Christians? Using self-defense and Guns?

[Gary]

I knew you said that, but if you were not assuming armed protection then is the master of the house just watching?

The master of the house prevented a break in. It doesn't say how he defended his home, only that he did.
.

 

[tobewell]

That Scripture actually pertains to keeping Christ as a protector of your soul in defense against sin ....

 

[th1b.taylor]

I only don't say how another person should walk, because I don't want to blaspheme the Holy Spirit walking in that person. Maybe I am at a different point in my walk. I can post scripture and then the Holy Spirit can work in that person.

LtD,
This begins to feel like your running in an infinite circle. We are being led by your posts and we are neither on subject for the topic nor are we discussing the same thing that began this exchange... what are you doing? I wanted you to study, where are you going?

 

[th1b.taylor]

That Scripture actually pertains to keeping Christ as a protector of your soul in defense against sin ....

Good, biblical, understanding and life application.

 

[Fish Catcher Jim]

You can stop a murder or rape without violence.

Yes this is true you can stop evil without violence BUT most beleivers are not so prepared for this. Jesus own diciples had to ask Him why thery could not cast out the demons....His answer was ...this kind of thing needs prayer and fasting.....Now the problem there is this.....you can not wait until the situation calls for action to pray and fast in order to deliver the situation......One must just as Jesus always was....stay prayed and fasted up at all times.

Now you are right within your thinking as to fight the good fight of faith and fighting against principalities and darkness and evil powers etc and not against flesh and blood or people.....The problem is......they fight back and unless you are truly prayed up and full of the love and power of God and yes can send them packing or dropping to thier knees and even leading them to the Lord...............your gonna get hurt.......Your First responce is always got to be In Christ (words) but it might take a little struggle or force to make safe way as well.

 

[LovethroughDove]

LtD,
This begins to feel like your running in an infinite circle. We are being led by your posts and we are neither on subject for the topic nor are we discussing the same thing that began this exchange... what are you doing? I wanted you to study, where are you going?

I am going to bed right now. As for this thread, I have no idea where it will go.

 

[th1b.taylor]

I am going to bed right now. As for this thread, I have no idea where it will go.

You see, there you go round the circle. There is no discernable logic to be found.

 

[Obadiah]

Reading this back and forth dialog reminds me of a story. It's a true story, one I was part of. Not the only one I've been a part of by any means, but one that fits this thread.

As some of you know I spent a career as a police officer in Los Angeles, and I was always a street cop. No desk jobs for me (other than when I was recovering from an injury.) Part of that time I worked in a neighborhood that for some reason attracted a lot of pacifists who had the same and sometimes even more extreme pacifist views on life than those expressed by some of our members here. One of them was a young lady I knew personally because she was a waitress in a restaurant we all ate at almost every night and I had become friends with her.

Late one dark night a call came out on the police radio that a woman in a park was screaming for help and screaming for the police. I was the first to get there and to my surprise there really was a woman screaming somewhere out in the pitch black dark park! (Those kind of calls are either false alarms or by the time you get the call and drive there it's too late almost 100% of the time.) So I go running into the park and guess who I find screaming for help? Yep, the waitress, my friend. To be exact, the scene was so horrific I didn't even realize it was her until it was over. What happened was while she was walking home from work a guy high on Angel Dust grabbed her from the sidewalk, dragged her deep into the park, stripped off most of her clothes and had her pinned on the ground raping her! He had beaten her and thrown her down on the ground where her bare back, rump, and legs were being cut up from some broken glass that happened to be in the grass.

Now think about just that part of it for a minute. How much does a paper cut hurt? Now imagine hundreds of deep gashing cuts being torn into your bare skin as some guy with superhuman drug induced strength grinds your naked body into several pieces of broken glass, and keeps doing it on and on and on as seconds start to feel like minutes and hours and you feel like it's never going to end. And on top of that, your head is pounding from the pain of the blows from his fists, and you are totally and completely unable to do one thing about it. You are overpowered and completely unable to take any kind of control of the nightmare that your evening suddenly became. You feel such shame and revulsion from the things he is doing to you. And this isn't even mentioning the fact that you are being raped all the while too, and that you are sure when he's done he's going to kill you so you can't testify against him. That'll be easy for him to do because you know you are half dead already and can feel the life slipping out of you as every second passes. It's probably not a good idea for me to start describing the details and horror of the actual rape itself on this site, but let's just leave it at from interviewing many victims I probably have a better idea of how horrible it is than do most women who haven't been raped. I could go into a lot more detail, but I know there are people here who don't want to think about it.

