Episode 58 - Christian Violence

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[Music] if you enjoy the liturgist podcast but would like to go deeper if you'd like to learn more and talk to others going through a journey in appreciating the world equally through science through art and through faith we'd like to invite you to subscribe to this program on patreon patreon is a site designed for people to raise monthly support through donations but we've actually kind of moved away from the donation model and instead created additional content available for a very affordable subscription of five dollars a month so of course we'll take any amount of money as a donation if you want to give one or two or three dollars a month that's fine and if you do that you'll get access to a second podcast called the liturgist conversations which is a behind the scenes look at how the liturgist podcast is produced but for people who subscribe at five dollars a month we create weekly meditations uh to help you deepen your spiritual practice and sometimes we do a series of daily meditations so that's available to you and and of course some people uh also subscribe at the 20 a month tier which probably for right now gets back in that donation mindset uh but we do have some additional time to talk and discuss things about the program with people at the 20 level uh and occasionally some in-person meetups as well so if you're interested in learning more about subscribing to the additional resources we make available to our patrons simply go to theliturgist.com and click on the join us button in the upper right hand corner to find out more [Music] michael king was born in atlanta georgia in 1929 then in 1935 michael's father changed both his own and his son's name to martin luther king to honor the protestant reformer martin luther dr martin luther king jr became one of the most famous and beloved advocates for justice and civil rights and history who is known for his eloquent and beautiful speeches in which he would say things like quote peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal unquote how ironic then that dr martin luther king practices faith in the stream of and was named after the german anti-semitic reformer who advocated for the massacre of peasants here are a couple martin luther quotes and speaking of the peasants he said quote let everyone who can smite slay and stab secretly or openly remembering that nothing can be more poisonous hurtful or devilish than a rebel it is just as when one must kill a mad dog if you do not strike him he will strike you in a whole land with you unquote he also advocated violence like this towards who he called the blind jews who were and i quote truly stupid fools he had a seven solution problem for the jews first to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them second he said i advise that their houses also be raised and destroyed the other five steps included depriving jews of their employment and making them do hard labor instead taking all their money and killing any teaching rabbis or jews who leave their home does any of that sound familiar to anybody else so here's my question is christianity primarily a religion of peace love and shalom or violence bigotry and oppression who's more representative of christianity martin luther or dr martin luther king jr what's more representative of christianity matthew 5 love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you or first samuel 15 do not spare them but kill both man and woman child and infant oxen sheep camel and donkey is it those who live by the sword die by the sword or slaves obey your masters i mean how can one religion give rise to pope francis who speaks to outsiders to the catholic church like this quote since many of you do not belong to the catholic church and others are non-believers from the bottom of my heart i give this silent blessing to each and every one of you respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of god unquote but also give rise to popes like gregory ix who created the people inquisition in which thousands of people were tortured and murdered with methods including starvation burning victims bodies with hot coals forced over consumption of water hanging by straps thumb screws metal pincers and of course the rack for being unbelieving heretics how can one religion produce both christian pacifism and christian terrorism christian abolitionists and christian support and justification of slavery children's hospitals and the crusades how is saint francis of assisi who gave everything to the poor and who spent a lot of his time communing with animals in the forest a part of the same faith as the climate exploiting capitalistic evangelical war machine how can members of the ku klux klan subscribe to the same ancient creeds as the african methodist episcopal church how can a group dedicated to following a man who was executed by the state be some of the biggest proponents of executions by the state [Music] i ask it again is christianity a religion of peace or is it a religion of violence welcome to the liturgist podcast just recently i was in texas the south is like the death belt it's sort of the buckle of that you know texas half of all executions are in this one state so i was i was traveling around creating a conversation around this and one of the folks who shared their story it was pretty incredible she was a she is a texas pastor uh deanna golson so she's a a pastor that told me her story and someone visited her church and they said hey pastor i got a question for you deanna says i was ready for anything you know do i believe in hell substitutionary atonement you know trinity whatever but bring it you know and the woman says are you for the death penalty and she says i was i was shocked you know she said yeah i am i am for the death penalty and the the woman just collapsed and she said my son is set to be executed in the near future and i just needed a pastor to walk with me this is author speaker and social justice advocate shane claiborne indiana um basically reverend golson she just said okay i'm going to put all that on the back burner and my i want to walk with you through this i want to be your pastor in this and she began to accompany this mother as her son faced execution and she said as i begin to see what we're doing um and in particular it was actually during the season of lent you know as as jesus's uh execution is on the horizon she said i began to fill this collision you know with my faith and she said and then it became real when he didn't want his mother to witness his execution and she said they asked me so she became the witness and during in the execution chamber during the execution and she said i had gotten to know this young man i'd gotten to know his mom and now i'm watching the state i live in the system that i have justified and supported take his life and she said so here he is he gets strapped to the gurney and his last words are i want to ask for forgiveness from everybody that i've hurt and then he says and i want to extend forgiveness to those who are getting ready to hurt me and to take my life his last words were forgiveness so he's executed and then reverend golson says my my last job was to walk his mother to the coffin so she could touch his hand for the first time in 10 years they weren't allowed contact visits and so the first time that she could touch the flesh of her son was when he was dead and she said i realize what we are doing and so many people just haven't seen the real dark side of this this when scripture says we're wrestling against not flesh and blood but against principalities and powers i think that's exactly what is at stake in the death penalty and and i think it raises so many other huge questions and so in the end like reverend golson now has been on panels with me as one a pastor who was formerly an advocate and supporter of the death penalty uh that now is passionately against it and it's because of her faith and also because of her love for justice and and her love for victims of violent crime to be anti-death penalty doesn't mean we're anti-victims or we're anti-justice it's just to say that we can do better than killing to show that killing is wrong with the death penalty i mean it's one of those things that a lot of people don't think a whole lot about but the more you start looking at it the more troubling it gets especially when we look at our racial uh history you know the legacy of slavery and racism i mean where executions are happening right now is exactly where lynchings were happening a hundred years ago and in the states that have held on to the death penalty the longest or the the states that held on to slavery the longest um but you know what what's also troubling is that christians have i i think really been the a part of the problem on this um the 85 of executions in the last few decades have been in the bible belt my buddy says the bible belt is the death belt and wherever christians have been most concentrated is where the death penalty has flourished and and that that just messes with me you know as people who believe in redemption and grace so so at the end of the day it raises uh some fundamental questions about faith too and when i look at the bible i mean one of the first murderers was moses so i mean he killed a dude you know and and like it's not really funny but i mean the fact is like the bible david you know killed uriah committed adultery with bathsheba saw of tarsus you know was like terrorists so the bible's filled with messed up people and the whole story is a story of grace and redemption and how good god's love is you know in spite of all the crazy things we do and and that's really what's at stake with the death penalty i think too what have your thoughts been about why christianity is so associated with violence still you spent a lot of time in the evangelical world you grew up in the south what are your thoughts about that how does that happen well first of all i think we've had a very narrow like understanding of what it means to be pro-life and for a lot of christians that has meant to be against abortion and and i think abortion is a really important issue an incredibly important issue but to me pro-life doesn't just mean anti-abortion