No Chains on Me…

From the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize lecture given by Rae McGrath on behalf of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

“Freedom is so often the justification for war. But where is the sense in fighting for the freedom of a people employing a weapon which will deny those same people, in peacetime, freedom to live without fear, freedom to farm their land, freedom to merely walk in safety from place to place — deny them the freedom to let their children play without being torn apart by a landmine? That is no freedom.”

I think its really important to realize that it is next to impossible to justify war on the basis of granting freedom. Not just on the basis of the horrific consequences of landmine use, but because war, on any front, is denying freedom to someone, enemy as well as civilian bystanders. I think more recently, limiting the use of cluster bombs has become the new but similar issue (Human Rights Watch, Cluster Bomb Ban in US).

It is no moral excuse to wring your hands and cry, “but I never knew” — if you never asked to know.

Really enjoying reading through the Nobel Peace Prize lectures. Fascinating stuff.

Great set of Scriptures outta Colossians tonight. Reminds me of telemarketers

May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Act now, and you too can have forgiveness of sins. But don’t wait, Time is running out. Supplies not limited.

This offer brought to you courtesy of Christmas.

Shalom to you and yours this year.

“Not long:

Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne,

Yet that scaffold sways the future,

And, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow,

Keeping watch above his own.

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

…Glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

And now all I want to do is listen to Rage Against the Machine This stuff gets me pumped.

What we need:

(as seen on another blog I follow)

Great quote from my Epistemology book for this weeks reading:

It is not only the leader of men, statesman, philosopher, or poet, that owes this bounden duty to mankind. Every rustic, who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help or kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race. Every hard-worked wife of an artisan may transmit ti her children beliefs which shall knit society together, or rend it in pieces. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

William K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief

Good quote:

The church … cannot be content to play the part of a nurse looking after the casualties of the system. It must play an active part both in challenging the present unjust structures and in pioneering alternatives.

- Donald Dorr
Catholic missionary priest

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Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness.”

- Whittaker Chambers

…that I had to put to picture. Hope you can read it here. If not, click on it and check out the bigger version.

So I’ll keep saying it until I become famous and get quoted in some book or something (not really)

Saying “You can live like the world and be a Christian” should be just as wrong as saying “You can live like a Christian and still not be saved.”

Thoughts?

“Our greatest fear as individuals and as a church should not be of failure but of succeeding at things that don’t really matter.” -Tim Kizziar.

I think I may have referenced this quote in an earlier post. Just found it!