“... it hardly matters who wins a war. ... that new perspective may not focus on who won a war.
... It’s possible that without those two bombs, J.P. Barret would have been n an excellent position to die at 19. ... the one thing necessary, is to do what is right in the eyes of God -— whose perspective he is persuing. ...”
I am at a loss.
Are moral absolutists merely lazy?
Or are they overtoppingly arrogant?
Claiming that it never matters who wins and who loses enables the claimant to avoid any of the hard work of finding what is actually going on, of deciding what to do, and of actually doing it.
Or, in the case of WWII, what went on and why. “It was bad to kill people with atomic bombs” is easier to say, than actually going out and learning something useful about the times, the people who lived through them, and why they did this or that.
And moral absolutists exhibit hubris by claiming The Almighty has issued them direct orders. The truth of that can never be determined: doubt will exist. And as the late Roger Zelazny noted, doubt is the chastity of the mind.
All of the moral absolutists’ protestations are but to say, “We are more moral than the rest of you, therefore we can ignore you. Or order you about, as it strikes our fancy.”
First, I never claimed that "it never matters who wins and who loses". I made a much more circumscribed observation: that this would not be the sole or uttermost consideration from a perspective of eternity.
Second, you argue as if against a pacifist. I am not a pacifist, not even a nuclear pacifist --- a position I consider defective --- and am assuming that war can be waged in deadly earnest, inflicting hundreds of thousand of fatalities (I'm thinking here of WWII) and be right and just; yes, even if atomic bombs are used --- after all, the different kinds of bombs and armaments per seare a technical, not a moral, distinction.
So you've spent your efforts to rebut points I did not espouse.
I did espouse a longer perspective, since this is a perspective we will be obliged to acknowledge at the point of Judgment. And this is a perspective we get, not from hubris, but from a certain ---to use Zelazny's word --- chastity, since it comes of not succumbing to lust, nor wrath, nor fear, but from a fidelity to the code of the just person, even the just warrior.
Not to get too lengthy about it, war must be conducted by focusing overwhelming destructive force on enemy combatants and their military (not social) targets, since we wish to annihilate the enemies' ability to project military aggression, not their ability to exist as a society. Just force destroys what needs to be destroyed; and it discriminates so that the infrastructure of civilization, and of biological life itself, is not selected as "target".
Discrimination is the key. A person who flicks off morality and is willing to engage in indiscriminate killing, is not engaged in war, but in murder; he is not defending his nation, but turning it into a nation of murderers; to the extent that this advances to completion, in the end he and his enemies are indistinguishable. They are the same, and he has destroyed his society in order to save it.
This is the Judgment of which I speak.