it means being for life you know every person is created in the image of god and i kind of wonder what would happen if christians began to have a bigger framework for that to where we thought any anytime a life is destroyed we lose a part of god's image in the world that means we should be the biggest champions of life when it comes to gun violence the movement for black lives you know resistance to militarism and war and the death penalty and all these things these are issues of life so that's part of what breaks my heart is is some of us who uh would call ourselves christians we we've often stood on the side of death rather than life and as one who when i look at jesus um and jesus is the lens through which i understand my christianity you know he's a the model for my life and the one i i think you know came to show us what god is like and and it's very becomes very difficult to reconcile violence with jesus you know we i've been saying like any death penalty pro-death penalty christian has a nagging problem of jesus to deal with because when you look at jesus and jesus you know saying in as much as you forgive you will be forgiven blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy and love your enemies like i'm pretty sure he meant we shouldn't kill them you know and yet like that's what we've we've seen is that sometimes we've been the the champions of something different but if you look at jesus on the cross i mean we see what love looks like when it stares evil in the face and jesus says father forgive them for they they don't know what they're doing and i i think when it comes to the death penalty in particular it's so important to understand jesus as one who was executed you know and and that the significance of that that jesus turned across which was only known like the electric chair as a symbol of torture and horrific humiliation i mean the most violent thing that the state could do and it was it was a horrific form of death and now like jesus triumphed over that death and put it as colossians says on display you know he put death on display and triumphed over it with love and grace and forgiveness and so that one of the images i use is is that jesus was like water poured on the electric chair to short circuit the whole system of death and i think any time we rejoice in death we disgrace jesus and the cross because what jesus was doing was exposing the most horrific violence that we are capable of enduring it and triumphing over that with love black folks understood that during the periods of lynching they they called jesus the first lynch e you know and it was this incredible act of divine solidarity with the most marginalized and despised people in our world and they saw jesus hanging from a tree you know and and turning uh this horror into hope and now we look at the cross and we see a conduit of god's love but that's a testament i think of what jesus did and and it should change the way that we think about death i think in the way that we think about the death penalty uh in particular is if every week or every day we're identifying with a forgiving victim of violence estate violence then it should make us suspicious of violence you know it should make us champions of grace and forgiveness so that's that's what i hope for you know and this is different you know there's a generational thing to this michael you know i think where like there's a lot of young christians millennials were polled and like 80 of them were against the death penalty because they can't reconcile with jesus but there's still a lot of i think fundamentalism that looks back at the old testament and says well god put the death penalty in place but then when you take a closer look there's 30 death worthy crimes in scripture you know so like one of them was working on the sabbath like people would be in big trouble like everybody but chick-fil-a would be in in the you know hot seat on that one so like you know well chick-fil-a works on the sabbath they just don't work on the lord's day that's right thank you but but you know like 30 death worthy crimes and even in the u.s like some of those were in place that's where we have the salem witch trials you know like uh witchcraft or sorcery i mean all kinds of things were were listed on there and i don't know many people that want to bring that death penalty back you know like the way it was and so there's there's there's also the idea of an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth which i think we've used to be used as a license for revenge and it was just the opposite the closer you look at that idea it was a limitation of how much you could retaliate so you could return equal harm for the harm done for you but it put a limit on that so that you didn't continue to escalate you know and legitimate violence and then jesus comes and that's where jesus is the fulfillment of all this he goes you've heard it said an eye for an eye but i tell you turn the other cheek you know don't even hurt the person that hurts you and i mean that's a really incredible way of thinking is it we may have a right to harm someone who's harmed us but god's justice may be even bigger than we ever imagined like and more graceful than we ever imagined so i think jesus like is the lens through which i like read the whole bible and how i like understand the world we live in and and and to me that's where jesus really becomes the force for grace and forgiveness and all this and um and the early christians understood that they they were spoke unilaterally against violence in a lot of different forms but capital punishment was one of those where they said over and over they said things like when someone kills a person we consider it a crime but why do we call it a noble virtue or justice when the state does it or when we do it in mass you know in the military like like how do we then make uh violence a virtue so i love the early christians on that i mean it probably didn't hurt that they were like they were also like victims of execution so they weren't big fans of it [Music] i've often wondered how our view of the cross and how our view of the role that punishment plays in the fulfillment of justice theologically ends up creating an environment where pro-life can mean against abortion but for the death penalty because if you understand that god is loving and just and the way god fulfills justice is punishing transgression or punishing crime that view of justice becomes a lens with which you view the cross you view salvation and then you ultimately view earthly justice where kind of as you alluded to with restorative justice and other lenses that we could view justice as a concept through that can reinform our theology reinform our public policy and re-inform really the way we view life itself yeah you when i when i look at the biblical idea of justice and and you know some of my friends that are smarter than me that actually read the bible in its original languages and stuff you know they said that this this idea of righteousness and justice with the same fundamental concept even the same phrase and the best translation that we have of the idea of righteousness and justice is restorative justice we've been conditioned to think of justice as like what did someone do wrong and what do they deserve as punishment for that crime and i think god's justice is much deeper and more beautiful and it's asking a different set of questions it's asking what harm was done and how do we heal that the wounds of that injustice you know and and and that also is about healing the person in the community that was harmed and the one who did the harm you know maybe the community has a responsibility uh in in healing those wounds as well and i look at places like rwanda that have become really some of the the exemplary models of restorative justice and the rwandan genocide where hundreds of thousands of people were being killed has become sort of a mirror to the world of what restorative justice can look like and now some of the people that were responsible for that were not killed but they're actually rebuilding the country that they destroyed and there's amazing stories of forgiveness and grace i was over there and there are families that their children were killed in the genocide and now they've adopted over the years some of the folks that responsible for the genocide and are raising them and you you look at that it looks beautiful and i think we haven't even allowed the possibilities of our imagination on some of those because we've been so confined to one version of justice you know is is just you know what what they do wrong what do they deserve and i think that's really a different way of thinking about justice then this whole scripture is more putting things at one again healing the things and it's even where we get kind of the idea of atonement you know at one moment some like simplify it to being that you know but like one version of god healing all things is that god needed more blood you know that that humanity was doomed and so it's kind of like god had a gun pointed at us and then took the gun off of us and pointed it at jesus and killed jesus and some of those versions can end up creating a god that is very easy to fear but very hard to love and the god i know and the god i see in jesus is actually love incarnate and not you know so that that i think how we understand jesus's death has very much can shape how we think about god you know and so these are these are huge questions but they're so important you know i think they're they're questions that they affect the way that we live too because we tend to imitate the god that we worship so if we think god is throwing lightning bolts down like zeus or something you know it makes us want to you know whoop out a can too so yeah well it's this idea that if we take justice and put it in opposition of love it's almost like god is wrestling with god's self in any encounter with humanity but i think like as you've kind of alluded to like maybe the most scriptural depiction of justice is restorative i mean i've been studying the story of the prodigal a lot lately uh in the original cultural context the prodigal son committed capital crimes and when he returned the father rushed to restore him and restore him fully this might be