Posted on 08/07/2015 10:48:44 AM PDT by Perseverando
Boulder, CO – -(Ammoland.com)- “You shall not kill.” As a Catholic altar boy and student at St. Jude’s School near Boston, Jack Coughlin learned the Fifth Commandment early in life.
As a Marine Corps sniper and devout pro-life Catholic, Coughlin killed for a living. From rooftops, hillsides and shelled-out buildings, he focused the crosshairs on distant individuals, squeezed the trigger and ended their lives. By the time he retired, Coughlin had accumulated 60 confirmed kills in Somalia, Iraq and other foreign battlefields he will not identify.
Coughlin, author of the autobiography Shooter ( tiny.cc/40gh1x ) , has little trouble sleeping at night. He has confided his personal demons to priests but doesn’t believe his career gives cause for penance.
“I learned ‘Thou shall not kill’ in Catholic school, but I also learned the difference between right and wrong,” said Coughlin, who continues practicing his Catholic faith in southern California.
“I learned that we live in a world of good and evil and that there is a heaven and hell. I learned that evil flourishes when good men do nothing. Evil presents on the battlefield. If no one stands up to it, the devil wins.”
As a 49-year-old retired Marine, Coughlin is part of America’s small tactical sniper community. He and his colleagues in the military and law enforcement are the focus of current public attention, as audiences continue flocking to the blockbuster movie American Sniper. It tells the story of Coughlin’s good friend and former Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle.
Former Catholic seminarian and documentary producer Michael Moore is among the critics who have criticized Kyle and other snipers for doing a job they consider immoral. In one notorious Twitter post, Moore wrote:
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
I am reminded of LtCol. Dave Grossman's writings on "killology."
I think “Thou shall not kill” translates as Thou shall not murder.
Correct.
The passages that prohibit killing use the word “retzach” (to slay, murder, kill). The Bible never uses the word “retzach” in conjunction with war.
There are some people that just need killin' ASAP. ISIS immediately comes to mind.
Semper Fi!
Yes. There are many places in the Bible where killing was just, and necessary.
bfl
Jesus told people to sell spare cloaks and buy swords.
When considering the issue of a Christian’s involvement in warfare, I remember the picture of this nun at a peace rally holding a sign saying “Thou shalt not kill”. There was an example of someone for whom embracing a morality fabricated by human intellect prevented objective study of her tradecraft. She achieved acceptance within the larger social and academic humanistic community by allowing others to write her definitions and set her agendas. She to merged a Christian identity into a liberal, secular orthodoxy by backward engineering selected scriptures through selected homilies to arrive at an acceptable, preordained point of departure.
She was typical of so many pastors and congregations committed to moral exhibitionism residing within the comforting light of asymmetrical theological analysis that excludes the fallen world of Genesis. Popular acceptance demands they remain undefiled by any perception of looming danger, or of historical awareness of the bloody conflicts and shattering tragedies the warrior fights through on their behalf. They harvest the requisite moral authority for acceptance by berating at a safe distance those who go into harm’s way.
Now contrast this position with that of C. S. Lewis, who experienced two world wars and a depression during his distinguished academic career. In terms of pure intelligence few surpassed him. After WW I Lewis entered Oxford as an undergraduate student, where he won a triple first; the highest honors in three areas of study. Such was the beginning of an outstanding career. As a Christian few have surpassed him for accurately tempering a superior intellect with the wondrous mystery of the Lord’s existence as absolute righteousness and absolute love resulting in perfect justice.
He balanced those academic achievements previously with experiences from the trenches of WW I. As an Irishman, Lewis could not be drafted, but turned down a scholarship in 1917, and chose to volunteer. Lewis was commissioned while still 18, and was shipped to the front line near Arras, France. He joined Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry in the Somme valley on his 19th birthday. He was wounded by an exploding artillery shell in April 1918 and never returned to active service.
The quote I remember comes from Mere Christianity, which included a compilation of radio addresses he gave from 1941 through 1944, and was later expanded into a book. He gave the radio addresses after experiencing the Blitz and the threat of Nazi invasion as well as trench warfare when a young man.
“Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death. If one has committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the bench and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian solder to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It is no good quoting “Thou shalt not kill.” There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when the Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: nor Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major – what they call a centurion….. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate or enjoy it.”
An introduction to the distinction for the Hebrew of the Old Testament initially appears by reviewing Strong’s Concordance. The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” uses the word ratsach, which by my count appears 33 times in the Old Testament, and always refers to what our civil courts would interpret as a sub-set of first and second degree murder. I find two others words for kill and slay, muwth and harag, and three for destroy, shamad, shachath, and charam. These appear over 230 times and encompass all accounts of warfare and capital punishment. There is another word for killing a sacrifice, but I did not attempt to count its appearance.
When faced with individuals such as the nun possessing a fledgling intellect and life experiences as two dimensional as her sign, I would always choose to take my council from people like C. S. Lewis. Lewis expressed a durable morality earned in ultimate bloody deluges and the great economic tragedy of the 20th century.
American Sniper
That inane statement by Michael Moore that snipers were considered cowards demonstrates a complete detachment from reality for him and his acolytes. The applicable principle of warfare I have heard many times is that, “If you ever find yourself in a fair fight you have failed to plan correctly.”
The sniper is the ultimate weapon for the application of precision munitions. Whether individuals or teams they operate apart from supporting units and must rely upon stealth for survival. The infantry knows there could never be too many snipers watching their backs for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
5.56mm
If you can not see how a sniper taking a shot would have been good and just then there is nothing for me to say.
100% bump
And by the way, thanks for the post. I put it at end of my C.S. Lewis essay.
An Air Force veteran of Korea described an engagement in which he used his trump card maneuver which always gave him an advantage - only to find that his position was unimproved.He went on to say, “We both got the same idea at the same time - this was too close to being a fair fight!”
Logic dictates that those who initiate physical force outside of rational self-defense lose any claim to the right to life.
It’s that simple for me. I’m honestly amused at people who seem to think you can both violate the right to life and hold it at the same time.
To add to what you are saying, forfeiture of the right to life occurs any time a person commits a capital offense.
For example; murder, rape, treason, etc...all entail the forfeiture of the right to life.
Just as St Pope John Paul stated that the Ten Commandments are a lower limit of human morality, so too are capital offenses, they are acts that are below the limits of civilized society.
MUCH Shorter one on snipers in Bosnia *here.
IYAS9YAS: "Yes. There are many places in the Bible where killing was just, and necessary."
It's simply the difference between just and unjust taking of lives.
Murder, by definition, is unjust killing.
But the Old Testament requires death as a just penalty for capital crimes, including murder.
So when people use "Thou shall not kill" as an excuse to, for examples, abolish capital punishment or refuse participation in all wars they are, yet again, abusing the Bible's intended meanings.
I find several levels of such abuse: ignoring God's word altogether, altering it to fit one's agenda, misinterpreting it to fit one's agenda, lazily failing to interpret it properly, etc. But there are also several levels of believers' response, ranging from casual indifference to unhealthy preoccupation.
Lately I've been memorizing the Letter to the Hebrews as my first extended memorization project--I'm in chapter 12--and now I'm contemplating, I trust under the Holy Spirit's guidance and inspiration, tackling Romans soon. Although I understand that we will soon be in the Lord's physical presence, I also know that we'll have 1,000 years before the end comes, a millennium in which, if we wish, to memorize (and apply, of course) the entire Bible, so I'm just getting a head start. Since Hebrews has only taken me four months, I think I could manage the whole thing in ten centuries. For example, even though Job has 42 chapters, it was created five hundred years before Hebrew became a written language, so it was made to be memorized (especially if you're a shepherd overseeing your flock on a hillside with no TV, phones, etc.). Makes me want to do Job after Romans...
I'm finding that memorization necessitates and produces a greatly increased personal appreciation for and understanding of passages in Hebrews now that I know them so intimately, which makes, as you said, "abusing the Bible's intended meanings" nearly impossible now.
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