Is violence the only option? -----

I want this to be a place where people can express various religious (and new age if they want) opinions about violence and the future and present.

Like is “war” really the best way to deal with terrorists?

If someone punches you is the best course of action to hit back?

Does violence beget violence?

Is peace a viable solution in the world’s current state?

Is peace possible with divergent religious/spiritual viewpoints?

Hi

No. But ever terrorist must be dealt with in a different way.

No but if really feels good at the moment.

As long as there are fundamentalist there can never be peace.

EZ$

Violence is rarely the solution. But when it is, it’s the only solution.

Good line Phaedrus. It said it all… every other solution should be sort first, before war. Then you fight for your life with 100% of the population behind you.

That’s why I don’t understand the ‘weakling’ tag given to Neville Chamberlain re his attempts to deal with Hitler first. It didn’t work and therefore war was necessary.

If Chamberlain didn’t try to make a deal, wouldn’t people (like me) be saying: “who knows, perhaps hitler just wanted to be relieved of the crippling debt and retrieve the areas he lost after WW1?” As much as I would hate to do that, I think that would have been better than 50 million dead. (Of course, you’d have to include a clause like one step more and it triggers an automatic war)

PS Phaedrus If thats your line, then you should copyright it by puting your name at the end. If its not, who wrote it?

Scythekain: I’m aware I didn’t answer your question , I hope to later when I get time

Tim Larkin. He’s an ex-Navy SEAL fighting instructor. He strongly advocates avoiding ‘social violence,’ while teaching skills needed to kill another person to save your own life.

I’m slightly paraphrasing him.

scyth

Scyth, you should know it is never safe to ask a question like this with me around. I am sure to answer in a way to annoy just about everyone. :slight_smile:

One thing that baffles me is why people believe life can be any different than it is. It presumes a choice that isn’t there. It is our being that attracts our life in the collective as well as in the individual sense. Since we are as we are, life continues as it is including the inclination towards violence

When life’s conditions are appropriate, the result is violence and when not appropriate, non-violence. We do not create these conditions but they are instead created as a natural flow of events. We react to these conditions in accordance with our being and the collective being of man results in violence when conditions are right for it.

Peace cannot be an option simply because it is a reaction to certain external conditions. It lasts only as long as the conditions allow. When conditions change as they must from the lawful change in life’s cycles, then the reaction of peace changes to the reaction of violence in response.

when has war ever worked for controlling terrorism instead of creating more? (in example how terrorism has increased in Iraq and made the middle east more unstable.)

and you’ll feel guilty about doing so later. (if you have any moral empathy.)

this statement is I’m afraid the truth. When you bring the absolute truth to the discussion table, then you’ll only be upset when the other side does the same thing.

name one instance in recent history on the global scale where violence was the only option.

I honestly get sick of this deterministic crap. You always have a choice. When someone confronts you, you can stop and think about your choices.

What seperates us from animals is the ability to make choices. When someone presents us with more food and we are full we have the opportunity to stop and think about whether we should eat it or not. It’s laziness that removes common sense and the choice.

the results don’t have to be with us. There are situations that are fight or flight, that happen so fast that we don’t have time to react. These are few and far between though. Being “removed” from the food chain (in a kind of transcendental way.) we have the opportunity on nearly all occasions to step back and think about our decisions and our “will”.

thinking that we have no choice in how we’ll react is fatalistic. Believing that all responses to violence will be violence is fatalistic. We can change and must change. we must think and use reason. We must make the choice. We must stop and think.

Peace is hardly external. Peace comes from within. Your stuck in determisms fatality. Get out of it before it sucks you in.

HELL(O) F(R)IEND(S)

It’s live or die, it’s you or me. I choose me. Is that violent?

And if 100% of the population was not with you is it time to fight? Was 100% of the population behind WW2?

Is violence simply a word used to describe the imposing of one’s will over an unwilling object? I do agree with Phaedrus, war should be the last resort and then you finish the job.