a little bit of a stretch or a misread of the parable but you have the older son who is disappointed in the form of justice that the father chose to administer but the father very clearly says that's not what i mean by justice what i'm looking for is for this family to be whole yeah and and you look at some of the most horrendous injustices and travesties in in the world like the rwandan genocide or the holocaust or um you know apartheid south africa and there's a lot of ethicists that say what happened is there became a death fatigue people got just absolutely so tired and worn down by violence and death that they realized the solution to this is not to mirror what has done so much harm we can do better than that so like after apartheid fell the new south africa had no space for the death penalty after the holocaust in fact like there wasn't the death penalty and jewish folks have kind of done away with the death penalty and in part because i think that they've seen that death is the disease not the cure you know death is the problem not the solution so if we're going to heal that we we don't really do an eye for an eye tooth for a teeth like we don't rape people who raped to show that rape is wrong you know if you if you poke my eye out i wouldn't actually poke your eye out that would seem kind of cruel you know and yet in the most extreme case of of of murder we still try to show you know kill to show that killing is wrong and i think there's a whole lot of the world that's discovered we can do better than that you know there's all kinds of ways that we can take evil seriously we can take violence shouldn't go without consequences but there's a whole lot of ways that we can contain violence without mirroring it you know we can there's over 140 countries that have moved on from the death penalty and we just keep we we happen to be one of the few that's holding on to it and you know it's important because this is a company that we keep when it comes to countries that execute the most people china is number one number two is iran ir and then iraq and then saudi arabia and then the us is number five like those are not known as champions of human rights you know injustice so you know like and so i think we part of what we we really can do and it's going to take a generation i think to move on this and to create a groundswell that says we we can do better than this form of justice and that doesn't mean that we uh just let people run free or that someone like dylan roof doesn't deserve punishment for what he did or does that that doesn't have consequences but when we kill we stoop to the morality that we're we're actually trying to teach our kids you know don't do that and when the state does it it kind of reinforces some kind of like distorted view i think of justice [Music] since 1995 the united states of america has executed 1454 people executions peaked in 1999 with 98 inmates executed in a single year the south is the leader by far with 1 186 executions though texas and oklahoma executed more than their share with 654 people most executions happen via lethal injection though eight states allow execution including my native florida and three allow two states still allow firing squads but unlike utah oklahoma only uses firing squads as a backup in the event other methods are found unconstitutional race plays a significant role in the application of the death penalty black people are over represented on death row by a factor of 3 when compared to the general population studies have shown that depending on the state the defendant is two to three and a half times more likely to receive the death penalty for killing a white person as they are for killing a black person the first dna exoneration occurred in 1989 350 people have been freed from death row by dna evidence and 37 of those 350 pled guilty to their crime 71 of these cases involved an eyewitness misidentification and 41 involved a cross-racial witness misidentification 46 involved a misapplication of forensic science and 28 over one in four involved false confessions more than half of these false confessors were 21 or younger at the time of the arrest on average inmates exonerated by dna evidence spent 14 years in incarceration before dna evidence revealed their total innocence of the 350 people exonerated by dna 217 were black 106 were white 25 were latinos and two were asian americans for more information about the death penalty dna exoneration and the injustice represented by the death penalty visit innocenceproject.org or deathpenaltyinfo.org [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists there's a lot of misinformation out there so the more i started looking into stuff the more troubled you become because like there's there's a study of hundreds of police chiefs and they they were asked what are the most effective deterrents of violent crime they went they listed all kinds of different things but the death penalty was like the very bottom of the list you know it didn't even virtually register and part of what they said is like we're we're dealing with like really really wicked stuff sometimes and like dylan roof in in charleston you know he doesn't like think oh i might get the death penalty for this i don't think i'm actually going to shoot these people you know like we're it's it goes much deeper than that and there so so i think that there are a whole lot of ways that we can um have a safer more sensible society like what really captivated me on this was not just statistics because i don't know too many people that get argued into thinking differently but it was the stories you know and i mean just a few days ago i was with ron who is with witness to innocence which is all folks that were wrongfully convicted and they were sentenced to death ron was in a motorcycle group going across the country and they were in this kind of uh envoy of motorcycles drove through a town and there had been a murder they had no idea but they were swarmed by police arrested and they didn't even know what they were being charged with they said geez can we see a judge can we put on trial because we don't we don't even know what's going on here they were put on trial and they were convicted and sentenced to death i mean they're just like dear in the headlights and uh come to find out like years later nine days from ron's execution nine days away a police officer confessed to the crime and there had been a whole cover-up operation the sheriff was involved they actually found the weapon it was locked in a safe like all the evidence was there and they had pinned it on these motorcycle guys like to cover up a police officer's crime and they were willing to kill four people to do that and and you you look at that you're like my gosh you know it but then the more you look i mean there's 155 other people like ron that have been wrongfully sentenced to death some of them hours from their execution and later proved innocent that's just the ones that have been able to prove it you know and you hear stories like that and it raises so many questions about a lot of things i mean for every nine executions we've had one exoneration one person proved innocent you're like man what if every 10 planes that took off one of them crashed you know we'd be like whoa time out you know but and it's people's lives that are destroyed through that i mean cumulatively it's almost 1800 years that have been taken from those 156 people that were wrongfully convicted because it takes over 10 years to prove your innocence so the issue of innocence how much we trust the state you know do we trust our government with the irreversible power over life and death and that's you know why a lot of conservatives have really jumped on board with the abolition movement but but a lot of times we think that we're killing the worst of the worst but we're really killing the poorest of the poor and what determines who gets executed is often not the atrocity of the crime but the resources of the defendant to defend himself or herself and that just i think for any one of us that loves jesus and cares about the poor that that is very disturbing and troubling [Music] what do you think about the differences between systematic and and cultural and political ethics and morality versus individual because you know we've been talking about like how jesus responds to people a lot of people's response is you know yeah as an individual you're supposed to love your neighbor and forgive your neighbor but as a society you know how could a society function without a military how could a society function that just says you know yeah if you bomb our country we'll just forgive you and turn the other cheek and they extend that to sort of give the state carp launch of whatever violence it wants to use how do you guys think about those tensions and those lines between you know mandating some sort of personal ethic of non-violence on a larger scale the practicalities of that the complications of of that and how do you see that in play in this issue yeah i mean i i think that it's a great question and this i think is one of the really weird things that we have differentiated is is personal ethics and social you know ethics or government like somehow it's like our governments are holier than people are you know or sin doesn't affect systems it only affects people and you know i i interviewed an executioner in the middle of this and i never even really thought about what it does to folks who are responsible for taking for for doing the dirty work of executing someone talked to this guy ron mcandrew he's a former prison warden he oversaw executions in florida during one of the electric chair executions the man's head caught on fire and he was horrified he was like i was done with the electric chair but he said i still believed in the death penalty i'd been so conditioned to believe definitely his response was to go to texas and get trained in lethal injection and bring it back to florida and when he did that he was still haunted by the folks that he killed in fact in his own words he said they visited me in my sleep he said i drank myself to sleep i was i was absolutely haunted by my job as as executioner and in the end he ended up being against the death penalty and he's an expert witness now about cruel