So I stopped him. I almost beat him to death with my baton to stop him. Those police batons with the side handle can deliver tremendously powerful blows in the hands of a trained person, and I was well trained in it's use. Because of the drugs in his system, he didn't even stop raping her while I was beating him and all attempts to just pull him off were futile. The drugs were giving him superhuman strength and my last resort before shooting him was to continue hitting him with the baton as hard and as often as I could, even across the head to try to knock him out so he would stop. My fear of shooting him was accidentally shooting the waitress, so I really didn't want to do that. By this time other officers had arrived and we simply wailed on him with our batons until he finally weakened enough that we could pull him off. (Tazers were relatively new and few had them yet, but even those aren't very effective on people high on Angel Dust.) Rodney King only got love taps compared to what we had to do to this guy just to get him to weaken enough that the five of us could finally pull him off of her! That night he came within minutes of dieing in the hospital from the internal injuries we caused.

So what's the point? The point is the second that guy grabbed her on the sidewalk, the waitress was no longer a pacifist! And this was typical of what happens when pacifists are suddenly confronted with a situation where they are in great pain or great fear from what some scumbag is doing to them. (And this is even true of Christians who boldly claim that they will trust in the Lord to save them or just willingly allow themselves to be needlessly killed.) They lay aside their pacifist ideals and scream bloody murder for someone with some kind of rescources or some kind of a weapon to come save them. It happens pretty much EVERY time. I've seen it many more times than I can ever try to list or even remember. Not ONCE did I have a pacifist, after being the victim of a violent crime, tell me "No, don't do anything bad to him, don't try to stop him, I don't mind laying down my life for this violent scumbag of a criminal." No, not ONCE in my entire career did I hear a person who claimed to be a pacifist say that while or after they were victimized. None of those who condemned us for using force to stop violent criminals and preached about how wrong that was were people who had ever been a victim of a truly violent crime where killing the criminal was actually justified. Not one. Those that had the experience of being a victim of a truly violent crime immediately abandoned all their ideals.

I know from real life experience that it's simply just too easy and unrealistic to sit in a comfortable house in front of a nice computer and talk about how all us Christians are supposed to just lay down our lives for the criminals. I've not once seen or heard of one person, Christian or otherwise, who literally and voluntarily did that if and when the opportunity came along. Sure, martyrs were burned a the stake and such things as this. But that was forced on them by tyrannical governments with tyrannical enforcers who didn't exactly give them any more choice than my waitress friend had. None of them walked up to the stake voluntarily to be burned alive! It's a whole shockingly different world when you are suddenly and violently being beaten, shot, raped, or murdered and those ideals go right out the window real fast.

 

[FreeGrace]

The scripture in Matthew points to self-defense not being cool.

56 posts since yesterday at 7:38pm??!! What in the world!

Anyway, while wading through to catch up, I couldn't resist this comment.

One might want to reconsider the issue of self defense up to and including killing during self defense by considering this passage of Scripture:

Esther 8:11 - In them the king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, to kill and to annihilate the entire army of any people or province which might attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoil. NASB

Esther 9:5 - Thus the Jews struck all their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying; and they did what they pleased to those who hated them. NASB

9:10 - but they did not ay their hands on the plunder (though the king gave them that right)

9:15 - in Susa, the Jews killed 300 but did not take their plunder

9:16 - In the entire kingdom, the Jews killed 75,000, but did not lay their hand on the plunder

Those who would argue against self defense are arguing against the Word of God. Self defense is a Biblical concept.

 

[th1b.taylor]

56 posts since yesterday at 7:38pm??!! What in the world!

Anyway, while wading through to catch up, I couldn't resist this comment.

One might want to reconsider the issue of self defense up to and including killing during self defense by considering this passage of Scripture:

Esther 8:11 - In them the king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, to kill and to annihilate the entire army of any people or province which might attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoil. NASB

Esther 9:5 - Thus the Jews struck all their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying; and they did what they pleased to those who hated them. NASB

9:10 - but they did not ay their hands on the plunder (though the king gave them that right)

9:15 - in Susa, the Jews killed 300 but did not take their plunder

9:16 - In the entire kingdom, the Jews killed 75,000, but did not lay their hand on the plunder

Those who would argue against self defense are arguing against the Word of God. Self defense is a Biblical concept.