Scythe, I try not to hold any beliefs but I accept that violence is natural, often necessary, and subject to so many variables that it is difficult to simplify and deem a violent act necessary or unnecessary…

Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary? You will have a hard time convincing me it was not.

good god, now your claiming that nuclear bombing Two cities is equivalent to the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor?

WHICH WAS A MILITARY BASE.

Unbelievable. The lives of millions of citizens is justified, even though at that point in history the war was pretty much won, we had the japanese fleet in tatters, we had hitler cornered. It was completely unneccessary use of power, and it shows that the winners never get charged with war crimes.

ask yourself besides pearl harbor and a near miss off of Fort Stevens in Oregon, where else were we attacked in the US in WW2, that justified the use of such a horrendous weapon?

Was violence necessary to remove hitler? yes, was the nuclear drop. A resounding HELL NO, on that one.

If you believe that then you are no better than a compulsive animal. You have no control over when you act violent you can’t think it out. Violence is natural so is pissing, why don’t we just piss everywhere?

Because we have self control. the belief that you can’t control yourself and violence is natural is absolute hubris. Of course you can control your response YOU CHOOSE NOT TO.

When you feel the urge to take a shit do you just drop trow where you stand?

The firebombing of Tokyo actually killed more people than either nuke- almost as many as both combined. Yet no one now considers it controversial. I guess it doesn’t push our emotional buttons the same way. At any rate, we have the benefit of six decades of hindsight now. Even the experts disagree about whether the nuking of Japan was “necessary,” but at a minimum Japan could have avoided us by not attacking the US and declaring war. A case could be made that they “got what they deserved.”

BTW, the A-bomb question is really a case of applying modern tactical and strategic thinking to a war fought 60 years ago. War was fought against the whole populace at the time. From Berlin to Dresdon and from London to Tokyo, all combatants in the war bombed the others cities. Remember the Blitz? If Hiroshima was a war crime, then so was the bombing of every other city by every other combatant. Perhaps war itself is a crime.

The Japanese, along with most other powers, both hardened military targets and camaflaged them into the middle of cities. “Precision munitions” in the sense that we now use simply didn’t exist. Carpet bombing was the rule of the day. You couldn’t reliably come in and destroy assets without harming civilians the way we try to do it now.

The idea of surgical strikes and “bloodless warfare” where civilians aren’t involved is a peculiar modern fiction that didn’t exist in '45.

The decision to use atomic weapons to force surrender was based on the best intelligence at the time, and was connected to the estimated death and casualty figures of an assault on the mainland. It wasn’t a decision made casually by the 'let’s nuke ‘em’ crowd. Was it the right decision? It was at the time.

I wish our so-called surgical strikes were a bit more surgical. Of course, we no longer kill civilians, we just have ‘collateral damage’. :unamused: Double speak is alive and well.

JT

Scyth

It’s not really determinist crap. What you believe to be choice is just the natural reaction in accordance with your being. What good is imagining something we are incapable of as we are?.

The possibility of choice explains my interest in the psychology of being. The biggest thing a person can aspire towards IMO is the ability to choose, for consciousness in order to become aware of what to choose from a human perspective, and the will to be able to carry out choice. A developed human being could carry out responsible choice but our being, as it is, is incapable of such choice.

Consider what attracts our entertainment dollar. It is what we “choose” to spend it on. What do the movie makers know will sell? Isn’t violence a great part of it. If a person becomes realistic, they IMO will see the futility of violence but we are conditioned to live in our imagination and have adapted to find it satisfying so violence becomes attractive.
.

Is an alcoholic lazy? He may stop and “think” about quitting but other sides of their being have more influence so he resume drinking. This isn’t laziness, it is an aspect of our being where our thought becomes in opposition to our emotions…

we have the opportunity on nearly all occasions to step back and think about our decisions and our “will”.

True but consider how rare it is for a person to maintain a new year’s resolution and you can see how limited we really are in this ability to step back.