and unusual punishment but it's his faith that led him there you know he said there's no good way to kill people and you know when we do that we feel it it really begin to squash the good in us when we take life it kills a part of us and i've i've heard the same thing you know from soldiers that come back and they said i went to iraq and afghanistan i thought you know i'm going to get rid of terrorism but they said i felt like we were creating it was like we were pouring fuel on the fire and that's exactly what dr king said you know as you you don't fight fire with fire you don't fight hatred with hatred love is the way to do this like non-violence overcomes violence and and violence begets the very thing that it seeks to get rid of and and so a lot of soldiers that come back from iraq that i'm friends with they said i felt like i was trying to carry a gun in one hand and a cross in the other and i was trying to serve two masters and there just wasn't a way to reconcile the cross and the message of jesus to love our enemies and simultaneously be ready at any minute to kill them like i just couldn't do that and it's created you know what a lot of folks are calling like a moral injury like an injury of conscience in them as they feel this kind of collision in their souls so i think we can do a lot better in the world too as we think of of what it means to seek god's kingdom that when we continue to fight violence with violence we we continue to add fuel to the fire of violence in the world you know what does it mean to love our enemies in the world of isis is folks say well that's impractical i'm like i mean jesus said that to people that were being fed to beasts in the arena and being hung upside down on crosses i mean evil was real two thousand years ago and it's real today and i think part of what what the problem is is that we haven't had the courage to take the cross as seriously as we've taken the sword we haven't had the courage you know to be willing to die loving our enemies as we have being willing to die ready to kill them if you like the liturgist podcast but you would like to dive deeper by connecting with people in flesh and blood rather than just listening to voices all the time we would love to see you at one of our liturgists gatherings we're hosting three of them this year we're going to be in los angeles california september 15th and 16th boston massachusetts october 6th and 7th in seattle washington october 27th and 28th these gatherings are always such a great time we've done several of them and the big thing is you guys meeting each other and being together there's always fascinating and brilliant people that attend these things and then you'll also have science mike and i doing the weird stuff that we like to do having existential conversations we're going to host some liturgy moments with you um some meditations we'll sing together a little bit join around the table every one of these is kind of unique and take on sort of the vibe of the place and the and the people that are there um you can get tickets at the liturgists.com you can just go to the events page also there you'll be able to see gunger events and science mic events as well gunger for instance is going on a little acoustic tour again this summer as well as a couple of full band dates like in dallas and new york city as well for the gunger tour i know they're still working on getting some of the ticket links up so keep an eye on that if you'd like but if you're in the united states gunger's probably going to be somewhere near you in july or august but if you want the full deal with science mike and gunger and most importantly other liturgists the gatherings in los angeles boston and seattle really are going to be the best thing for you so do check it out on the website liturgists.com events and we look forward to seeing you in person we do think these events are going to be really helpful for you see you soon strange to me how comfortable we get with violence and like when you you use the example shane of you know we don't we don't repay rapists with rape if if that was proposed people would just be horrified right yeah i mean if you said no we should do that so they know what it's like people it'd just be automatically oh my god you couldn't do something like that to somebody but why is it that murder and killing someone violently is seen as less than that somehow like we're more comfortable with that i remember going to the movies recently and seeing just looking at the posters and i couldn't see a poster where i was standing every single poster had like a gun yeah or some sort of violence on it it's what we celebrate in this culture it's like the hero that went and killed everybody you know it's like somebody's made the observation that you don't have rape mystery parties you have oh man murder mystery parties where it's kind of fun and romantic who murdered who murdered the person and it's like this kind of fun social thing to do but imagine a rape mystery party or it's like who raped so and so in the study like why do we consider murder and killing so light and carefree like it's just something that we do that's disturbing i'm with you dude and i mean when we look at our country too i think sometimes we we get so it becomes so normalized that it's it's everywhere you know it's in our video games it's in so much messaging even in our language you know like uh like killing time and you know there's just i mean i'm not like a prude but i'm saying i think it gets in us you know it gets inside of us and then i mean we live in a country where i was just looking at um guinness book of world records and one of the records that we fl i was flipping the page you know looking at it with a kid and i flipped the page and it said most guns and it's the us by far has the most civilian-owned guns and it's it's like almost one per person we've got about 300 million guns and the next country it was i think india where it was four guns for every hundred people or something like that like it's just insane like like the world that we're living in like we become normalized this is normal and you realize my gosh like where there's more guns more people get killed with guns you know like more people commit suicide we got 90 people a die a day who are dying from guns and you know the the the solution to that i think this is where like it gets so vicious is we say well what do you do well the answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy again we need more guns you know and so we just keep like this you know jesus's language is if you pick up the sword you die by the sword you know like we've we keep doing that and it keeps killing us it's literally killing us three thirty thousand people a year in our country that are dying from gun violence and and you know my friends that own guns like they're like well it's not a gun problem it's a heart problem i'm like why can't it be both i mean i think we sin is real like violence is real it's in my heart too you know i have to deal with that too but like it's a lot harder to kill someone with a spoon you know and uh or violence uh in my neighborhood you know in our country it's it's unprecedented in a lot of parts of the world so i think we can do better you know and jesus points us towards that you know the the bible doesn't have a whole lot to say about the right to bear arms but it's got a whole lot to say about loving our enemies and and i think that's where we've got to really come back to the centering on jesus you know peter peter i like peter because he you know when the soldiers come for jesus he picks up a sword and cuts one of their ears off jesus looks back at him and scolds him puts the ear back on the dude and the early christians understood that so powerfully they said when jesus disarmed peter he disarmed every christian because if ever there was a case for redemptive violence to protect the innocent like peter had the strongest case in the world he's protecting jesus and jesus scolds him and heals the person that he hurt so that that's i think why we see you know perfect love and jesus is non-violent and it's also what the the disciples uh were committed to you know they said grace can dull even the sharpest sword so i think there's a whole lot of ways that we can become a healthier society but we go we got to hit it on all fronts you know i think we've got to take on the spiritual like heart issues but we've also got to take on some of the the issues like guns that you can access you know folks that can't fly on airplanes can get a gun philly you can get guns that have the capacity to shoot a hundred rounds in a minute you know and uh kids in my neighborhood when i was like why would you have a gun like that you can't shoot a deer with that you know and it's a great question should we even have things like that [Music] so one of the first folks i i met before i had even really started researching for the book is a guy named billy neal moore and what's interesting about billy's case is his guilt is not in question he took someone's life he came back from vietnam really troubled not the least of his worries was financial and so he and uh army buddy kind of got together and they they thought they had a foolproof plan to get some easy money no one would get hurt they were going to rob this house and prior to this um billy had never had any criminal history nothing like that and so they went to rob this house and things went totally haywire and the homeowner was killed and billy neal moore was haunted with what they were responsible for and so he turned himself in confessed fully to the crime knew that he would face the death penalty and what's interesting is billy said that was fine with me i i had no reason to live i thought i deserved the death penalty and he said if i if i could have pushed the button on my own execution i would have done it he tried to kill himself while he was in prison but then there was an interruption and it came from the most unlikely place you would think it was the victim's family they were christians and they got to know billy and they said listen we hate what you did you took someone from us that we loved so much and we will never get them back and they said but we um we want you to know we believe in jesus we