"You talk of “our” shame, but I personally have no sense of shame for what is happening in the middle east; only a profound sense of sorrow for all those affected by it. You have sorrow but not shame. I think they are very similar. Shame, I think, is a stronger word to more accurately describe what our ancestors and fellow Christian believers have been up to over the centuries. Every single one of them had a conscience, the clear guidance of more moral behaviour in the New Testament. Living in a bygone age should no longer be an excuse for obvious immoral behaviour then.
Does your deep sorrow and my shame be about:
- the conversion of Constantine to Christ and forever after - disastrously - no strong witness for non-violence, non-collaboration to fight an unsavoury government?
- the Christian Crusades?
- the Church for centuries missing out on St Francis of Assisi pattern of Christ-like living of utter simplicity?
- Christian involvement in colonial ways of domination, forcing our style of doing things upon indigenous people who never invited us into their settlements and lands?
- making our wealth out of stealing other whole tribes and peoples to grow our cotton, tobacco and sugar?
- that we never paid them a pittance and housed them in hovels?
- two Bengal famines - one under Churchill who didn't want the Japs to benefit from food we sent to Bengal in the 2nd WW?
- our colonial ways meant we ended up with Palestine in the dying days of empire, when we were already taking on more than we could cope with - but never realised it;
- and then we had much more in common with the Zionists/Jews as they, at first, trickled into Palestine.
- then the flood of desperate people fleeing the worst persecution visited upon them after many centuries of despicable behaviour by the Christian nations towards Jews.
- Would we have had the Israel/Palestine problem if we Bible believing, devout Christians had treated them, each and everyone, as Jesus Christ Himself would have done?
Could our sorrow/shame drive us to question how it came about that two branches of the Children of Abraham both suffered under our British Mandate - the Muslims and the Jews?
"The British were carving up the Middle East and making contradictory promises to Arabs and Jews and setting them up for conflict" over who had the land. (Jeremy Bowen in the Radio 4, 'Our Man in the Middle East' series)
Is this is our shame and sorrow for our ancestors role in bringing about the Middle East mess?
That our close attachment to the Bible led the 1917 Cabinet to be more sympathetic to the Hebrew Scriptures story of the Jews and therefore to them wanting to return to Palestine?
Shame implies guilt, flowing from personal responsibility for a moral failing or misdemeanour. The Bible teaches that we are each held responsible for our own actions, but none of us can carry responsibility for the failings of others. Only one man took that on, when he was nailed to the cross for us, and for our salvation!"
You wrote, "The Bible teaches that we are each held responsible for our own actions, but none of us can carry responsibility for the failings of others."
Where exactly does it teach us that we are each responsible for our own actions?
But is that always true? If we know of clear wrong doing but do nothing, are we not to blame?
Are we not all implicated to a greater or lesser extent if we know but do nothing? Or, even if
For the person of honour and integrity, he or she has to say, "My first allegiance is to my conscience and to my Lord and Master who taught the way of non-violence." And then, of course, honour and integrity demands resigning, rather than having anything to do with prosecuting an obviously illegal war on Iraq in 2003 which did not have that final UN resolution to authorise and make it legal in the eyes of man (NOT God!)
Only Carne Ross (in 2004) and one woman in the now called Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office had the honour and integrity to resign from their very much loved and well paid jobs in the FCDO.
I think, more importantly, our own sense of right and wrong or conscience should tell us how to behave. Every individual Jewish and Christian believer has had all Ten Commandments to live by for the last 3,500 years. For all those millennia the most important, Sixth Commandment has been broken by the very individuals, Jew or Christian, who so admire all ten and claim to live by all of them.
I call it the most important because we humans have been so enthusiastic in breaking it! Even, in the Old Testament, claiming that we are only doing God's Will when slaughtering even the suckling infant and mum. 1 Samuel 15 v 3.
Even Jesus reinforced His Way of non-violence by suffering a tortuous death on the cross rather than to do what nearly every believer and follower of the Way of Jesus has done since the year 300 AD. He refused to use aggression to try and save Himself. He failed to call up the hosts of Heaven to come to His rescue.
The whole ghastly business of dispatching our fellow humans by crucifixion was so popular for centuries in the Roman Empire. Only to be out done by our Christian and non believers all being involved in mass slaughter in two Bengal famines, 300 years of vicious slavery and 500 years of our British Empire founded on control, domination and occupation. With the full knowledge and support of individual Christian believers - and everyone else. The top people in charge all had the Bible!
Individual Bible believing, God fearing, devout, evangelical Puritan Christians were caught up in Cromwell's cause and army which ended in the only British monarch in a thousand years, being executed by the State! Astonishing. And, it was all about who had the right to rule, on God's behalf, on earth - King or Parliament.
During our side's quite despicable and illegal war on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from the 1950s to 1975, I never heard of an upstanding Christian believer in America going to prison instead of going off to cold bloodedly murder the people of SE Asia. Only the Muslim boxer, Mohammed Ali!
Donald Trump's core base include the vast majority of evangelical Christians. I heard on Radio 4 that 80% of them voted for him in 2024. I heard Pastor Michael Youseff say he would vote for Trump because of his strong stance on abortion. Never mind the slaughter of the living!
