Welcome back to
the "Liberty Insider."
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Before the break
with Paul Anderson,
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we were getting
into some heavy weeds
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on fundamentalism
and religious liberty.
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And I even quoted,
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in its own right infamous
speech of Pope Benedict,
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but I took it to
another direction.
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You know, we're playing
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with some serious
stuff here, aren't we?
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When we talk
about religious faith
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and, and
compulsion or lack of...
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True.
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Willingness to die
or willingness to kill.
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Which are very
different constructs.
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To die for
one's faith is heroic,
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to kill because someone doesn't
believe like you believe.
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It's the most pugnacious
expression of religion
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possible in my view.
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I think so.
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And I often tell
people on religious liberty.
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You know, there's a lot
to know in the U.S. about
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precedent or legislative actions
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and so on in the constitution.
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But at simple litmus
test, if you're ever compelled
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to do something
against your conscience,
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it's wrong.
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Even like as a
Seventh-day Adventist,
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if there were ever
to be a law requiring
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or even
encouraging people to worship
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on the seventh-day Sabbath,
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it would be wrong
in this construct.
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In a theocracy,
you know, as there was
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in the Old Testament.
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Yes, there would be an
expression of God's will,
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but we don't know God's will.
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And human agents
always perverted.
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So our safety is of
keeping the civil law away
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from our religious requirements.
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And any civil law
that requires you to,
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to worship or to be have
religiously in a certain way
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by definition is
against religious liberty.
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I think it's important
to stand like the apostles
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and say, we ought to
obey God rather than man.
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But that requires the individual
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to know the
revealed will of God.
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Well, now you're
getting at the real truth.
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We can't
automatically tell about
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the nature of the laws
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and the dynamic
unless we ourselves
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have a sort of an
inbuilt religious compass
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that comes from knowing God.
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Right.
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When we're
oriented to true north,
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then you can know where
east, west and south are,
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otherwise you drift.
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And I'm more and more reminded
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of any number of
statements in the Bible
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that say that the times
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that we clearly are living in...
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It's not unique to Adventists
or even to Christians.
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There's a grand
general awareness,
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these are sort
of the final days.
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And in these
days, these are times
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that will deceive
even the very elective.
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They're by
nature deceptive times.
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So it's not like computer.
The computer world at least...
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The Apple world
started off with WYSIWYG.
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What you see is what you get.
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It really isn't
true anymore, is it?
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Yeah, that's true.
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There's lots of deceptives,
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but then I
learned some years ago
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that bank tellers don't
study counterfeit to know
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what's authentic and
what it is inauthentic.
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They study the authentic
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and the more they
know the authenticity,
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the more likely
they are to detect
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the counterfeit.
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We've got to focus
on what's authentic
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and then we'll be able
to disarm more clearly.
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I remember...
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You know, I was traveling
recently in another country
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and for some reason they gave me
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American money exchange
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and they gave me
two, three dollar bills.
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That would be unique.
Do you still have them?
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No, I got rid of them.
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I did a double take on them.
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Three dollar bills.
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So yeah, you got to
know to recognize it.
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But tell me a little again
just sort of taking a diversion
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back to your specialty in
chaplaincy or in pastoring.
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You had a long
career in pastoring.
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You know, how do you see
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the dynamic of religious liberty
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working out in our day?
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Do you...
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Have you seen signs of people...
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As a favorite
author of mine says,
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that it's true as a
compass to the pole.
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I mean, that's what we
need in nowadays, isn't it?
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Yeah.
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The best resistance
against the temptations
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and the
compulsions to disobedient.
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True.
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That's true to duty
as the needle to the pole
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is a restatement of a
principle of integrity,
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but to have a
spiritual and moral integrity,
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you've got to know
what is, what is truth.
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And live
according to that truth.
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There will be people who
perceive different truths.
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But that does not obviate
the one that you've chosen.
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And then I think
that when we look toward
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an appreciation of humanity
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and human dignity
and human liberty,
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we will be less likely
to want to violently impose
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our will on other people.
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They may be wrong
and sincerely wrong,
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but they have that right.
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And as we have the
right to practice our faith
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which we believe is
ultimate ground truth.
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Let me ask you a
personal question back
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when you were a
military chaplain.
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I'm sure you were
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in a number of tense situations,
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not necessarily battled,
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but you know it's
a different dynamic,
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it's not sort of
laidback civilian life.
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I'm sure there's always
and you're dealing with,
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with people of
many other faiths,
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and the commanders,
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I hope they
wouldn't oppose your faith,
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but they wouldn't necessarily be
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in favor of your faith view.
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How did you maintain that?
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Did you have to
keep reminding yourself
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of the very
particular aspects of your faith
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that put you there, even though
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you're often administering
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to other people of other
faith in a secular environment?
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What keeps
things straight for you?
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That's a good question.
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For me my
fundamental paradigm was,
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I know who I am.
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It helps me to help
others know who I am,
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if I understand who they are.