believe in second chances we believe in forgiveness and redemption and so they said we're going to argue against the death penalty for you and it was incredible to watch like their relationship in fact billy uh committed his life to jesus he got baptized while he was in prison this family became kind of his surrogate family and they were one of the biggest opponents of the death penalty in his case the victim's family and it was a really exceptional case because not only was billy's life spared but he was eventually released from prison and today he's a pastor and i get to preach with him every chance i get and when he preaches the gospel it is the very heart of jesus that no one is beyond redemption you know i i think part of why i have such a passion about this is for a lot of my life i was for the death penalty and in fact i can remember in high school and debating on the other side of this issue and really like i felt like i was running some liberals in the ground you know and i had the bible on my side i had so much going for me so that gives me a little bit of compassion because i i see where people are coming from i see um why like people are inclined to be supportive of the death penalty and and a lot of folks you know haven't met the stories they have they haven't come face to face with the the real people that i think are directly affected by this the last story i'll tell too is uh you know as i was finishing up the book i went to minneapolis and i met this woman who everybody was like oh she's a legend you got to make mary johnson you know so they took me to meet her and her story starts really hard her son was killed in minneapolis in a random shooting on the street it was her only son she was horrified obviously like instinctively wanted the harshest form of justice you know a punishment for the person they found the young man that had killed her son then over time like she really just just she's kind of a charismatic a little bit of a pentecostal woman she says the spirit started to work on her and and then there was this kind of like uh wild moment where she read this poem and she gave me a copy of it it's it's an anonymous poem no one even knows who wrote it but it was it's these two heavenly women that are talking to each other and they can tell you know it's kind of got this surreal angelic feel but the two women have a blue tent to their halos and that means that they had lost their children on earth and one of the women's realizes that she's talking to mary the mother of jesus you know so she's like oh my gosh you're mary the mother of jesus and mary says back to her tell me about yourself and the other woman says i'm the mother of judas iscariot uh you know the one who betrayed jesus and then killed himself and they embrace one another and um miss johnson when she read this in minneapolis she said i realize that there's another mother and i want to get to know her so she got to know o'shea the young man who killed her own son she got to know his mother and over the years she really got to know o'shea the young man who was responsible for the crime and they started an organization called two mothers and one of them leads a support group for women whose children have been murdered and the other leads a support group for children who have been responsible for violent crimes and all of them are healing together and now when when o'shea when the young man who did that crime when he was eventually released from prison years later one of his first things that he said as he was released from prison is i feel like the luckiest man in the world to have two mothers and he ended up living next door to mary the mother of the young man who he had killed and that when i look at that story like to me it's got the marks of the spirit of god all over it it's about restoration and about healing and i think we need more stories like that [Music] if you'd like more of shane claiborne's thoughts on the death penalty he wrote a book called executing grace why it's time to put the death penalty to death [Music] well we've heard some heart warming and moving stories we've had some beautiful faith expressed by shane claiborne i think it's about that time of the show when it's time for epistemological breakdown am i sounding particularly christian today i think we both are a real real real real jesusy vibe in this one a lot of jesus it's called thrown around it's called christian violence it makes sense i i am a christian so it does it does make some sense so when we talk about violence i think it's really easy to simplify and think in categorizations just like everything else for some reason it just it seems really difficult for human beings sometimes to uh deal with paradox and to deal with complexity i mean like the idea of light being both a particle and a wave is only a problem for us you know it's like it's not a problem for light i've never heard it stated that way but that's that's quite correct yes it's only a problem for our constructs for our thoughts for our words and perspectives and so we we want to think one thing is a thing and so we say is it a particle or a wave well we have such a an enlightenment zeal to make all of our rhetoric axiomatic and to have ideas being axiomatic being a demonstration of their trustworthiness or truth claim and uh reality keeps bucking our expectations of of axiomatic systems describing accurately yeah so we talk about something like violence and it becomes a dichotomy then of non-violence or just war is it okay sometimes or is violence evil i don't know i guess the way i sort of see things there's kind of this paradox and this tension at the heart of when you talk about something like violence because without violence we don't exist without death there is no life every meal that we eat is taking a life taking a lot of life whether you're vegan or not to live is to take life from something else that's rough that's at the heart of it all i hold that that sometimes violence is unnecessary not sometimes it's always a necessary part of life on some level but i also find that a stand against violence a stand for non-violence so stand for peace and harmony and for life is also at the center of it all to hold both of those things in tension it's both a particle and a wave sort of thing to say yes the way of jesus is non-violent the way of a healthy beautiful spirituality the way to be a full human being alive and present to life and bringing shalom into the world is to stand against violence with peace to enact a different sort of embodiment in the world that is non-violent and i think holding both of those things to be true so is violence evil yes is the better way non-violence yes is violence necessary sometimes yes i mean like it's all it's all yes uh and that's it's complicated and it's complex and it's we don't like that because that's a problem with us not necessarily [Music] for me the larger question like that fits in that framework is not is violence good or bad it's when or under what circumstances is violence necessary and that cuts a much more subtle and nuanced line than either you know warmongering or absolute pacifism and even the idea that violence is evil i i you know you have to like accept a certain number of of assumptions yeah to say that right like so like if it is a a lion killing violently killing a gazelle and eating it is that evil well i think most people would say no well from the perspective of the gazelle right well yeah because that's a real bad time but like from the perspective of a herd of gasels it's not necessarily a bad time because it does create this pressure where the limited number of calories from vegetation go to the healthiest gazelles that are the best outrunning lions which ultimately kind of tunes them better for the environment and don't hear that as an argument for social darwinism i'm not making that leap so part of that's endemic to how mammalian brains especially predatory mammalian brains function but then in the question of like when is violence justified i almost think unless you're on the far ends of the poles of human behavior the answer is almost always difficult to arrive at because it's not axiomatic right like so clearly using violence or force to intervene someone being assaulted yeah like i just i can't understand that level of pacifism [Music] that to say no even that's not appropriate but then at what point does violence fit this label we use evil i don't know that it's always cut and dry i don't think it's ever cut and dry i mean even thinking about a word like justified he said is the violence justified by what metric and to what ends yeah right yeah i was gonna say okay then justifiable but still i still assume some sort of larger assumed thing you know like either a biblical or a ethical or a moral black and white that can be adhered to or not adhered to so that it's what it is it's messy but that's why for me like even even the lion eating the gazelle is there when i say a word like evil i have to recognize that that's just a construct coming from a certain perspective the knowledge of good and evil is this human condition so as such like the the idea of necessary evil again from the perspective of the gazelle or from the perspective of even me watching the gazelle the lion eating the gazelle is an is an evil of sorts it is a there's a pain and a suffering that it creates in me because i don't want that to happen creates pain in the gazelle it's there's something i don't know from a certain perspective it is evil but it's also necessary is it any given act of violence is it the right or the wrong thing it depends where you're looking from and what you're trying to do is probably unsettling for people because then how can you say i mean you could take that into horribly vile justifications of violence because everybody that enacts violence i'm sure feels justified on some level so this is like why our evangelical friends are always sounding the alarm against moral relativism because if you create the right set of observational points of the right perspective you can justify almost any action and that's actually why i love the christian faith uh like this metaphor of the garden and that the major event that happens is the knowledge of good and evil even other animals with large