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As another poster mentioned below, "We are, in fact, explicitly commanded to love our enemies... Christians, also, need the reminder that we cannot hate." Nietzsche was correct that Christianity is a slave morality, and the right-wing tradcaths will never be able to make it anything else no matter how many angels Christ is said to command.
Right-wing Christians do indeed need the reminder that they cannot hate, as commanded by their messiah.
There seems to be a translation issue
The distinction also occurs in Greek: πολέμιος versus ἐχϑρός
The issue is occasionally discussed at length (Search for "hostis" to jump to the discussion).
When I first came across this, I was puzzled. Tyndale published the first English bible in 1535. Why did nobody complain about translation issues until 1932? On the other hand. I'm so old that I studied Latin and Greek for O-level in an English Grammar School. I'm guessing that the educated elite in England learned a decent amount of Latin as recently as 1900. If they cared about what Christ meant by 'love your enemies', they would read the Vulgate, find "diligite inimicos vestros", then go off to fight in the Boer War, happy that shooting at a 'hostis' was compatible with Christianity.
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The love for enemies is a Christian love, an imitation of what Christ does. This includes, for example, warning the uncharitable wealthy of the eternal hellfire that awaits them, as Jesus does on many occasions. It may include insulting some by calling them children of Satan, for the purposes of hopefully awakening an obstinate soul. It also means, in some cases, “showing mercy by fear, hating even the garment stained by their flesh”, while still loving the person’s soul. It means that if someone in your church sins against you without apology or listening the church’s correction, the whole community severs all ties with them completely (Matthew 18:17). Historically, perhaps the best example of Christian love is the execution of criminals: allow them the dignity to confess and speak to a priest, then execute them quickly without needless pain. Hence the death penalty was justified by Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine, in a framework of Christian love.
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...And the reply to you, of course, is that "not hating" does not obviously preclude burning cities to ash together with their occupants. Christianity is not a pacifistic religion.
Just so I can understand, if Christians were burn down a city, you'd say they had a moral requirement to do so from a place of sorrow and concern, not hatred?
I don't think "Sorrow and concern" cover the full range, but they are at least a start.
I do not think Christianity necessarily implies pacifism, and war sometimes involves burning cities, together with their occupants. If I'm correct about that, then the Christian thing to do is to try to keep it to a minimum, and on a tight leash. It would be dishonest to pretend that war is not war, though.
The correct balance will always be criticized by the bloodthirsty as cowardly and slave-like, and by the pacifistic as bloodthirsty and merciless. There is, in fact, a balance, and we should keep to it. Does it seem otherwise to you? Do you object to the morality of the examples above?
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I am fine with the idea that Christianity doesn't require its adherents to be pacifist. Nor do I oppose the idea of collateral damage, though there are substantial requirements, in my view, on who is allowed to claim the victims of their attacks qualify.
Tangentially, I also do not agree that the examples you gave constitute something morally acceptable.
Do you think they are questionable, or obviously unacceptable?
I can definately agree with the questionable, and I can at least recognize the arguments for completely unacceptable. I see the picture of the woman and child burned to charcoal in the Tokyo firebombing article, and i think of my wife and my daughter plausibly suffering a similar fate. Death is the common lot of all humanity, and Christians have subtle but important disagreements with non-Christians about the nature and importance of particular forms of death.
Obviously morally unacceptable. There are arguments for doing it, but they are dwarfed by the power of the arguments against bombing population centers without some kind of impending mass disaster. As far as I know, there was never a time where the danger posed by more selective bombing (or just not bombing) was so immediate and high that it could justify destroying entire cities.
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