All's not fair in love and war

 Why should you, whose mother-wits

Are furnish'd with all perquisites,

B' allow'd to put all tricks upon

Our cully sex, and we use none?

 

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras 

All's fair in love and war again

 

 Against such lewdsters, and their lechery,

Those that betray them do no treachery.     

 

-- William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 5, Scene 3

All's fair in love and war

 

 

 

 

A just war may be prosecuted after a very unjust manner; by perfidious breaches of our word, by inhuman cruelties, and by assassinations.

-- Francis Atterbury 1662-1732

Abortion just in the US approaches 60 million but Christians still wring their hands over Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Here.

If I didn't know better I'd say all these children killed in the United States since 1973 have been a guilt offering for the horrors of World War II in which we participated.

What morality can there possibly be in war, Christian or otherwise? All such thinking is a rationalization of war. All's fair in it. Who cares that millions of lives were spared by the atomic bombings? Certainly not Americans, who have gone on to kill millions of their own whose only crime was to have the temerity to begin existing as a consequence of someone else's pleasure-seeking.

In truth all such thinking about just war is actually an attempt at rationalizing Christianity itself, not simply war. It is an attempt to reconcile good and evil on the grand scale instead of on the puny stage we all occupy, where a beautiful life is tragically ended by a criminal, an accident, or a disease, and there's no explaining it.

The message of Jesus made perfect sense until it didn't, when the kingdom of God did not come as he thought it would, when God's justice failed to appear on earth as it is in heaven.

God's justice. The scoffers among us ridicule him for being wrong about this when we should be honoring him for showing us how far we are from it, the more now than in 1945 over Japan.