Thanks, I had not thought to go to Esther but this stinking disease and, likely, old age are getting to my resources. I enjoy telling folks that when I fell of the side of my last diesel the little guy that runs my filing system broke both of his legs and that I have yet to figure out how to get a pair of crutches through one of my ears.

It is very tough to get a New Covenant or a later day New Testament Christian out of the Sermon on the Mount and into the books of the Bible it is referencing. Again, thank you.

 

[Jesse]

Reading this back and forth dialog reminds me of a story. It's a true story, one I was part of. Not the only one I've been a part of by any means, but one that fits this thread.

As some of you know I spent a career as a police officer in Los Angeles, and I was always a street cop. No desk jobs for me (other than when I was recovering from an injury.) Part of that time I worked in a neighborhood that for some reason attracted a lot of pacifists who had the same and sometimes even more extreme pacifist views on life than those expressed by some of our members here. One of them was a young lady I knew personally because she was a waitress in a restaurant we all ate at almost every night and I had become friends with her.

Late one dark night a call came out on the police radio that a woman in a park was screaming for help and screaming for the police. I was the first to get there and to my surprise there really was a woman screaming somewhere out in the pitch black dark park! (Those kind of calls are either false alarms or by the time you get the call and drive there it's too late almost 100% of the time.) So I go running into the park and guess who I find screaming for help? Yep, the waitress, my friend. To be exact, the scene was so horrific I didn't even realize it was her until it was over. What happened was while she was walking home from work a guy high on Angel Dust grabbed her from the sidewalk, dragged her deep into the park, stripped off most of her clothes and had her pinned on the ground raping her! He had beaten her and thrown her down on the ground where her bare back, rump, and legs were being cut up from some broken glass that happened to be in the grass.

Now think about just that part of it for a minute. How much does a paper cut hurt? Now imagine hundreds of deep gashing cuts being torn into your bare skin as some guy with superhuman drug induced strength grinds your naked body into several pieces of broken glass, and keeps doing it on and on and on as seconds start to feel like minutes and hours and you feel like it's never going to end. And on top of that, your head is pounding from the pain of the blows from his fists, and you are totally and completely unable to do one thing about it. You are overpowered and completely unable to take any kind of control of the nightmare that your evening suddenly became. You feel such shame and revulsion from the things he is doing to you. And this isn't even mentioning the fact that you are being raped all the while too, and that you are sure when he's done he's going to kill you so you can't testify against him. That'll be easy for him to do because you know you are half dead already and can feel the life slipping out of you as every second passes. It's probably not a good idea for me to start describing the details and horror of the actual rape itself on this site, but let's just leave it at from interviewing many victims I probably have a better idea of how horrible it is than do most women who haven't been raped. I could go into a lot more detail, but I know there are people here who don't want to think about it.

So I stopped him. I almost beat him to death with my baton to stop him. Those police batons with the side handle can deliver tremendously powerful blows in the hands of a trained person, and I was well trained in it's use. Because of the drugs in his system, he didn't even stop raping her while I was beating him and all attempts to just pull him off were futile. The drugs were giving him superhuman strength and my last resort before shooting him was to continue hitting him with the baton as hard and as often as I could, even across the head to try to knock him out so he would stop. My fear of shooting him was accidentally shooting the waitress, so I really didn't want to do that. By this time other officers had arrived and we simply wailed on him with our batons until he finally weakened enough that we could pull him off. (Tazers were relatively new and few had them yet, but even those aren't very effective on people high on Angel Dust.) Rodney King only got love taps compared to what we had to do to this guy just to get him to weaken enough that the five of us could finally pull him off of her! That night he came within minutes of dieing in the hospital from the internal injuries we caused.

So what's the point? The point is the second that guy grabbed her on the sidewalk, the waitress was no longer a pacifist! And this was typical of what happens when pacifists are suddenly confronted with a situation where they are in great pain or great fear from what some scumbag is doing to them. (And this is even true of Christians who boldly claim that they will trust in the Lord to save them or just willingly allow themselves to be needlessly killed.) They lay aside their pacifist ideals and scream bloody murder for someone with some kind of rescources or some kind of a weapon to come save them. It happens pretty much EVERY time. I've seen it many more times than I can ever try to list or even remember. Not ONCE did I have a pacifist, after being the victim of a violent crime, tell me "No, don't do anything bad to him, don't try to stop him, I don't mind laying down my life for this violent scumbag of a criminal." No, not ONCE in my entire career did I hear a person who claimed to be a pacifist say that while or after they were victimized. None of those who condemned us for using force to stop violent criminals and preached about how wrong that was were people who had ever been a victim of a truly violent crime where killing the criminal was actually justified. Not one. Those that had the experience of being a victim of a truly violent crime immediately abandoned all their ideals.