cranial capacities and high intelligence don't seem to wrestle with what is and is not ethical as much as we do yeah not even a tiny percentage of how much time we spend thinking about it this is something that defines the human condition and so then we start to explore you know through linguistic models of reality what is right what is wrong absolutely the root of that is violence and the threat of violence so many ethicists say that governments build their authority on the threat of violence that's the seat of power for government institutions and as simple as it is that's what draws me to the christian faith specifically and the gospels when you have this library of books in the bible and then it gets distilled down into love god and love your neighbor and so then when you when you start to explore the question of violence through the perspective of does this love your neighbor you absolutely have to take a very reticent approach to violence and to war and to force because in that situation the only way i see violence as being justified is when you are doing what must be done to prevent someone from being harmed should always be done with great hesitation with great care and with a with ultimately a perspective of restoration and not retribution yeah it comes down to like what kind of organisms do we want to be some people like i i watched alien this last week and as a friend invited me to go and i said yes kind of without thinking about it and then i thought about i'm like why am i going to this movie i don't i don't like movies like this but i had already said yes i was like i'm going to guess there was a little violence in the alien film there was a little violence in it but it of course i was kind of existential while watching it because it's like like there's this fear everybody's i won't give any spoilers uh other than that there is an alien that kills people when we show these films where there's this terrifying other creature that eats humans and just attacks and we have this like fear of it it's the dark music and it's this feels like this really evil thing and i'm watching it like that's what's any different about that than what we are you know we walk around as aliens but we're just our human beings are the are the chickens and the pigs and the cows come in and slit their throats and we're very organism-centric you know this every individual organism is its own universe of sorts for itself and so what are what kind of things what kind of people kind of organisms do we want to be and we've seen in history certain ways of being human that there's something in us that says no we don't we don't want to be a species of genghis khans and hitler's and stalin's now i said we don't want to be a bunch of people that just are trying to kill whatever and whoever stands in our way to power and the pinnacle of whatever sort of lifestyle and comfort we want it's better to have love it's better to love not just the powerful and those who have something to offer us that make our lives more economically empowered or whatever but also the people who are under us in the in the socioeconomic ladder and power systems the the oppressed and the poor and the marginalized to to to show love there is to value the core of what we are and who we are and the core of everything and to honor life and to love life which isn't which is the same thing as to love ourselves how can we love ourselves if we don't love our neighbor you know it kind of all goes together this love this experience of human love dictates non-violence it it when you follow it through to love yourself is to not want to go to war with your neighbor if you really love yourself truly and love who you are and what you are it is to love your neighbor i think that i think of those goodness first john pulling out some bible again love is of god everyone that love is born of god and knoweth god he that loveth not i'm like quoting a song in my head a children's church song if you don't love your brother you don't love god if you don't love your neighbor you don't love god you don't love yourself it all goes together so to love god is to love a way of non-violence still there's times that you've got to eat and so how can you engage in the tension of the paradox of that in a way that you can still hold on to love some of it is letting go of some of for me letting go of some of those really strict fundamentalist structures in my brain between ideas like love and violence and and somehow when i eat if i'm grateful to the food that gave its life that is giving its life for me as a manifestation of love and grace and god you see that there's tension in it and it's a little messy and a little tricky but it's still aimed towards the kind of human that i want to be which is what what i see as well in the christian story and then the story of jesus who suffers violence on a cross who offers his body and his blood to the world and who we we take that as our food of sorts as grace [Music] i think that's interesting when you think about how those things tie together with the christian proclivity to violence and how that when it's beautiful is a direction towards love love of yourself love of your neighbor love of god and somehow that turns into a fear-based us and them a violence towards those who are perceived as underneath us maybe the unbelievers or the heretics or the whatever and there's this separation and this fear rather than love that actually separates us love pulls us away into ourselves with fear and violence it's interesting how that turns how christian violence such an ironic and unfortunate perversion of christianity if you take a particular read of the hebrew bible wherein there are the chosen and the chosen are constantly under threat from outsiders and tasked with protecting and preserving the word of god and then you filter that through a new testament where the center of gravity is in like revelation it's very easy to take the metanarrative of the bible and of the narrative of the early church fathers being persecuted for their faith and to craft this us or them and we take this image i think almost instead of over under it's you'd imagine a city surrounded by a wall with a dome over it and there's two kinds of threats there's there's lateral threats kind of outsiders coming towards you which you know today would be those atheists that would be uh islam this would be people equal to us but opposed to the gospel and then the kind of coming from above threats would be more like the way the government persecutes and i think in a modern western protestant context that looks like what rachel held evans calls the christian persecution industrial complex where there's this entire cottage industry of taking that read that meta-narrative of scripture and then interpreting current events in a way that makes people of faith feel afraid of outsiders makes people of faith be fearful of a gay couple that just wants to get married and have a cake at their wedding and that gets interpreted as violence directed toward them which then potentially becomes justification for economic violence social violence or overt physical violence you see this in a popular support among christians especially evangelicals but but christians in general for militaristic intervention in the middle east a majority of americans support these drone strikes that happen you know this is really really horrible stuff you know we have reports of of children being killed by uh bombs and missiles that have been issued from drone strikes but it's justified because islam is not a religion of peace the muslims are out to create a false theocratic order in america and if we don't act we will be overcome and this comes from that siege mentality turning scripture on its head doing what by the way evangelicals say was the problem with the old testament where the jewish people were chosen to be the messengers of god and they just thought they were the chosen and even though that's a critique i've heard in conservative churches that's actually what's happening in the western church today jesus demonstrated what it meant to be chosen jesus showed us exactly what it meant to be chosen it meant to lay down what was rightfully yours to step down from power to step down from authority to eliminate these ideas of above and below that's the that's the beauty of the neighbor parable neighbors are there you're just neighbors there's no there's no hierarchy there's no command structure there's no authority there's just neighbors yeah that that fly in the ointment of the land and the chosen it's it's it's pretty central to so much uh of the religion to see how jesus sort of he came from the religion of judaism but he also sort of subverted it you don't have that element so much in buddhism or hinduism or some of the eastern religions where there's like a piece of land that is supposed to belong to one people and a call of a single people group whether it be through you know bloodline or belief as it turns into in the new testament there's still sort of that center within judeo christianity sometimes of the chosen people and that's i think it's a dangerous idea and one that needs to be subverted i've heard some christians the way they subvert it is by accentuating the blessed to be a blessing idea that this group has received this blessing or this revelation or maybe even this this plot of land for the sake of the world to be able to use it to bless the world with but yeah it's always worth paying attention to how that meta-narrative that's so central to so many readings of the scriptures and approaches to religion and christianity in particular i think it's just important to stay aware of that and how does it subtly creep in even to progressive circles and groups can be practically necessary things sure but if there's that sort of inner chosen people that are really on the end any idea even if that's where the really enlightened progressive ones it's all that same shit [Music] yeah i mean that's the the national narrative too the american narrative is we were given this land to bless the world yeah even though we took this land by force enriched it with forced labor and did not bless the world right but yeah the narrative that justifies our existence is to be this what is the shining city on a