“To sate the lust for power more horrid still,
The foulest stain and scandal of our nature, murder,
Becomes its boast.
One murder makes a villain, millions a Hero.
Princes are privileg’d
To kill, and numbers sanctified their crime.”
-Beilby Porteus (1759)
“Murder does not become other than murder because it is mass murder.”
-Thomas Merton
-Wars, conflict, it’s all business. One murder makes a murderer, a million murders make a hero.
-Charles Chaplin (1947)
If you shoot one person you are a murderer. If you kill a couple of persons you are a gangster. If you are a crazy statesman and send millions to their deaths you are a hero.
-Watertown Daily News, (1939)
Christians have not realized yet that what men may not do as individuals they may not do when enough of them are gathered in large numbers to form a political society…A Christian cannot do in a crowd what he cannot do alone.
-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Biblical Scholar
Normalized wickedness, culturally accepted wickedness, glorified wickedness, societally honored wickedness, statistically sanctified wickedness is still wickedness in the mind of Christ-God and must also be understood as wickedness in the minds of His disciples. If it is not identified as wickedness at least in one’s own mind, it will become part of the person and perpetuate itself through him or her in ways beyond anticipation or control. There is much money to be made, many laughs to be gotten, enormous power to be grabbed and prestige and privilege to be had by turning a blind eye to normalized wickedness and treating it as acceptable because “that’s just how thing are.” There is even more money to be made in leading others to do the same. To morally justify a manifestation of wickedness is to become part of the process of promoting that wickedness and thereby unleashing ever more wickedness into the human condition. If for the Christian the ultimate and defining norm of good and evil is the Person and the teaching of the Jesus of the Gospels (and if He is not who or what is), then war is raw wickedness and so is military training, as well as, capital punishment and abortion—regardless of how normal they are in a society or in the institutional Churches.
“The Christian obligation of loving one’s enemies—and by implication the sinner—does not require that we cease to recognize the wickedness a person has chosen as wicked and hateful. No higher model of Christian love can be found than Jesus Christ, whose love was not the affirmation of the goodness of men, but a desire to confer on them a goodness that they lacked. There is a world of difference between Christian love toward the sinner and a sentimental sympathy for him. Christian love will spare nothing in order that the one doing evil be redeemed from his condition. Sickly sympathy with the wicked, however, is not true compassion, even for the wicked.”
-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical Scholar
The Two-Edged Sword (Imprimatur)
To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.
-Confucius
It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts and minds.
– Carl Jung
If anyone tries to tell you, or tries to convince you, or tries to make you believe that a faithful follower of the Jesus of the Gospels can participate in the wickedness of mass human slaughter in war, say to him or her with your whole soul, whole mind and whole strength, what Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” For, if you as a Christian, regardless of your position in the institutional Church, do not wholeheartedly reject the untruth that Jesus approves of participation in the mass slaughter in war, you will become that untruth.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
