Interesting column in The Star-Ledger today by Raymond A. Schroth, a humanities professor at St. Peter’s College on torture and its relationship to Easter.
Jesus, he says, in his death, embodied the intersection between politics and religion and his death should standa s a reminder, a warning really, that we all share responsibility for the violence — both to body and spirit — done in our names.
For the death of Jesus was the prime moment when politics and religion became one. His arrest, trial, imprisonment and execution was a political event, a judicial murder. Politicians both religious and secular saw Jesus as a threat who had to be removed. Even more than Adam’s fall, this is the Original Sin of mankind: All those from Cain’s murder of his brother Abel to those of us today who have tolerated political violence share the responsibility for Jesus’ death.
All state-sanctioned violence — he writes specifically about torture, but I would add war and the death penalty to this — falls uner this ethical rubric. This is why the Vatican has a theory of just war to separate othe legitimate uses of force — defensive and proportional only — and why the pope oppsed the invasion of Iraq and the Vatican opposes capital punishment.
You don’t have to be a Catholic or even a Christian — I’m not — to agree with Schrath’s argument. Read Camus on the death penaly or Gandhi on the counterproductive nature of revolutionary violence to get a broader sense of the spiritual and physical dangers of state violence — or organized violence, like the Intifada.
Watching stone-throwing Palestinians face off against Israeli tanks (proprtionality?) or suicide bombers targeting civilians (the weapon of the powerless wielded without regard for life, engaging in a ceaseless downward spiral of violence, bombers begetting tanks and bulldozers begetting bombers and so on), can anyone tuly say that this violence is making anyone safer?
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