Its not that violence will always be the response to violence but instead that violence will always be present. I am suggesting that a person may be non-violent on Monday and become violent on Wednesday all for what is rationalized as justifiable reasons.

Stopping and thinking is one thing but our being denies the dominance of such thought. It will always be a case of the "last straw, leading us to violence.

There is a difference between determinsim fatality as concerns humanity and how it concerns an individual. It is precisely the psychology of being as opposed to the never ending expression of “wonderful thoughts”, that can prevent a person from being “sucked in” and lead to choice from becoming open to the experience of reality from first knowing oneself.

HELL(O) F(R)IEND(S)

I have some questions: who decided we should go to war with Japan and who decided we should go to war against Hitler?

Hiroshima was of military importance too. Do you think the Japanese would have chosen not to use the bomb if they had the option at that time? Good god had nothing to do with who had the bomb. Your assertions that the war was pretty much won isn’t surprising in that you have all the facts that were not available to the people involved at the time… Ask yourself what it would have taken to get onto Japan and force the proud Japanese to submit? Do you think we can be certain what the costs were? Do I have to repeat hindsight is…?

You bring up a good point… I forgot humans aren’t animals.

Pissing aside, I meant to say that it was a natural occurrence–as in men have conflicts and resort to violence to solve them–sometimes this violence is necessary. I did not mean to excuse it as if we are compulsive animals.

We don’t do this because of self preservation. Other animals will find out who took a dump in their territory and come out and womp us… oh wait, I forgot we are god’s creations and thus we are subject to morals and ethics.

[size=75]If this seems rude I apologize… I’m in a terrible mood.[/size]

Well I think the fact that Japan and germany were allies had alot to do with it.
[quoteHiroshima was of military importance too.[/quote]
So is Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington DC. Had they bombed those cities I would lean more to TWO japanese cities being necessary bombing targets.

Here’s what the nuclear drops where.

My dick is bigger than yours. Think about it, Japan got charged with war crimes for pearl harbor and we didn’t for TWO nuclear bomb drops on TWO major cities. You could say that Hiroshima was of military import, but the japanese civs killed in that bombing vs american? sorry I think america should’ve suffered some consequences for that, in the very least we owe the japanese more retribution for placing japanese americans into internment camps. Were they as bad as the jewish camps in germany? NO, of course not, but they were probably not even as bad as Gitmo. Still a travesty of human rights.

Had the situation been reversed Germany and or japan probably would’ve unleashed the japan. BECAUSE they would’ve done it does not justify it or make it right. Let’s say that I plan on stealing your car. To counter me you use preemption and steal my car. Does my intention make your action right?

Sarcasm. No but defecting german scientists did.

I’m sure they had more facts than they let on, it was a revenge bombing, completely unjustified, maybe some day when the intelligence records of the time are released we’ll realize that and move on.

we are animals. But we’re also more than animals. Animals can’t control their actions. Animals have no self control. Cats can be trained to use the bathroom, but as soon as they need to go they go, they can’t hold it for any length of time like we can. And if you don’t spay or neuter them they still get uncontrollable urges to mark their territory.

Violence is a compulsory response to a situation. For example let’s say that some skinny punk comes up to you and calls you a, scrotum faced shit licker. (or whatever is offensive these days.) Your immediate animal instinct tells you to:

A) call him a name back.

B) punch his lights out.

C) laugh at him, clearly he’s got low self esteem to call others names.

D) pity his low self esteem, and ignore him.

Through self control you can make your action non-violent and non-confrontational. There are other options you could take per circumstance.

society subjects us to ethics we learn morals. if you want to live spur of the moment and do whatever you feel the urge to do, than I’ve got one word for you.

“piggy”.

For all you determinstic self urgers, read “the road less traveled.”

if you read it with an open mind about self control and spiritual progression you may get something out of it. If you read it with your deterministic mind set and self control is impossible, it’ll do nothing for you.

take a st. johns wart and call me in the morning.