I know from real life experience that it's simply just too easy and unrealistic to sit in a comfortable house in front of a nice computer and talk about how all us Christians are supposed to just lay down our lives for the criminals. I've not once seen or heard of one person, Christian or otherwise, who literally and voluntarily did that if and when the opportunity came along. Sure, martyrs were burned a the stake and such things as this. But that was forced on them by tyrannical governments with tyrannical enforcers who didn't exactly give them any more choice than my waitress friend had. None of them walked up to the stake voluntarily to be burned alive! It's a whole shockingly different world when you are suddenly and violently being beaten, shot, raped, or murdered and those ideals go right out the window real fast.

That's a powerful story and being a cop in LA, I imagine you have a ton of them. I've never talked to a police officer before about this but I can only imagine their thoughts when they are being attacked or if someone pulls a gun on them, that their viewpoint is I am not going to die today for this thug who just robbed a store, or raped someone or just killed someone. I will not allow this thug to take away their child's Dad or my mother's son. I have no idea if that's what they think, but if I was a cop - I would be thinking that.

God gave us instincts and I just can not imagine someone not using them when their life is threatened. If a person was attacked by someone and lived, they would be much more prepared the 2nd time.

 

[th1b.taylor]

Reading this back and forth dialog reminds me of a story. It's a true story, one I was part of. Not the only one I've been a part of by any means, but one that fits this thread.

As some of you know I spent a career as a police officer in Los Angeles, and I was always a street cop. No desk jobs for me (other than when I was recovering from an injury.) Part of that time I worked in a neighborhood that for some reason attracted a lot of pacifists who had the same and sometimes even more extreme pacifist views on life than those expressed by some of our members here. One of them was a young lady I knew personally because she was a waitress in a restaurant we all ate at almost every night and I had become friends with her.

Late one dark night a call came out on the police radio that a woman in a park was screaming for help and screaming for the police. I was the first to get there and to my surprise there really was a woman screaming somewhere out in the pitch black dark park! (Those kind of calls are either false alarms or by the time you get the call and drive there it's too late almost 100% of the time.) So I go running into the park and guess who I find screaming for help? Yep, the waitress, my friend. To be exact, the scene was so horrific I didn't even realize it was her until it was over. What happened was while she was walking home from work a guy high on Angel Dust grabbed her from the sidewalk, dragged her deep into the park, stripped off most of her clothes and had her pinned on the ground raping her! He had beaten her and thrown her down on the ground where her bare back, rump, and legs were being cut up from some broken glass that happened to be in the grass.

Now think about just that part of it for a minute. How much does a paper cut hurt? Now imagine hundreds of deep gashing cuts being torn into your bare skin as some guy with superhuman drug induced strength grinds your naked body into several pieces of broken glass, and keeps doing it on and on and on as seconds start to feel like minutes and hours and you feel like it's never going to end. And on top of that, your head is pounding from the pain of the blows from his fists, and you are totally and completely unable to do one thing about it. You are overpowered and completely unable to take any kind of control of the nightmare that your evening suddenly became. You feel such shame and revulsion from the things he is doing to you. And this isn't even mentioning the fact that you are being raped all the while too, and that you are sure when he's done he's going to kill you so you can't testify against him. That'll be easy for him to do because you know you are half dead already and can feel the life slipping out of you as every second passes. It's probably not a good idea for me to start describing the details and horror of the actual rape itself on this site, but let's just leave it at from interviewing many victims I probably have a better idea of how horrible it is than do most women who haven't been raped. I could go into a lot more detail, but I know there are people here who don't want to think about it.

So I stopped him. I almost beat him to death with my baton to stop him. Those police batons with the side handle can deliver tremendously powerful blows in the hands of a trained person, and I was well trained in it's use. Because of the drugs in his system, he didn't even stop raping her while I was beating him and all attempts to just pull him off were futile. The drugs were giving him superhuman strength and my last resort before shooting him was to continue hitting him with the baton as hard and as often as I could, even across the head to try to knock him out so he would stop. My fear of shooting him was accidentally shooting the waitress, so I really didn't want to do that. By this time other officers had arrived and we simply wailed on him with our batons until he finally weakened enough that we could pull him off. (Tazers were relatively new and few had them yet, but even those aren't very effective on people high on Angel Dust.) Rodney King only got love taps compared to what we had to do to this guy just to get him to weaken enough that the five of us could finally pull him off of her! That night he came within minutes of dieing in the hospital from the internal injuries we caused.

