Zu's musings

An intro?

I had some free time in the PhAT lounge, A.K.A. my personal office, and I wrote down a more flowing prosey introduction to my thesis. I haven't meshed it with the solid outline-style bullet points of the thesis, but I'll have more time later this week. I still have to write a 5 page book review of Biohazard, but I did a lot of that in "my office" too.

Anyways, teh intro!

In the ancient world, Christianity began with the preaching of a carpenter in Judea. This man, Jesus, spread a message of peace and love. Even as he was arrested, beaten, and nailed to a cross, Jesus continued to show mercy and forgiveness to his disciples, his jeering countrymen, his executioners, and indeed to all mankind. In the years following his death, the disciples of Jesus spread the message of love, mercy, and non-resistance to violence, hoping that Christ would come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, ushering in an unending reign of peace and happiness. The writings of the disciples and their followers represented this belief.

Learned men like Origen and Tertullian wrote tomes about how Christians should behave, how they should try to emulate Jesus in all their deeds, even if their refusal to violate their beliefs led to their deaths. It was far better to die happily as a martyr to the faith than live a lie for the rest of your life. After more and more time passed without the return of the messiah, the followers of Jesus, of now which there were legion began to wonder how they could mesh their faith with the corporeal world. There were brief guidelines written down by an early convert, Saul called Paul, but it did not seem to be enough. Before long though, a bishop of the Christian faith began to write down his thoughts on how the earthly world co-existed with the heavenly one above.

Augustine had to grapple with the fact that the most powerful man on earth, the very Caesar that Jesus instructed his followers to pay tribute to, was now himself a disciple and the Empire which had tried and crucified Christ had been made Christian. The bishop realized that the worldly issues his predecessors had dismissed were now more than ever very important. So he set about formulating a doctrine where the state, because it was an apparatus ordained by almighty God, could do things that would be sinful for mere men to do on their own.

Some 1600 years afterwards, evangelical Christians in the United States faced a similar dilemma. Up until the Second World War, they had never been overtly political; preferring instead like Origen and Tertullian to comment on moral issues and stay away from the business of statecraft. However, with the rising specter of communism and other leftist phenomena emerging in the 1950’s, the evangelicals increasingly turned to politics.

The atheism of communism was seen as an evil that permeated into America, causing leaders to examine previously unquestioned ideas like prayer in school, and the structure of the family. As the years passed, the evangelical Christian groups, now styled the Religious Right by their contemporaries, exercised more and more power over voters and in turn, elected officials. Now that they had a hand on the rudder of the state, the religious right had to travel the path of Augustine by acknowledging the very real and pragmatic issue of war. The effect of this shift and the destination of their new path have come together in the war on terror, and more specifically, the war in Iraq.

posted by Zu @ 9:08 PM