a brief rant on the ever-pressing reality of complacency

we are five percent of the world’s population and we have 43 percent of the world’s arms/weapons. i think that should be disturbing.

without question.
point blank.
disturbing.

a few years ago the pentagon spent $1 billion on advertising. even in american history you have leader and leader - from george washington on, saying: be careful of large standing armies. and now we are paying a substancial part of our taxes to have our military advertise to us?!

many would argue at very basic levels:
if you are a follower of Jesus and you don’t start making some noise about what is happening in our world right now — then when do you speak out? We are spending billions every month on our wars right now. at what point to we stand up and speak out about the things Jesus calls us to get loud over.

this isnt simply about u.s. wars. God is simply much bigger than we have envisioned and is calling into being a compassionate community around the world. it is our duty to find out about what’s happening in the larger world - and respond well.

john dear (not the tractor) says this -

"My point is that not only are people dying around the planet, but we have died in so many ways with them. Gandhi would say we’ve lost our souls. That was the effect on the people who first built the tools of atomic war. This was the loss of their souls. We’re facing the death of our imagination. … We can no longer even imagine a world without nuclear weapons or a world without war. And yet that is precisely what we are called to do — to imagine the end of war.”

see, from the very beginning people have struggled with this idea. think of solomon building God’s temple... he ends up using slaves. solomon forgets the kind of world he’s supposed to build.

ole RB:
“Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It’s a book written from the underside of power. It’s an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire. This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen.”