So what's the point? The point is the second that guy grabbed her on the sidewalk, the waitress was no longer a pacifist! And this was typical of what happens when pacifists are suddenly confronted with a situation where they are in great pain or great fear from what some scumbag is doing to them. (And this is even true of Christians who boldly claim that they will trust in the Lord to save them or just willingly allow themselves to be needlessly killed.) They lay aside their pacifist ideals and scream bloody murder for someone with some kind of rescources or some kind of a weapon to come save them. It happens pretty much EVERY time. I've seen it many more times than I can ever try to list or even remember. Not ONCE did I have a pacifist, after being the victim of a violent crime, tell me "No, don't do anything bad to him, don't try to stop him, I don't mind laying down my life for this violent scumbag of a criminal." No, not ONCE in my entire career did I hear a person who claimed to be a pacifist say that while or after they were victimized. None of those who condemned us for using force to stop violent criminals and preached about how wrong that was were people who had ever been a victim of a truly violent crime where killing the criminal was actually justified. Not one. Those that had the experience of being a victim of a truly violent crime immediately abandoned all their ideals.

I know from real life experience that it's simply just too easy and unrealistic to sit in a comfortable house in front of a nice computer and talk about how all us Christians are supposed to just lay down our lives for the criminals. I've not once seen or heard of one person, Christian or otherwise, who literally and voluntarily did that if and when the opportunity came along. Sure, martyrs were burned a the stake and such things as this. But that was forced on them by tyrannical governments with tyrannical enforcers who didn't exactly give them any more choice than my waitress friend had. None of them walked up to the stake voluntarily to be burned alive! It's a whole shockingly different world when you are suddenly and violently being beaten, shot, raped, or murdered and those ideals go right out the window real fast.

I've heard similar accounts from Officers when I lived and performed in Houston. But that reminded me of our pacifist in Vietnam. He arrived and was issued his, worthless, M16 and right away we explained to him that he was in serious need of a back up because of the jam rate of those first models.

He was a draftee, eighteen and pacifist and informed us he would never fire a bullet through that (blank) thing anyway. Shortly after arriving it rained and high on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, he went swimming in a mud hole on the Company foot path.

As best I recall it, he experienced his first major Rocket attack that night, we had one every other night. He was coward behind a sand bag wall when a 120mm went of a few feet away on the other side and buried him under the, former wall.

In the next week he was armed, every second of the day with his M16 on his shoulder and he purchaed two other weapons from a returning soldier and slept with and was never naked of his Cowboy Style Pistol Belts, left and right and could not wait to get on an aircraft so he could kill some gook and retrieve his automatic 7.62.

Strange, life, isn't it?

 

[th1b.taylor]

That's a powerful story and being a cop in LA, I imagine you have a ton of them. I've never talked to a police officer before about this but I can only imagine their thoughts when they are being attacked or if someone pulls a gun on them, that their viewpoint is I am not going to die today for this thug who just robbed a store, or raped someone or just killed someone. I will not allow this thug to take away their child's Dad or my mother's son. I have no idea if that's what they think, but if I was a cop - I would be thinking that.

God gave us instincts and I just can not imagine someone not using them when their life is threatened. If a person was attacked by someone and lived, they would be much more prepared the 2nd time.

Jesse,
From my conversations, being a Cop is much like Urban Combat but on a smaller, but just as dangerous, scale. If you think about them not killing you, you slow down. I only thought those type of thoughts off duty. My thoughts were, pay attention, look at the conditions we were entering into and to think... what if, so I was planning all the time.

I'm betting Obidiah will answer you soon.

 

[LovethroughDove]

Sure, martyrs were burned a the stake and such things as this. But that was forced on them by tyrannical governments with tyrannical enforcers who didn't exactly give them any more choice than my waitress friend had. None of them walked up to the stake voluntarily to be burned alive! It's a whole shockingly different world when you are suddenly and violently being beaten, shot, raped, or murdered and those ideals go right out the window real fast.

First, I want to thank you for sharing your experience. I pray that I handle my life according to God's will. I have a hard time stubbing my toe, so if anything tragic takes place I don't know how I would do.

