7 O'clock News / Silent Night

Not “calm,” not “bright”...

A wondrous Christmas hymn, “Silent Night” was written by a German priest Josef Mohr in ( maybe before) 1816.
Needless to say, northern Europe in the early 1800’s was neither calm nor bright, nor holy, nor at peace, nor filled with love’s pure light, nor redeemed by grace.

There was a high infant mortality rate, crop failures, ravaging disease, and horrendous slaughter. Europe had had almost continuous, calamitous war for 25 years! No “calm” there.
Nothing bright or holy!

Napoleonic troops and anti-French troops had ravaged back and forth. 558,000 French-lead soldiers died during the campaign into Russia. In 1813, over 600,000 soldiers fought in one battle alone at Leipzig, Saxony. As many as 110,000 were killed or wounded.

Approximately 1 million or more civilian died from that war. Total deaths reached between 3 to even 6 million! Then Germany as a confederation was created from parts of the former Holy Roman Empire, but German nationalists assassinated leaders… Speaking of assassinations, that takes us back to the time of Jesus’s birth in Roman Palestine under Herod the Great in about 4 B.C.E.

Not a time of love, peace, goodness, Godliness, or light either.

Nor was Britain at the birth of the Quaker movement in the 1600’s. Strangely, not even the early Quakers waged peace, contrary to many Friends histories and popular understanding! Many of the early Quakers fought in the great slaughter of the English Civil War.

Traagically, George Fox who would later emphasize the Lamb’s War, the peaceful way of Jesus, at first urged the Puritan killer Oliver Cromwell to carry forth his holy war all the way to Rome!! “Let thy soldiers go forth…that thou may rock the nations as a cradle.”

Not at all like the cradled-manger of Jesus.

So much for “silent night, holy night”...

Instead, even with those Friends of Jesus, the Children of Light, there was an ocean of darkness at first...

Nor is there any peace and holiness in the 21st century. Multi-millions of Christian Russian Orthodox soldiers and their leaders continue to invade and slaughter thousands of innocent Ukrainians.


Hundreds of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken to Christian Orthodox Russia.

Then there is the endless massacres of Palestine-Israel, the Sudan, etc.

Consider that powerful “Silent Night” meditative song by Simon and Garfunkel back in the 1960’s, also a horrific time of slaughter.

What a paradoxical contrast between the way of Jesus versus how Christians, Muslims, and Jews trash Jesus’ way now.

May we truly witness of the love and peace of God in this often Christ-less, unholy season.

Yet still hoping--despite endless despairing news--

in the Light of Care, Good, True, Just...

Daniel Wilcox

Our Human Culture of Violence and Future Choice

Though the horrors of war and lethal violence occur much less now in the world than 70 years ago,*
there are still so many innocent victims
and far too many misguided victors, and not a few sociopaths.

How ought a human being--just one of your average "I"s--respond to all the urgent calls for war?

How should I respond?
Take a brief trip down into memory hell...

What is the best way to respond to injustice, inequality, aggressive attack, and terrorism?

1. Like many Jewish people in the Holocaust?

2. Like the Deists in the American Revolutionary War?

3. Like the Girondins and Jacobins during the French Revolution?

4. Like Howard Gilmore, the Medal of Honor submarine captain fighting the Japanese?

5. Like Desmond Doss, the Medal of Honor medic?

6. Like the Allies using carpet bombing on German cities ending with the firebombing of Dresden?

7. Like American sniper Chris Kyle in the American first strike war in Iraq?

8. Like General Sherman in his "March to the Sea" in the American Civil War?

9. Like Gandhi in his nonviolent struggle against colonialism?

10.Like Muslims such as HAMAS and Islamic Jihad in their religious fight for land?

from Liberty Magazine

11.Like the Israeli military bombing of Gaza after Palestinians murdered 3 Israeli teens and shot rockets into Israel?

12.Like the Greeks in the Trojan War?

13.Like Krishna who ordered Arjuna in 3,000 B.C. India to kill his own relatives in war because that is a soldier's duty?

14.Like 19th century Europeans who escaped being drafted into their countries' wars by immigrating to the United States?

15.Like the Crusaders when they conquered Jerusalem in 1099?

16.Like Viet Cong soldiers against other Vietnamese, the French colonists, and American soldiers?

17.Like General Santa Ana in fighting invading Americans in the Mexican War? And the leaders of the Mexican Revolution against each other in the early 20th century?

18.Like Emperor Qin when he conquered Zhao in China about 220 B.C.?

19.Like John Woolman, the famous abolitionist and Friend to the Indians in the 1700's?

20.Like the fictional character in the movie Collateral Damage who emphasizes only the killer ought to be killed, not any innocent bystanders?

21.Like American leaders in the killing of about 450,000 civilians in the bombing of Japanese cities?

22. Like Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Muslim community activist and nonviolent warrior in the 1920's who opposed the British?