hill but it's like if we're the shining city on a hill the oil in our lamps came from human bodies i know we've talked about nationalism on the show before but there is this combination of the national narrative and the religious narrative and in a very uh traditionalist value meme way it becomes an unquestionable story but i'm not sure that as christians and as americans we can really come to terms with what violence means and the justification of violence until we come to terms with the role that violence has played and the country we live in becoming what it is and the way that it enables and sustains the very life that many of us live and that's a huge huge issue to wrestle with the outcomes and the path toward reconciliation and restoration and reparation are not clear but i don't believe you can truly appreciate a conversation on violence until you study and come to terms with indigenous genocide in the americas or slavery or economic violence and segregation or the cradle to prison pipeline for black americans all these things are related to how we systemically prescribe violence in our country you know shane claiborne did a great job talking about how that applies to the death penalty that also just scratches the surface of a very deep well of just black tar which is the structure of our country and therefore the religious institutions that reside within that political system are powered by violence and not the i'm thankful for this animal who has given me energy way but in the worst sort of exploitive disgusting dehumanizing violence against other organisms which also have tasted from the tree of knowledge and can contemplate what is right and what is wrong and therefore must also contemplate why is it i who is under the boot why is it i who feels this heel on my [Music] neck it's so easy in seeing that sort of violence this is how violence gets cyclical because we see it and we're disgusted by it and it's so easy to dive into that tar and to then dehumanize the dehumanizers you know this is how the cycle of violence it's like you somebody did something that was horrible and we feel like it's justice to get in there and do the same to them and a little worse and then somebody on that side feels the same way and you just get into this cycle and having a stance a heart position of non-violence even when you feel like it's justified and the person who wronged you or wronged whoever is worthy of nothing but death because they've sullied their own image of god by becoming this animalistic violent thing and you see that and then you make them this less than the image of god thing and then without knowing it you're you're doing the same to yourself which so you know it just it continues about so having this position of non-violence and not position positions it is feels like stationary position feels like axiomatic language center-based thought rather than a way of being a way of being non-violent i think always sees the divine in the enemy always sees the human in the beast of the enemy and the oppressor and the person that is the bad guy and it doesn't mean you just accept what they do or that there's nothing to be done and you just let people trample over people and i i learned a lot from the buddhist way of thought with this idea of non-violence because the way i i grew up you know for a long time i debated on my pacifist and i consider myself a pacifist but then you then it raises the issue of just war and and what if yeah what if you see somebody attacking somebody on the street are you really not supposed to step in physically if somebody came into my house and broke in would i defend my family all those questions because it was this dichotomy created in my mind and that was the sort of thinking that's enlightenment thinking and you know modern western thinking and the buddhists from what i've heard and studied and internalized at this point is non-violence all the way down to you know like are you gonna step on that flower if you don't have to step on it there's a beautiful flower you're gonna just crush it without thought or are you going to but see for me the way i came from that that would easily become like a fundamentalist okay don't step on flowers you know like and that's not the point like if you step on a thought a buddhist kills billions of organisms a day with bacteria you know there's all sorts of things dying uh on a microscopic level on a plant level animal there's all sorts of death surrounding every life again but when you can you're aimed if your being is aimed towards non-violence i try not to kill insects in my i'm not gonna try if i see an insect in my house that i don't have to kill if i can peacefully release it into the wild now i do which is not something i used to do but i don't get weird about it if there's a spider crawling towards my daughter and i don't feel good i'll stomp on it and maybe that's just because i still have work to do in myself i don't know but i it's just become like if i don't have to kill my my being is aimed towards non-violence always that's where i want to be and and it's not always that we had an ant hill that an exterminator got rid of and i felt sad about it i felt sad that all these ants were killed but i was also like for us to just let these ants roam and take over our house would really create a lot of suffering for my family it's tricky it's messy it's life honestly to explore that a little deeper it's a decent analogy there's a significant number of non-native invasive ant species in california that are destroying the indigenous life forms in california and so in some ways a failure to uh respond to that nest could have a much higher cost in life in the region and and life that's not as robust maybe or is more specialized and so doesn't have the same opportunity to spread to other places the way these invasive species have and then there's this whole thing the the cycle of violence and i think there's this great way of breaking the cycle of violence which is outlined across the entire arc of the bible one is repentance repentance is actually an incredible tool for breaking a cycle of violence because if you have been the most recent transgressor you repent you turn away from doing that anymore but repentance also includes restitution you you do what you must to make amends with the party you have wronged even if that included violence that's one way of preventing the cycle of violence and there's also the the approach of christ in the face of violence which was uh which was to submit to the violence although i think there's some pretty good scholarly uh understanding that and and part of what jesus did in his submission to violence was an extremely powerful critique of that violence to walk you know if you're told to walk a mile and you walk too that's not simply uh to be kind and gregarious but to reveal the brutality of the initial request but either way we're given these tools to break cycles of violence but it in the biblical arc that i see it's not if they send one of yours to the hospital somewhere there's to the morgue kind of approach we tend to embody but restitution restitution we forget so much when we talk about violence and stopping violence i i don't see how it's possible without restitution without some way of settling the score because significant violence has generational consequences especially when that physical violence has been attached to some ongoing economic violence so when you think about humanity sort of as a larger organism as this one species and you think of some of the bigger cycles and and enactments of violence like war you know larger scale punitive justice systems and all this i think there's always room on a systemic level and in the organism of humanity for regardless of the situation violence is not the answer for the voice to be protesting every form of violence regardless of whether it is justifiable or not that even in a war that must be fought there's a voice still there with their signs and saying violence is never the answer that even though that might not be a practical thing for the rest of humanity to say okay let's just get rid of the militaries and on the borders and call it a day uh that might not be a practical way that humanity could survive but having the voice towards that end always and persistently is part of the balance of the system it's like the the immune system in a body is gonna fight any foreign thing and sometimes if your body gets a little screwed up and it sees a part of itself as the foreign thing that immune system is still fighting it's still doing what it does it's still getting rid of that foreign invader you know it's this sort of constant direction of being towards non-violence think of this as as like this pacifist saying no you know even if the invader comes into my house i will not raise the sword you don't want to be so hard line where it actually becomes violent in itself but this constant no to violence i think has a value in society and so i applaud the people that even when it's impractical i think there's something beautiful about even if it costs everything i will not pick up that sword i think that's a beautiful thing to have in the organism [Music] i almost said well because you know i'm always like above all i seek balance i was like well then i just wonder if i should explain the necessity for voices saying violence is necessary and then realize you don't have to do that right it's humanity it's the nature of the species yeah you're never going to find like will anyone advocate for violence in this situation exactly will someone stand up no the more fragile flower is the non-violent thing that's the more rare and special attitude and and movement of energy to have the the violence and i'm going to protect me and my own that's that's deeper in the brain yeah that's the weeds you cannot keep from growing in your garden well on some level it's it's the border of the garden itself you couldn't have a garden without that at some level yeah but to embrace the paradox of that is a challenging it's it's a level of consciousness that most people don't operate at that it's too it's too much for most language centers to to hold in one place but i think it's an increasingly complex world it's necessary for more consciousnesses to be