurate retribution: violation of an absolute value like human life requires “comparable restitution”, which has always been understood as forfeiture of the murderer’s life. If the capital punishment is justifiable, it is only on this basis, otherwise human life’s absolute value is destroyed in favor or a relative value (peace in the community, lower crime statistics, higher property values, etc.). If a man dies because he is reasonable expected to kill others for he has killed before, this reasoning does not seem that different from that of executing him for past violation of this world’s supreme value of human life. Both reasonings recognize that human life is sacred and its violation demands the commensurate satisfaction of capital punishment. Yes, I do believe, in principle, in the application of the capital punishment for “capital crimes”. I hold, moreover, that it is a duty (read: obligatory) to execute perpetrators of capital crimes. No, this does not mean I exclude the possibility of mercy, of suspending the sentence. My justification in suspending what I just called an obligatory punishment is again the idea of the judge’s (and the State’s) mediation of God’s authority. Because it is God and not the judge who is the origin of the authority of the death sentence, the judge, if he can reasonably hold the man to be sorry or reformed, can consign the case to the Supreme Judge. If there is no God or no mediation, then the human judge or tribunal would be unconditionally obliged to mete out the death sentence or ignore the supreme value of this world that is human life. My thoughts, for what they are worth, on capital punishment.

Have I managed to convince anyone that I am a religious fanatic? If that’s how I am coming off, I sure would like to hear from you.

However, for Schickelgruber’s demise to have
broken the hypnotic spell it would have had to have taken place earlier. Or so it seems to me.

As far as I can tell, Wild Bill Donovan seems to have made a concious decision to leave him intact until the war was won.

Wonder what would have happened had Generals taken over and tried for an Armistice? Our side might well have held out for unconditional surrender anyway. They all regretted not listening to Pershing back in 1918 and getting the German Army to surrender instead of having German civilians negotiate.

Oh well. Neither of us had to made the decision. Dunno about you but in my case I imagine that is rather fortunate.

See you on the next posting of interest. This one looks sorta played out.