I’m not stating that violence is always impossible to avoid, unless everyone follows the morals of empathy and self control, violence will occassionaly be needed, like happened near my hometown, in the federal courthouse building where a nutcase walked in with a hand grenade threatening to set it off.

given the circumstances it was better to take out his life than to risk the lives of hundreds of innocents. BUT, he was the classic case of suicide by police, his hand grenade had been drilled out in the bottom, and he had a living will on his personage.

So deadly force? a good response? I think there are some good non lethal responses out there, like tasers or the “sound gun” which shoots a direct beam of sound energy at you that immobilizes you.

Remember self control means were free to choose our destiny. Peace can be a destiny of our fragile race if we embrace it whole heartedly.

HELL(O) F(R)IEND(S)

Scythekain, historians have argued back and forth over the necessity of dropping the bomb. To date there is no majority for NOT dropping those bombs… think about how difficult that makes the decision back then…

You clearly have never had a cat. I trained my cat… that fucker would cry all morning until I got up and let it out of the house into the back yard. He would immediately proceed to do his business… Humans would take a crap anywhere if they ran out of time–just like well trained cats. Also, it could be argued that people go crazy because they aren’t getting some action… perhaps we still have many animalistic insticts?

:laughing: That word just made my day. My mood is just changed :smiley:
All I can say is that I love little pigs–they’re so cute (and intelligent). I bet they can be trained to poop in the right place. :laughing:

Scythekain, I disagree with your assessment of Hiroshima/Nagasaki but for right now, you are my favorite person in the world… piggy! :laughing:

:astonished: just think, if we have a WWIII the whole world would be destroyed!

anyways, viloence is here and probably would never end since it is almost impossible to draw a line where it begins/stops. however, if we had a different system of living, it is possible for it to be lessened…

a difficult decision made in haste is worse than an easy decision thought about heavily.

I’ve no doubt it was a difficult situation. Do you have any doubt it was politically motivated?

actually I have two cats currently. I’ve taught them to use a box, and the two I have now are very good about using their box. we had one a year ago (a stray we got off the street) that was less able to practice control. She was constantly peeing all over the house all over everything regardless of the cleanliness of the box. It’s not like she didn’t understand the connection of “box = potty.” she just couldn’t get past her animal instinctual need to mark her territory.

I never said that we aren’t controlled by instinct and determinsm, I said we have the power to step outside of that.

glad to help ya.

guess saying piggy was the right choice.

You also have to bear in mind that no one really had any idea just how terrible nukes would end up being. The US military actually tested nukes above friggin’ ground in the Dakotas! :astonished: And they had VIPs standing around watching. The dangers of radiation were only suspected- no one knew that there’d be birth defects and cancer rates many times higher for centuries as we now know there’ll be.

I guess it’s now fashionable, given the current state of dissatisfaction with and envy of the US, to second guess everything we’ve done since the Boston Tea Party…wait, scratch that, including the Boston Tea Party :wink: …but Truman did what he thought was best at the time. You have to keep in mind that the Japanese really pissed us off. They decimated our fleet, well in advance of their Declaration of War, and they didn’t follow any of the Western rules of war. They rarely surrendered and routinely tortured an executed any prisoners they took. Japanese civillians sometimes committed suicide rather than risk contact with American troops. The Japanese were hated, and with very good reason at the time (ie any sane person in the same situation would have felt the same, or at least understood those fears).

What’s more, even the two nukes barely ended the war. Plans were in the works for a coup d’état, and the military actually planned to kill the Emporor, despite his being considered a man-god, in order to continue the war. Only the atomic bombs coupled with the threat of having the Russians declare war, too, led to the Japanese surrender.

In great part because of those actions, people in American now are free to speak their minds and even to criticize the use of the A-bombs. And that’s fine- that’s part of what freedom is for. But most of that talk is revisionist history that ignores the reality of the situation circa 1945.

:smiley: