<snipping much of Marvin's truly excellent post>
And yet, "a city on the hill cannot be hid." Christ exhorts us to let our
lights shine. While I've always argued that our alleged city on the hill
needs a hell of a lot of work, that's no reason to deny that in certain
areas, we are a hell of a lot better than al Qaeda and the Taliban, and
those things are worth fighting to preserve.
I think our chief weapons must be knowledge and, I agree, some cultural
humility, rather than sheer military might. But you know what? The
values that will make it possible for us to craft a humane
strategy for fighting terrorism, a strategy that respects the innocent and
understands cultural differences -- if we succeed in crafting such a
strategy -- will be exactly the virtues Friedman extolled. In truth,
these secular values of tolerance, openness, and so on, are merely the
classical religious values writ large and without respect for religious
territorialism. But unless we recognize them as fact, seize upon them,
and use them knowingly, we just as surely damned as if we forget them
altogether and rest in the assurance that the presence of money implies
the presence of the Good.
Mother Theresa may hold herself a sinner before God, but it doesn't mean
she doesn't know the right thing to do, and it doesn't mean that she
doesn't *know* that she knows the right thing to do.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
I'm largely going to bow out of this discussion on the grounds that Marvin
and John are making the points I would like to make, only they're doing it
much better, so I can't add much. Bravo to both of them, however. I would
add a touch, however, which is that Christian just war theory, for example,
makes it clear that those who fail to wage a just war sin every bit as much
as those who wage an unjust one, which suggests to me that Christian
theology demands that we recognize the necessity of action when we are in
the right, and is not terribly forgiving to those who refuse to act and
equivocate between right and wrong on the grounds that we might not be
faithful to our ideals. We might not, it is true. But we must do the best
we can. The second is that, as is usually the case, Abraham Lincoln said
things best, in this case in his Second Inaugural. Lincoln said, "with
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right . . ." This is
usually and correctly read as an injunction to be aware that we may not
know the right. But equally it is an injunction by Lincoln that, seeing
and knowing the right, we must then act. We cannot ever be sure that we
know the right. But, as Lincoln said some years earlier, "we cannot escape
history" either. Knowing now that we are in an historical moment,
believing that we know the right as well as we can and that God seems to
have given it to us to see it as much as he can, we are morally bound to
act, or in failing to act, acknowledging that we are unworthy of both our
freedom and our heritage.
Gautam
