SDJonathan
Member
I was reading Sam Harris's book "The End Of Faith", and while I'm aware Sam Harris isn't exactly held in the highest esteem in christian circles, he brought up something that I suspect might be a topic of interest to christians. I've copied an excerpt from his book below, for you to read.
Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of "Collateral Damage"
What we euphemistically describe as "collateral damage" in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons - weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property.
What would we do with such technology? Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters currently loose in the world: the killers and torturers of children, the genocidal sadists, the men who, for want of the right genes, the right upbringing, or the right ideas, cannot possibly be expected to live peacefully with the rest of us. I will say a few things about pacifism in a later chapter - for it seems to me to be a deeply immoral position that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism - but most of us are not pacifists. Most of us would elect to use weapons of this sort.
A moment's thought reveals that a person's use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics. Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.) - in the pages of writers like [Arundhati] Roy and [Noam] Chomsky, in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons?
Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or not you admire the man's politics - or the man- there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently.
In reading this, something occurred to me: According to Christianity, doesn't God have the capacity to employ the use of Sam Harris's hypothetical perfect weapons? Surely he must, given his omnipotence. Instead of bringing about the great flood, could he not have conjured a divine force with the same effect, but that would spare the infants and innocent children, as well as the animals that weren't selected for the Ark? Yet he didn't. Does that not mean the deaths of these children and infants and animals were intentional?
What do you think?
Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of "Collateral Damage"
What we euphemistically describe as "collateral damage" in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons - weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property.
What would we do with such technology? Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters currently loose in the world: the killers and torturers of children, the genocidal sadists, the men who, for want of the right genes, the right upbringing, or the right ideas, cannot possibly be expected to live peacefully with the rest of us. I will say a few things about pacifism in a later chapter - for it seems to me to be a deeply immoral position that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism - but most of us are not pacifists. Most of us would elect to use weapons of this sort.
A moment's thought reveals that a person's use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics. Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.) - in the pages of writers like [Arundhati] Roy and [Noam] Chomsky, in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons?
Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or not you admire the man's politics - or the man- there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently.
In reading this, something occurred to me: According to Christianity, doesn't God have the capacity to employ the use of Sam Harris's hypothetical perfect weapons? Surely he must, given his omnipotence. Instead of bringing about the great flood, could he not have conjured a divine force with the same effect, but that would spare the infants and innocent children, as well as the animals that weren't selected for the Ark? Yet he didn't. Does that not mean the deaths of these children and infants and animals were intentional?
What do you think?