 

[jasonc]

I've heard similar accounts from Officers when I lived and performed in Houston. But that reminded me of our pacifist in Vietnam. He arrived and was issued his, worthless, M16 and right away we explained to him that he was in serious need of a back up because of the jam rate of those first models.

He was a draftee, eighteen and pacifist and informed us he would never fire a bullet through that (blank) thing anyway. Shortly after arriving it rained and high on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, he went swimming in a mud hole on the Company foot path.

As best I recall it, he experienced his first major Rocket attack that night, we had one every other night. He was coward behind a sand bag wall when a 120mm went of a few feet away on the other side and buried him under the, former wall.

In the next week he was armed, every second of the day with his M16 on his shoulder and he purchaed two other weapons from a returning soldier and slept with and was never naked of his Cowboy Style Pistol Belts, left and right and could not wait to get on an aircraft so he could kill some gook and retrieve his automatic 7.62.

Strange, life, isn't it?

no reality check. as a friend said, most pacifists live in la la land a paraphrase.

 

[Obadiah]

That's a powerful story and being a cop in LA, I imagine you have a ton of them. I've never talked to a police officer before about this but I can only imagine their thoughts when they are being attacked or if someone pulls a gun on them, that their viewpoint is I am not going to die today for this thug who just robbed a store, or raped someone or just killed someone. I will not allow this thug to take away their child's Dad or my mother's son. I have no idea if that's what they think, but if I was a cop - I would be thinking that.

God gave us instincts and I just can not imagine someone not using them when their life is threatened. If a person was attacked by someone and lived, they would be much more prepared the 2nd time.

Yes, I have a ton of them. A few people have told me I should write a book, but a lot of the ones people find exciting to read about really aren't such good memories in real life. Believe me, I held back a lot of the details in my post above because I just don't want some innocent reader to have nightmares. I've gone into detail of a few incidents over dinner (when prodded for them) and people lost their appetite. Most people don't really want to know the real life details of what a heartless thug will do to them. It ruins their fantasy that everything really will always be OK.

As for what I think about in these situations... I didn't think about much at all. There is no time to think. You automatically fall back on your training or you die. That's why although I support the right of law abiding people to carry guns and other arms for defense, I also always strongly emphasis they NEED to be properly trained. That's why all military and police forces have training requirements. Without training, you end up with situations like the guy who wakes up in the middle of the night and shoots a family member because he thought it was a burglar, or the woman armed with a gun who is confronted by a criminal that simply takes the gun away from her and shoots her with it. (The two most favorite scenarios the anti-gun crowd always like to bring up.) There's no valid excuse for those kind of things to happen if someone is serious about being trained properly and is willing to put their training into practice if ever needed.

That guy on dust with his super human strength could have easily jumped up and torn me apart had I given him the chance, so I just kept wailing on him so he didn't get the chance to do that. I knew from my training and past experience that had he turned on me before I could get control of him, my only option left would have been to shoot him and in all likelihood kill him. And no, had it degenerated to that, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second to do that... and I would have gone home and slept soundly without any guilt because I would have known I did what was proper and needed to stop what was happening to that poor woman and to protect myself while doing it.

Jesse, From my conversations, being a Cop is much like Urban Combat but on a smaller, but just as dangerous, scale. If you think about them not killing you, you slow down. I only thought those type of thoughts off duty. My thoughts were, pay attention, look at the conditions we were entering into and to think... what if, so I was planning all the time.

I'm betting Obidiah will answer you soon.

Bill, it's something the same I guess. I've never been in a war zone, but as a street cop it's pretty rare to get attacked with ROCKETS!!! But yeah, a bullet was just as dangerous in Los Angeles as it was in Nam. Pre-planning by thinking through all the possibilities that you can imagine ahead of time and working out solutions in your mind is what saves you if one of those scenarios becomes reality, as eventually one day one of them will. And I have been shot at, by a guy barricaded across the street that had put in a call to set us up so he could shoot one of us. Wasn't hit because I dove for cover behind a brick planter, but I could hear the bullets hitting the wall right behind me. One "imaginary" situation I had previously worked out in my head was what to do if (in the dark) I was being shot at and was lit up by a light. If I couldn't return fire, given the chance I would at least put out the light as quickly as possible so I was less of a target, keeping me alive until the next solution would be put into play. Sure enough, when I dove behind the planter it was on the porch of a house with a porch light up above me lighting up me and my partner (a fine young woman who was a student at the academy just on her first ride-along. And she performed wonderfully too! I wrote her a commendation after it was over.) But to the shooter I can imagine we looked like a couple of spotlighted ducks in a shooting gallery any time we popped our heads up to try to return fire. So without even having to think about it, I rolled over on my back and put a bullet in the light. At least if I was going to die that night, I wasn't going to make it any easier on the shooter than I had to. When these things happen, most times they happen so fast that you don't even think about it or feel any fear until it's over. (Then as the adrenaline rush leaves, you feel like you're going to pass out!) I imagine in that way it's similar in war, but at least as a city cop it doesn't happen anywhere near as often.

