God And Iraq
I'm late to the game, but thanks to Alabama Ass Whuppin' I can tell you about Ava Lowery. She is a fifteen year old peace activist from Alabama who produces short videos expressing her ideas. Her website is here. You can watch one of her videos and her recent interview on CNN here. In response to the videos, she has received death threats. Examples of which are here.
Generally, peace activists annoy me and I really dislike being lectured by teenagers. I'm sceptical about the death threats, also. Nothing drives up web traffic like a good persecution.
Still, when the CNN talking head questioned Lowery about the video in which a voice sings "Jesus Loves Me" as images of dead and wounded Iraqi children scroll past, her answer struck me. She said something like these are all God's children and they are suffering as a result of our actions.
No Christian can deny the truth of those two assertions. We have caused suffering. And the victims are God's children. The video lets us experience these facts. It does not assert that the war is bad. Rather it presents the facts for whatever impact they may have.
I'll let you decide whether or not God – who came to Earth as the suffering servant in order to free us from tyranny – thinks this is a good war and whether or not that should alter our foreign policy. All I'll say is that the only wrong response is to ignore the facts.
June 21, 2006 at 7:22 am
I don’t think we’d ever go to war, and certainly not pre-emptive war, if we really believed that every human is a child of God. It’s not possible to attack and kill without making the enemy less than human in our minds. I’m continually amazed that so many who claim the US as a “Christian” nation also support the war in Iraq. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?