Not inherently. There's also a societal thing here. If people can just go in with guns and shoot people without getting shot at back, it makes society more dangerous. And not killing them could be more dangerous than actually killing them. Now, I would agree that if you could disarm them without killing them, that is the absolute best choice. But if you simply let them kill you, they could do it to someone else.
I guess I should be clear about what I believe. I'm certainly not advocating that we let strangers kill our families. What you're saying in this paragraph is quite reasonable. It gives into our natural instinct to favour our loved ones over strangers, but ehn, it's a reasonable chain of thinking.
It's merely my position that you're using reasonable thinking as a way of diluting a natural reading of Jesus's quoted words. If we start doing that, the Bible changes very quickly from being a guidebook into a suggestion book where we pick and choose what
we think is wise. Now, we all do that anyway (it's impossible not to pick and choose), but some people think that doing so is not being as "Christian as they could be". Being a disciple of Jesus, I think, is supposed to be very, very hard. It takes an incomplete reading to think that it would be easy.
To a point, yes that would be noble. When you let innocent people suffer and die to allow a guilty person to live, however, this crosses the line of immorality.
No one is innocent! All have sinned. Yes, there is a specific victim in this scenario, but all are guilty of being sinful. If we all deserve Hell, then I'm pretty sure we deserve whatever happens to us here. The daughter's fate is in God's hands, no yours.
Jesus tells us many times to
comfort victims. He never says (or suggests) to lethally protect them, or to harm another.
Christianity is not inherently about giving to the poor, although things like this are important. Christianity is about glorifying God.
I'm pretty sure that saying that "Christianity is not inherently about giving to the poor" is very much failing to 'glorify God'. The
whole of the law was "Love God" AND "Do unto others"; not, "Glorify God, and oh yeah, be nice".
How we treat the poor is
how we glorify God! "As you treated the least of these, so have you treated me". You cannot separate the two concepts, Jesus intimated that they were the same thing. Not aiding the poor, the imprisoned, the sick, the sad is the same thing as not loving God.
1. The rapist chose to commit a horrifying crime, and so became guilty. Saying you should not kill a guilty person to protect YOURSELF could be justifiable, but saying you should not kill a guilty person to protect someone else is NOT justifiable. Especially if that person wouldn't consent to it.
Again, I agree with your reasoning here. However, it's not Biblical.
0) "Consent" is a grand ideal. I don't think that it's very Biblical. Except for the personal decision to trust God, I don't think there's consent respected anywhere in the whole book. The
only thing that I think is ever consented to is whether you'll accept Jesus's sacrifice.
1) If your daughter was noble enough, she'd be willing to sacrifice her life to save an enemy's life. If she actually sought to be Jesus's disciple, that's the purest expression of loving her enemy.
2) If your daughter was
not noble enough, then her fate is in God's hands. Jesus commonly mentions that the victims are going to be blessed. And who knows? If Christians had stuck to their ideals, like they did in the early Christian days, would the religion would be doing better now, as a result? You know, instead of people allowing their instincts towards self-preservation of themselves and their families dominate ...
Abraham was asked to sacrifice his child.
It shouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that a hypothetical of Jesus's teachings wouldn't ask you to sacrifice
yours.
And BTW, you have no evidence of your conclusion, you are drawing it based on assumption. Jesus never taught total pacifism, and the Bible is evidence of that...
I have given decent evidence that Jesus taught pacifism. "resist not evil" is the main one. "love your enemies". Rebuking Peter's use of a sword is another. Finally, the fact that the apostles
didn't go down swinging is good evidence. All of the apostles were non-violent, to the point of being killed! There's no story of "so I swung my sword to escape their evil, so that I could continue preaching!"
That is true, except that Jesus was also man, so if violence was ALWAYS inappropriate for man, it would be inappropriate for Jesus as well.
No, that just doesn't follow. Jesus does many things reserved for God, forgiving sins being one of them (just to make my point). Just because
Jesus did it, it doesn't mean
we can do it. Now, if it was just the temple-clearing, I'd say it was undecided. But he also gave clear instruction. Resist not evil. Love your enemies.
Seriously, how can you 'resist not evil' and be violent at the same time? It's not unclear!
No, Jesus was teaching not to use the sword because it was his destiny to be arrested, NOT because violence was always wrong...
Why can't it be both? Bringing the sword served no purpose to fulfilling his destiny. It
did allow an opportunity to rebuke Peter (Peter is commonly used as an example of 'what not to do') regarding the use of violence.
"For everything, there is a Season, and a Time for every purpose under Heaven. A time for war, and a time for peace."
THAT is in the Old Testament. The OT was certainly 'a time for war'. I have just shown you when "a time for peace" started! The whole of that chapter is about Earthly conditions, not Heavenly conditions, too!
(You'd be amazed at how good that chapter is for my interpretation, btw)
I've said that the true Christian message is to work endlessly in charitable efforts, and to engage in self-denial to do so. Ecc 3 says
"I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live"
Be happy, and to do good. Be happy doing what?
"That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God."
Why to get everyone fed, and to
enjoy the toil required to do so.
Finally
"As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals."
WAAAAY upthread, I pointed out that baboons prefer their offspring, so it's nothing special if we prefer our offspring too.
If you want to suggest that Jesus didn't preach pacifism, you're going to have to show NT scripture of that.
And, you know, if he
didn't teach self-sacrifice for others (to the point of noble self-denial), I kinda wonder what interesting ethical teaching the guy brought up? In my opinion, the only remarkable ethics that Jesus taught was the Golden Rule and the willingness to sacrifice yourself out of a sense of universal love. Everything else, from a secular perspective, is quaint & cute, but not really inspired.