 

[Obadiah]

First, I want to thank you for sharing your experience. I pray that I handle my life according to God's will. I have a hard time stubbing my toe, so if anything tragic takes place I don't know how I would do.

You're welcome.

I don't think anyone really knows how they will react when something truly terrible happens to them. We all hope we will react within our ideals of how we should or how we think God wants us to. But in real life many times that's not how it turns out. Particularly in America outside of the worst of the violent inner cities most people are isolated from this kind of thing and never know what it's truly like, so how can they ever try to know how they will react?

All I know is that ALL of those I dealt with had immediately dropped their ideals and did whatever they could to survive. Some who had planned ahead in their minds survived, some who had not did not survive. I've seen many shredded and torn apart bodies of those who felt they didn't need to be prepared for such a thing. I'll never forget seeing the inside of a man's chest after a bullet hit him when he decided he would use only his words against an armed robber. (I'd been conscripted to assist the short handed emergency room doctors as they cut open his chest in an attempt to start his heart by pumping it by hand.) But once his chest was fully sliced open, we found there was nothing left inside but warm bloody mush, much of which poured out onto the floor. There was no heart left at all and most of his left lung was shredded.

 

[Butch5]

You're right and you're wrong, I am leaning toward wrong and trying to be cute. I make no secret of the truth that I might die at any time because of some complication from the MS and you are right because my memory slipped and you took the opportunity to glorify thyself? You have given me quotes and a thesis I have refused to equate with the scriptures and I will, though is must be becoming rhetorical, make your case for the fallacy you preach.

You will be viewed in a much brighter light if you do not try to make the old man in the final stage of MS look like a fool. I should be approacing better than ninty leasons on my brain by this time. They have not wanted to know since the count went past sixty. ut as I've said, you'll have no credibility until you defend your position and make your case from the scriptures, otherwise, it is false.

I only made one claim and that was that the early Christians wouldn't use violence. I proved that from the church quotes. You asked for a Scriptural argument, I gave one, you chose not to read it. There's not much else to say.

 

[Butch5]

Reading this back and forth dialog reminds me of a story. It's a true story, one I was part of. Not the only one I've been a part of by any means, but one that fits this thread.

As some of you know I spent a career as a police officer in Los Angeles, and I was always a street cop. No desk jobs for me (other than when I was recovering from an injury.) Part of that time I worked in a neighborhood that for some reason attracted a lot of pacifists who had the same and sometimes even more extreme pacifist views on life than those expressed by some of our members here. One of them was a young lady I knew personally because she was a waitress in a restaurant we all ate at almost every night and I had become friends with her.

Late one dark night a call came out on the police radio that a woman in a park was screaming for help and screaming for the police. I was the first to get there and to my surprise there really was a woman screaming somewhere out in the pitch black dark park! (Those kind of calls are either false alarms or by the time you get the call and drive there it's too late almost 100% of the time.) So I go running into the park and guess who I find screaming for help? Yep, the waitress, my friend. To be exact, the scene was so horrific I didn't even realize it was her until it was over. What happened was while she was walking home from work a guy high on Angel Dust grabbed her from the sidewalk, dragged her deep into the park, stripped off most of her clothes and had her pinned on the ground raping her! He had beaten her and thrown her down on the ground where her bare back, rump, and legs were being cut up from some broken glass that happened to be in the grass.