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And if I can find
points of commonality
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and built up on them
and share specificities
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while understanding theirs.
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It built bridges and I
think the key toward living
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in a pluralistic society
is finding something to value
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about those who
are different from us.
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And when we
demonstrate appreciation,
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care and concern for them,
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they might be more
likely to reciprocate.
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Yeah. And I think you're
getting close to the key.
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You got to respect other people
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to really administer
religious liberty correctly.
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And fundamentalists
in the worst sense
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because I don't really
buy the term generally,
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but as we're seeing
it work that negatively.
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I have to believe
that at the end of the day,
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they are not overly
respectful of the people
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they are opposing.
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I think you are right.
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I just read a very
interesting article on the woman
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that belonged to the
Vesper Baptist Church.
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And I bring it up
purposely because remember,
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they were
insulting to the military.
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Right.
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Demonstrated the
military funerals
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because they were bothered
about attitudes toward gays
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in the military.
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So regardless of who
was being buried, you know,
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young guys being
killed in the military,
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the family are grieving there
and here this church coming,
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rant and rave about
gays in the military,
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must have been horrible.
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But I read the story
about this young woman
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and how she grew up
in this closed atmosphere
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where everything was hateful.
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They were against all
of the sinners in that
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but, so negative
that they wouldn't...
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As they were growing up,
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they wouldn't
fellowship with them,
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nothing, nothing to
do with anyone else.
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But online she
struck up some relationships
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and in the end she
actually moved away from them.
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But it was an interesting story
and the takeaway for me was,
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they were thoroughly impersonal
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in their
relations to these people
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that were condemning.
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They had never seen the
others as real human beings.
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Yeah.
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And when we can
depersonalized and other,
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we diminish in our
own minds their humanity.
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And that I think begins
to fly in the face of God,
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the Creator who
created humanity.
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So, and when we can
create an inequality,
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then we can
justify mistreatment.
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I'm gonna throw you
a really well question
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and I don't know that
you've had this before.
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It's worth asking.
Your point is very good.
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It's right on the money.
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But I know from
not just by reading.
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Friends of mine that went
into the military in Vietnam
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and this is sort of
component of fitting a soldier
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to go out and do
an unnatural act,
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kill another human being
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a process of
depersonalizing the enemy.
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That's true.
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Treating them as
the absolute evil.
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How can that coexist...
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Is that easy
coexistence with the soldiers
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that you have to
deal with as a chaplain
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and yet you're
communicating in this way,
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we just discussed...
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with them personalizing
and creating a personal goal?
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The dilemma of warfare.
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Good answer.
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But there is a
contradiction, is there?
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There is very, very much so.
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And a lot of the early training
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for instance in the
combat arm specialties,
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the emphasize is
on hitting a target.
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Yeah.
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And the target
isn't necessarily human
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in the beginning.
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That's the value
of the computer age
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and just the little, the mass
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and then the graphic
of destroying the target,
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not a human being.
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And then later it will become a,
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a personalized kind of thing.
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I had a conversation
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with a Special
Forces person once
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who, we were doing a
debriefing from an event
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that they were involved in.
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And this...
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There was some
hand to hand combat that
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and one of these guys
had been out on many missions
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and probably
killed a lot of people
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from a distance.
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But he had never up close
in personal killed anyone.
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And in the briefing
or debriefing he said,
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I never killed anybody.
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And I said wait
a minute. You've...
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Certainly you have and
he said, oh, you're right,
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but I always saw
them as a target.
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And he had
depersonalized the people
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to whom he was
militarily interacting
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such that he didn't
see them as a human,
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he saw them as
targets and we bring them back
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in these kinds of debriefings.
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I think this is
fundamental that any faith worth
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adhering to is
worth not any living for,
00:11:40.43\00:11:44.63
but dying for.
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The confusion that we're
facing in this age of terrorism
00:11:46.87\00:11:49.94
is that some people say that
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they have a faith that demands
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that they kill for it.
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Certainly
Christian faith should have
00:11:57.21\00:11:59.41
no part to such a thing.
00:11:59.45\00:12:01.62
I don't believe
that can be true faith.
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When I think of
the life of Christ,
00:12:03.75\00:12:07.26
there's nothing more personable
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that I can
imagine than the scene
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where Jesus speaking
to His friends said that,
00:12:12.43\00:12:15.36
greater love has no man
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than this than a man lay
down His life for his friends.
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True religion I
believe is selfless.
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True religious liberty
is devoid of compulsion.
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And when we talk
about fundamentalism,
00:12:30.68\00:12:33.18
we're perverting the word
00:12:33.21\00:12:34.98
and turning into
something pejorative,
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even though it
should be fundamental
00:12:38.09\00:12:42.66
that religious commitment
is central and nonnegotiable,
00:12:42.69\00:12:49.10
that is important,
central to human existence.
00:12:49.13\00:12:51.87
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:12:53.00\00:12:55.94