Fighting Wars To The Glory?

How Weird Can This Guy Get?

G.K. Chesterton said he smoked cigars to the glory of God. After many failed attempts to give up cigars, he finally decided to smoke to the glory of God. How might the desperate surrender of a theological giant apply to other sins? Maybe the worst sin is warfare because it involves an intention to gather armies and inflict them on other armies. It’s group evil, evil perpetrated to stop the perceived evil on the other side. And it truly is difficult, challenging in fact, to imagine doing it to the glory of God or however you define the ultimate power source in the universe. Subtracting the crusades and the religious fanaticism of some sects, would it be possible to discharge weapons, drop bombs, ram tanks through city streets in some kind of weird loyalty to the nameless oneness in everything? In my pacifist imagination it feels as though wars would never be fought if armies were never trained and equipped. Counter that with the fact that Japan has an almost total ban on private ownership of handguns. They kill each other with knives and have roughly the same murder rate as the rest of the world. They do not have mass killings. Back to fighting wars to the glory of the ineffable oneness, to somehow lift up our utter and complete need for losing the lie of separation into a oneness that sustains everything by fighting wars? Even as I write it and look back at it, it just feels wrong. Nobody could ever fight a war to the glory of ultimate wisdom and power and grace? As bizarre as this reads, it must be possible? G.K. Chesterson’s smoking cigars to glory must apply universally. It’s Kant’s maxim. When deciding on a certain behavior, you have to question whether it would work when universally applied. I think so. I also think there would be fewer and fewer wars and mass killings. I think murder might even go off the menu if our spiritual starting point is that each of us is ultimately a part of everybody else, indeed everything else. We belong ultimately and literally to every drop of rain that falls and makes a flower grow. Alan Watts says a day is coming when we will all look out at the stars and say, “It’s me.” This is terribly complex and grinding on the teeth. War has fascinated me since childhood, and as most history is the history of warfare, we might as well chew on it for another sentence of two. One clear example of how war affirms our common humanity comes when we look at the Jarvis women - mother and daughter - taking care of soldiers from both sides during The Civil War. In the years that followed they advocated that Mother’s Day become a peace holiday. Anna Jarvis was so frustrated when it became a “hearts and flowers” holiday that she asked the U.S. Congress to rescind the legislation that had created it. MacArthur said, “Nobody hates war more than soldiers.” Is it possible that we might braid together some kind of mythology or legend that would glorify our common humanity to the point we could ultimately create a peace mentality, a mentality that would offer soldiers the chance to stack their weapons and go home to their families? Wilson’s calling the first World War, “the war to end all wars,” was in that mentality and of course, the creation of the United Nations had that at its heart. But the stockholders of Lockheed Martin and the processors of African minerals have other ideas. They need war to feather their nests. I’m rambling, so forgive me. I remember telling the folks at a great aunt’s funeral, “Some people are just born to be a bad example.” Maybe she was selfish and insufferable to the glory of the ineffable oneness in all of life which is not selfish and insufferable. Bad examples point to good examples. We always have choices. As we wrestle with the problem of evil, we might just sigh and do our best to steer the ship away from as much evil as possible. Would you like a cigar?

My books are on Amazon and can be found using my byline. Welcome To Death Faire, from me and 30 other writers and photographers, is not on Amazon but can be found at theplantnc.com. Thanks to my subscribers. I’m hoping soon to figure out how to get paid from Substack. Love to all, especially since we are all part of one thing, oneness. Y’all be sweet to each other.