Now think about just that part of it for a minute. How much does a paper cut hurt? Now imagine hundreds of deep gashing cuts being torn into your bare skin as some guy with superhuman drug induced strength grinds your naked body into several pieces of broken glass, and keeps doing it on and on and on as seconds start to feel like minutes and hours and you feel like it's never going to end. And on top of that, your head is pounding from the pain of the blows from his fists, and you are totally and completely unable to do one thing about it. You are overpowered and completely unable to take any kind of control of the nightmare that your evening suddenly became. You feel such shame and revulsion from the things he is doing to you. And this isn't even mentioning the fact that you are being raped all the while too, and that you are sure when he's done he's going to kill you so you can't testify against him. That'll be easy for him to do because you know you are half dead already and can feel the life slipping out of you as every second passes. It's probably not a good idea for me to start describing the details and horror of the actual rape itself on this site, but let's just leave it at from interviewing many victims I probably have a better idea of how horrible it is than do most women who haven't been raped. I could go into a lot more detail, but I know there are people here who don't want to think about it.

So I stopped him. I almost beat him to death with my baton to stop him. Those police batons with the side handle can deliver tremendously powerful blows in the hands of a trained person, and I was well trained in it's use. Because of the drugs in his system, he didn't even stop raping her while I was beating him and all attempts to just pull him off were futile. The drugs were giving him superhuman strength and my last resort before shooting him was to continue hitting him with the baton as hard and as often as I could, even across the head to try to knock him out so he would stop. My fear of shooting him was accidentally shooting the waitress, so I really didn't want to do that. By this time other officers had arrived and we simply wailed on him with our batons until he finally weakened enough that we could pull him off. (Tazers were relatively new and few had them yet, but even those aren't very effective on people high on Angel Dust.) Rodney King only got love taps compared to what we had to do to this guy just to get him to weaken enough that the five of us could finally pull him off of her! That night he came within minutes of dieing in the hospital from the internal injuries we caused.

So what's the point? The point is the second that guy grabbed her on the sidewalk, the waitress was no longer a pacifist! And this was typical of what happens when pacifists are suddenly confronted with a situation where they are in great pain or great fear from what some scumbag is doing to them. (And this is even true of Christians who boldly claim that they will trust in the Lord to save them or just willingly allow themselves to be needlessly killed.) They lay aside their pacifist ideals and scream bloody murder for someone with some kind of rescources or some kind of a weapon to come save them. It happens pretty much EVERY time. I've seen it many more times than I can ever try to list or even remember. Not ONCE did I have a pacifist, after being the victim of a violent crime, tell me "No, don't do anything bad to him, don't try to stop him, I don't mind laying down my life for this violent scumbag of a criminal." No, not ONCE in my entire career did I hear a person who claimed to be a pacifist say that while or after they were victimized. None of those who condemned us for using force to stop violent criminals and preached about how wrong that was were people who had ever been a victim of a truly violent crime where killing the criminal was actually justified. Not one. Those that had the experience of being a victim of a truly violent crime immediately abandoned all their ideals.

I know from real life experience that it's simply just too easy and unrealistic to sit in a comfortable house in front of a nice computer and talk about how all us Christians are supposed to just lay down our lives for the criminals. I've not once seen or heard of one person, Christian or otherwise, who literally and voluntarily did that if and when the opportunity came along. Sure, martyrs were burned a the stake and such things as this. But that was forced on them by tyrannical governments with tyrannical enforcers who didn't exactly give them any more choice than my waitress friend had. None of them walked up to the stake voluntarily to be burned alive! It's a whole shockingly different world when you are suddenly and violently being beaten, shot, raped, or murdered and those ideals go right out the window real fast.

Actually, I don't understand why pacifism is portrayed as one who stands there and does nothing. There is nothing wrong about calling the police, the apostle Paul did so. God has His ministers for such purposes, as Paul states in Romans 13. There's also the admonition of Jesus to flee. So, no, a person is not simply going to lay down and say here mister killer put the knife in here.

Regarding the martyrs, if you read some of the stories there were those who were not forced to die.

 

[Obadiah]

Actually, I don't understand why pacifism is portrayed as one who stands there and does nothing. There is nothing wrong about calling the police, the apostle Paul did so. God has His ministers for such purposes, as Paul states in Romans 13. There's also the admonition of Jesus to flee. So, no, a person is not simply going to lay down and say here mister killer put the knife in here.

Regarding the martyrs, if you read some of the stories there were those who were not forced to die.

Yet there are many pacifists who DO portray pacifism in just this way. Like most things, there are different levels of it.

So do you think the woman in my post had the opportunity to run away? Not even close to the reality of what happens n an awful lot of these situations.

So which martyrs just out of the blue walked up and volunteered to be murdered because they were Christians? I don't mean those who accepted the fate that was forced on them more peacefully than other people would because they knew when it was over they were going to heaven. Which ones volunteered for it without being forced?