Posted on 08/06/2015 8:52:11 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The objective of warfare is to accomplish some goal (like winning the war) and then move into the future as peacefully as possible. Killing their emperor would have galvanized Japanese hatred of us for centuries.
You'd be surprised what sort of issues are the direct concern of the general staff. They learn to consider those sort of things in the War College. We learned to think that way once we were allowed to send officers the British Admiralty School.
There were three. One was detonated on the top of the test tower.
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There had to be a second bombing before they gave up, so the first Atomic bomb didn’t do the job either.
Roosevelt maneuvered us into that war. The decision to drop the bomb was brilliant politically but unnecessary militarily.
The Japs are damn lucky that we dropped the bombs before the Russians came in with any strength...just imagine if Tokyo got the “Berlin” treatment..yes, damn lucky.
1. In the OT, God says over 15 times that He "hates" the shedding of innocent blood. He calls it an abomination. Do you deny that?
2. Even if it is argued that God is the Master of life and death, and has the authority to order people to commit the abomination of murder in specific instances (as in the case of ordering Abraham to kill Isaac, or the genocide of the Amalekites or the Midianites)this was an exception, not a principle.
God commanded these killings, not as a general law (as if to say, "In war, you must always kill all the women and children" or even a general tolerance ("In war, you 'may' intentionally or indiscrimiantely kill the women and children" but as a specific command n a specific instance. They were never extended in the sense of a general rule.
Even more to the point, God did not order Harry S. Truman to kill all the people in Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
3. With the coming of Christ, God has established a new covenant with mankind (Jeremiah 31:31-34, Luke 22:20, 1 Corinthians 11:25, Hebrews 8:8-13, 9:11-15). Jesus and His apostles gave us a radically new understanding of the true intent of the Old Testament Law; they brought a new era of the rule of love for all people and spiritual truth instead of rule by law (Luke 10:25-28, John 13:34-35, Ephesians 2:14-18).
There is not one syllable in the example or the precepts of Jesus Christ that would justify the intentional targeting of noncombatants or the slaughter of blameless people. If there were, there could be no commandment against murder (one of the Big Ten) because murder is, by definition, an unjust killing, a killing of a person who has not merited a capital sentence.
One possible moral distinction: even in WWII, when the precision targeting technology just wasn't there, in some cases, ordinary incendiary bombs could be reasonably directed toward enemy troops or assets. You can see this in the early period of the War in Europe, when the US Army Air Corps did daytime bombings focusing on Nazi military assets. This was in contrast to the RAF, which did nighttime carpet bombings of whole cities, city block by city block.
Even if they predictably caused a whole lot of collateral civilian damage, the USAAC was justified in using incendiary bombs targeted "as exactly as they could" ---these bombings, though devstating, were not targeting the civilian per se.
I don't know whether the bombings of e.g. Tokyo were intended to slaughter and incinerate civilians, or if they were focused on military assets but (collaterally) resulted in horrific city-consuming firestorms. If they were solely intended to destroy military assets, they were justified. If they were not --- if they were intentionally focused on civilians, or deliberately indiscriminate --- they were the moral equivalent of Auschwitz, the London Blitz, or Planned Parenthood.
EVERY year, in early August, we get the same silliness.
"Why not say--as some slanderously claim that we say--"Let us do evil that good may result"? Their condemnation is just!"
I’m not missing any points.....we’re not arguing law here. God ordered the killing of children, woman and men to clear the “evil” that was and would be. (It pays to understand fully what evil is.)
Jesus warned.... “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matt. 12:30)..... In the fight ‘against evil’ there is no middle ground, no gray area, no neutrality.
The prophet Obadiah severely condemned the Edomites for doing nothing when evil was befalling their brethren, the Jews..... When Jerusalem was invaded by her enemies, the Edomites “stood on the other side” doing nothing but watching the slaughter as spectators.... God said by their failure to act and to help their brethren “even thou wast as one of them” (Obad. 11).
The same could be said of ISIS today....their woman and children are brainwashed fully and I would be comforted if their children were in the arms of Jesus in heaven rather than be raised to love hate and death as they are... and kill as they surely would.
That’s not what this is about.
It no longer matters, but the Japanese were training mothers and housewives the proper way to attack machine gun nests using broomsticks. The atom bomb saved a couple million Japanese lives atop all those U.S. Lives which is what mattered in those days.
Hiroshima was just the cherry on top. The fire bombings by the B-29’s was the real barbeque. It was pretty amazing the Japs did not give up after the amount of napalm dropped on their cities.
Wow! Even the idiots over at the DUmp agree that the a-bomb saved countless lives! I’ll be d(a&*med!
Exodus 15:3 says.... “The Lord is a man of war, the Lord is His name.”......
Deuteronomy 20 is basically God’s war policy.
.... He instructs ‘first’ to speak peace to every city.... BUT if it refuses to make peace and fights and attacks THEN we are to besiege it and smote it.
In this first account of war, there were four kings against 5 kings. The winners took all of the wealth of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abram’s nephew Lot lived. They also took Lot and all of his belongings as a prisoner of war. BAD IDEA.
As a result, Abram heard about it.... Did he shrink back and try to say “Pretty please give my nephew back?.. That wasn’t very nice that you slaughtered so many people and took their stuff... Can we talk about it? ... Nope. He didn’t say any of that. Here’s what he did....
Lot took 318 of his best men, divided his forces at night and went in. He attacked them, routed them and even continued to chase them, taking them down... Then, he brought back all of the goods that were taken. He also rescued his nephew Lot, took back all of his belongings and the people.....That means he overwhelmingly defeated them. To top it off, he got BLESSED for it!
Abram was attacked, and he defended himself. He went after the attackers, pursued them, took them down, and restored justice to the area.
Psalm 18:34:..... David said....” God teaches my hands to war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.”..... In verse 37 he goes on to say, ....”I pursued my enemies and overtook them neither did I turn again till they were consumed. I smote them so that they were not able to rise, they fell wounded under my feet.”
Numbers 10:9 ....justifies going to war against enemies that try to oppress you.
In 1 Samuel 17.... Israel is ‘being terrorized’ by the Philistines.... A young 17 year old boy named David took courage and killed their fiercest soldier, Goliath, with one blow to the head.... Then the Israelite army pursued and destroyed the Philistine terrorists killing them all and leaving their dead on the road…....To top it off, David cut off Goliath’s head and brought it back to Jerusalem as a trophy..... Then, David got blessed by God for his courage to fight against the enemy!
What goes unsaid in these discussions is the politically IMPOSSIBLE position that deciding NOT to use the atomic bomb would have put President Truman in at the time.
Just how do his critics think the American public of the day would have reacted when they found out that the President had deliberately decided NOT to use the fantastically expensive and possibly war winning atomic bomb out of some elevated sense of humanity?
Just how do his critics think the American public of the day would have reacted when they found out that the President had deliberately chosen to have the American people endure the million or more US killed/wounded/missing needed to reduce the Japanese home islands through conventional land warfare?
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