23.Like Napoleon against the European countries that opposed the government of Revolutionary France?

24.Like Joshua and the armies of Israel who killed everyone for Yahweh--"both men and women, young and old" living in the cities they attacked? And David and his band who robbed villages and then massacred everyone so that there would be no one to report their attacks?

23.Like the Prophet Muhammad who beheaded 600 to 900 Jewish men and older teens and then had their women and children sold into slavery? And like Muhammad when he had a Jewish poet executed because she wrote a poem against him?

24.Like the Confederate army which sometimes executed Union army troops after they surrendered?

ETC. (Come up with your own variations on how to deal with war.)


*The Fallen of World War 11: https://vimeo.com/128373915 and http://www.fallen.io/ww2/


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

'Whether' of the Arab Spring

‘Whether'
Of the Arab Spring
Turning glacial,
No global warming, only bloody warring
Very natural, yes,
Theological and political;

Whether Syria or Nigeria
Or Egypt’s
Two natures,
An ancient debate

Related to their 'Origen'

Whether

Coptic
Or (And)
Muslim?

And which Brotherhood?

Banned together

Or
Truly
One--
We the People…

No,
Once
Again
One’s
Chosen
By militant power,
No Sissy,
But El…

General (then no) mayhem

Not
Nazarene
Or
Taliban,
Yet again
The Strongman
Nasserite,

Whether
Another
Indigenous
Napoleon-night



Daniel Wilcox
First published in The New Verse News
in different form

The Bad of Boasting

Check out Hannity's America where the TV news commentator Sean Hannity claims "the U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth.

President Barack Obama claims,
"The entire world is watching. So let's seize this moment to show why the United States of America is still the greatest nation on Earth."

And Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president, claims American is “the greatest nation in the history of the earth.”

Huh? What happened to moderation, humility, unselfishness, and focusing on others?

Group egotism is the worst form of pride, the very worst form of boasting, and all too often the most destructive.

Nationalism is rotten to the core.

What about focusing on asking God to bless others, to bless the needy, the impoverished, the persecuted, the lonely?

May God bless everyone!

A cautionary note: There is a huge difference between nationalism--"America is the best, the greatest...God bless US!
versus
genuine patriotism, moderate love of one's country.

Sometimes when a leader claims his country is great, he means 'I love my country in a widened extension of love for my ken, my family and my spouse.'

In its best expression, love of country is like love of one's wife, a husband loves his wife like no other human.

He means he and his sweetheart's love is special, but he isn't claiming that his wife is better than all other women in history! He's not claiming that she is better than other men's sweethearts. Each guy loves his beloved for herself, not because he compares her to others!

See how obnoxious and absurdly arrogant that sounds, if he claimed the latter. No, he is speaking of being a loving couple. When we see such love the result is uplifting and a blessing.

I felt such love for the United States when as a young teen I earned my God and Country Award for Boy Scouts. The award wasn't a negative comparison award where I was vaunting my country over all other countries, but a genuine love of our people and our government.

Our love of our country can be genuine while we are still fully aware that multi-millions of other people elsewhere love their countries, too.

Tragically, most human political speech usually means the opposite--that my country is 'better' than all other people's countries.

Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon (one of the only two senators to vote at the start against the Vietnam War) warned against such boasting. He wrote two books about his time in American government, and in each one he warned against the insidious temptations of American politics (Crisis and Conscience and Between a Rock and Hard Place).

According to Senator Hatfield it is nigh impossible to escape from the pride which inhabits all political involvement in our government in Washington D.C.

Notice how Hannity, Obama, and many other political and religious leaders are continuing this tendency for human group pride. They claim the United States is better than all other nations, even all other nations in history!

This is an arrogant-spirited American IDOL, in the worst sense of the wor, where only one nation gets to claim its top dog--or is it 'top god?' (sarcasm intended!).

Of course, Americans aren't the only humans to get sucked into this virulent boasting. Try reading a few statements by the British leadership for more than two hundred years when the sun never sat on the British Empire, which was far larger and had a much greater control of the world than the U.S. ever has.

And don't forget the late 19th-early 20th century German belief that their nation, Deutschland, was uniquely called and indwelt by the World Spirit, called to lead the world.

Or consider the vast French claims during the Napoleonic Era, the Russian Empire, the Muslim Conquest, or the Roman Empire, the Persian...blah, blah...

There is seemingly no doubt that pride (boasting) is the worst human evil. What is baffling and tragic is how many modern Christians of a variety of stripes still seem to obsess on this temptation, to exalt THEIR nation as being better than all other people's nations.

And the true historic tragedy is that while individual pride constantly hurts a few humans, national pride and boasting has killed literally millions of people, and is the worst of worst when it comes to human evil.

Nationalistic boasting is the worst part of the ocean of darkness.

Let the OCEAN OF LIGHT overwhelm our tendency to pride.

In the Light

Daniel Wilcox