able to stretch themselves and allow a little bit more complexity and with issues like this if it's an increasingly complex world at all lately it's been seeming to get more black and white again more good guys bad guys i mean that's the thing i'm struggling with is i've gone from like fundamentalism to nuance and what i'm fighting now is going back to a fundamentalism in which the roles are reversed it's chemically satisfying to have that justified hatred you know oh the brain loves another it loves uh uh they're clear these are with me these are against me that's that's as good as jogging i mean the brain loves subtlety and nuance you don't like to use those circuits either you know they're slow they don't make snap decisions your brain wants to be able to make decisions very quickly because what is civilization [Laughter] and it's also like everybody's in the middle of doing their egos thing trying to pay the bills trying to get what they need to be done it's like you know if a soccer player every time they got the ball stopped for 30 seconds to consider why they chose that size of ball as the soccer league's choice you know like you get the ball taken from you we're talking with shane about sometimes how it seems like christians are actually more prone to accepting systemic forms of violence because in in the narrative in the men in our minds the ultimate reality god is what demanded blood for justice that's sort of the way things are at the core and so it's easier for a christian to accept yeah well somebody does something bad you kill him i guess we haven't talked about it on the podcast very much not a big fan of substitutionary atonement if you follow me on twitter you might wait or not here's the big twist that i realized after one of my twitter rants from the reference frame of seeing god as something fundamentally separate from uri i find this the story of substitutionary atonement repugnant and horrible and disgusting but that's not actually the way that i see god so i was realizing like okay stop defining the the words based on what you assume they're defining the words as and the way i see god is-ness oneness the all the none the ground of being but also the abstraction of being and non-being um it all becomes pretty literally true so in other words god killed god and this becomes a sacrifice within god's mind that allows god to make peace with god so i realized that my aversion to substitutionary atonement was basically an aversion to assuming a separation from god which so in a way like the fundamentalists are correct in saying that i just can't accept the gospel because i don't want to acknowledge myself as a sinner in need of grace so i had that thought and made me laugh but it's interesting to see like what i fight against is this sort of concept of a zeus-like god that is separate from me and humanity demanding blood of his son you should read james yeah you're resisting uh the hellenization of the faith so did james so did peter to some extent keep going i'm intrigued well i mean the whole thing was um paul was the rah-rah gentiles guy he was the roman citizen he was the the educated and western philosophy guy and so his writings bring in more influence from platonic ideals and greco-roman cosmology paul to some degree was an early greco-roman influence on the christian faith and james the brother of jesus who was probably illiterate was a christian who was a practicing jew like really respected among the jewish leaders as an observant jew but also respected in the early church because of his faith in christ many historians believe that that james and peter were kind of like the main figures in the early church four jews in and around jerusalem you know ancient israel day the west bank and israel or palestine we do see some tension between those views happening in their respective texts that are attributed to those authors you know james likely was writing through a scribe or one of his followers was trying to accurately represent james point of view because he could actually read and write but it's still i've seen many historians including secular historians who believe that the book of james might be like the most credible snapshot of early christianity that we have and uh and it does it does seem to resist some of these hellenized ideas well but it makes me wonder how metaphysically paul was attached to those ideas because there's communication to a context that i actually think is good i think without the gospel of jesus being hellenized if it's just rooted to ancient judaism it becomes stagnant and limited in what it can be so moving into other contexts and other cultures with their language and their imagery and their metaphors i think is great as long as you don't take those metaphors and imagery and everything in language too seriously and can realize that it can also then take it and go to another culture and take root theirs i mean if i'm if i'm trying to speak the ultimate mysteries to amelie and i use fairies and princesses in my words i don't i don't think that's like a problem um unless you start taking fairies and princesses too seriously in what i'm saying you know like the literal idea of those things so paul saying to people that use sacrifices and conceive of god's needing blood and all these things using some of that imagery to kind of subvert it from within and say you don't need to you don't need sacrifices anymore here's why here it all solves itself if he's not believing literally in those images as being sort of the actual pictures of reality that there's really some being up in the sky that is doing these things you know it actually is kind of a beautiful judo move i think going with the flow of of the culture using that's what he did at mars hill with here's what you're here look at this statue here's what your poets are saying in whom we live and move and have our being to the unknown god let me tell you about this he's kind of going with the flow going with the flow of the culture with the language of the culture with the discussion of the culture so why wouldn't he have done that to people that think sacrifice is a legitimate need existentially why wouldn't he say the ultimate sacrifice has been paid that's a positive view of paul optimistic but i just thought it was funny that i could find a way of saying that i believe in substitutionary tone i actually you started laughing and i didn't laugh because i was so with you i was like what's funny about that i was just yeah absolutely that's just yeah that's would be exactly how i would interpret that yeah which it's funny that i approach some theological ideas through lenses that i don't actually subscribe to arguing against a subset of that idea of this separate god in the sky and i don't even believe in this uh but then again maybe there's still some part of me that does who knows we had peter we gotta have peter rollins on the podcast again by the way he came over the other night and we had good good conversation he was talking about how he was at some place they're trying to nail him down with what he believes about god does god exist or not and he's like i have no idea what i believe that's my entire work is that you don't either you have no idea what you believe [Laughter] he did this whole thing with like this room of atheists and i think he borrowed some of it from darren brown the magician but he basically said everybody pull up a picture of someone you really love on your phone and and they did like a loved one and then he pulled out this piece of paper and he said here is an ancient curse that people used to use it's like a written out satanic curse and he's like could you could you guys could somebody come up here and read this curse over the person on your phone and nobody would not one person he's like see you all say you don't believe this why won't somebody come on you and he didn't put it out like this really militant atheist guy he's like no i'm not doing that he's like why it doesn't mean anything and he just wouldn't do it he's like you don't know what you believe there's part of you that resists that for a reason you you have all these weird beliefs underneath and superstitions underneath all of it that you don't know so you ask me what i believe i have no idea what i believe preach i'll amend to that absolutely what do i believe depends on the moment depends on what part of my brain is exerting the most control over my conscious experience at that exact point in time yeah that's interesting in terms of violence and violence like what do i believe about violence you don't know you don't know what you would do if somebody came into your house you don't know how you would respond that's not that's not something you can know that you believe because he's in your your language constructs of i i subscribe to this philosophy of non-violence except for when a and b and c are crossed and then then you can move into just work now there's just something in the guts and in the heart and in the being of a person when you when you move far enough into love and into non-violence as a way of life and a way of being that you can eventually look at the person that's nailing you into the cross and say father forgive them they don't know what they're doing and that's not a belief that's love [Music] we hope this episode has been enlightening and helpful if you'd like to see additional resources or if you'd like to join in a conversation about this episode with other listeners visit thelitus.com podcast you can connect with us on twitter at the liturgists or on facebook at facebook.com slash the liturgists we'd like to thank greg nordine corey pig and madison chandler for their contributions in helping produce this episode the music on today's episode was from on earth which is a collaboration between tyler chester and i you can find our first volume of music that you'll hear on this podcast out on all the places you've listened to music there's also music from ganger and paper chaser which is tyler's moniker for some of his personal music thanks again to shane claiborne for being part of this episode and a special thanks to all the patrons who make the work that we do possible michael gunger and i science mike have been your hosts thanks for listening everyone [Music] [Music] you