Peace Messenger

A Righteous Nation Goes to War in the Armor of God!

Bible verses adorned the covers of the Pentagon's Worldwide Intelligence Updates during the early days of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a report by Robert Draper, published in the June issue of GQ, has revealed.

The cover of the March 31 update pictured a tank in the desert, with Ephesians 6:13 printed above: "Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything to stand."

Another, dated April 3, shows tanks roaring through a majestic arch of swords, with the text "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith" (Isaiah 26:2)

In his "On Faith" blog for Washington Post, David Gibson contemplates the equally rephrehensible possibilties that either Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were trying the manipulate the religious beliefs of President Bush or that covers were the work of a dedicated corps of Christian military officers who see themselves as "spiritual warriors" and "government paid missionaries."

See these covers and several more samples at the GQ site.

CPWI Report at Adventist Activism

See Jeff Boyd's excellent report on the recent Christian Peace Witness for Iraq worship and witness in Washington, at Adventist Activism.

Adventist Activism is a relatively new effort by Adventists "collectively committed to continuing the work Jesus started while walking this earth — spreading the good news of the Kingdom by serving, healing and teaching (1 Corinthians 12:27; Mark 10:45; Mark 3:10; Acts 1:3)."  The web site offers "a collection of our stories and thoughts regarding this work of spiritually motivated social action."

Below, a clip from Tony Campolo's powerful speech.  More at the CPWI site.

The Two Futures Project

The Two Futures Project (2FP) is a movement of  American Christians for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. We believe that we face two futures and one choice: a world without nuclear weapons or a world ruined by them. We support the multilateral, global, irreversible, and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, as a biblically-grounded mandate and as a contemporary security imperative.

Our change strategy is based around the creation of a nonpartisan, conscience-driven, enduring majority of Americans who are committed to a nuclear weapons-free world. By joining together with one voice of Christian conscience, we seek to encourage and enable our national leaders to make the complete elimination of nuclear weapons the organizing principle of American nuclear weapons policy. We join in this work to the glory of God.

We are a movement made up of followers of Jesus Christ, from all denominations and traditions, united by the Holy Spirit in our intention to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, as a standard of witness and work in God’s world.

The Taliban's Best Recruiting Weapon

From: Chris Hedges, "Becoming What We Seek to Destroy," Truthdig, 10 May 2009

 

The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development....

 

We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat. We are the best recruiting weapon the Taliban possesses. We have enabled it to rise from the ashes seven years ago to openly control over half the country and carry out daylight attacks in the capital Kabul. And the war we wage is being exported like a virus to Pakistan in the form of drones that bomb Pakistani villages and increased clashes between the inept Pakistani military and a restive internal insurgency....  full column

Religion and Torture: A Disturbing Picture

The results of a recent survey on The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life: