No offense, Reverend, but I've known a fair number of chaplains who would disagree with you here. In fact I own two military-issued Bibles, complete with unit insignia printed on the cover.
There's some tension between Mt. 6:24, the apparent source for this admonition, and Mt. 22:21 (or the parallel Luke verse) about rendering unto Caesar. You can't serve two masters; but perhaps you can serve one at a time.
Alternatively, you can adopt the traditional answer (for Catholics and Muslims alike, as it happens, although they differ on important details) that the leader of the military has a kind of divinely-appointed duty: to protect the weak, uphold the law, ensure the peace, and so forth. Thus, service to one is a kind of service to the other.
I disagree with the "Reverend" (because I think he has badly misinterpreted the verse in question, to the point I wonder if he got his degree from a Cracker Jack box) from a different perspective.
ReplyDeleteI had an atheist and a born-again fundamentalist Christian working for me at one unit. They obviously disagreed with each other, but neither saw any conflict between their service to the military--and so to our nation--and their service or rejection of service to God. Serve two masters? Easy enough when the goals of those services don't conflict which as you've intimated military service and service to God do not to the point of dovetailing if not outright overlapping.
Warnock is no better than a money changer; although it's not money he's handling.
Eric Hines
Protestant. Not shocked as it's usually the low-church types who have a tenuous grasp of theology.
ReplyDeleteCS Lewis's "Why I Am Not A Pacifist" is deliberate and persuasive.
ReplyDelete"Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition."
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
Q is serving God, whether they know it or not. That's fine with me so far.
ReplyDeleteArguably everyone is; Gollum, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe dark and evil serves as a whetstone, a grinding stone. Their job is to oppose, but it means they serve Divine Will by getting in the way of Divine will. If you give them too much power and leeway, they become like a mafia secret combination and tend to supplant the system they are in (American elections).
ReplyDeleteThis is why there are "fail safes" that are sent and activated (administration backdoors or cheat console debug commands) if the dark gets too powerful and actually begins replacing the programming functions of the system, preventing it from accomplishing the Divine Will.
Freedom of will/choice is basically an illusion, but one given to both light and dark. By illusion, I mean it is true and false at the same time, on a quantum superposition level.