“My authority isn’t my own; it rests on the authority of two millennia of Christianity...(Go as far back as you need to.). Find any teaching that gave anyone approval to commit murder if they did so with the intent of ending the fighting.” [Captain Walker, post 147]
If the authority isn’t your own, it’s more a little curious, as it always manages to assist you in coming out of the game on top. And - marvel of marvels - it’s never around to be questioned.
It’s them or us.
If we meekly obey that lengthy list of dogmatists you’ve cited, there is only one possible result: we lose. If that outcome satisfies your moral sensibilities, I’d say you are more of a hindrance than a help.
I don't know about "always"; this is the one subject where I have referred to Christian teaching to demonstrate that the United States, on a moral plane, fell short.
Targeting innocents isn't wrong because I've said it was wrong; I'm simply pointing to Christian teaching to demonstrate that it was wrong. It was just as wrong for Germans to bomb soft targets (Coventry, London, and Rotterdam to name the obvious ones), it was also wrong for the British to bomb soft targets (Hamburg and Dresden being the obvious ones), and it was wrong for the Americans as well (Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to name the obvious ones).
We can't be cute about this and maintain the fiction that the rules are different for the Americans, because well, we're the Americans. The moral law that made it a crime to target British innocents made it a crime to target the German and Japanese innocents as well.
I've demonstrated throughout this thread that there never was a moral dilemma in the summer of 1945 about whether or not the United States should wipe out civilian population centers; the campaign to target population centers had been made before the United States entered the war some four years prior. Every discussion on the subject has been one of moral theatrics; nobody wants to believe that our hands were dirty, so the debate conjures up a false scenario where our conduct was as pure as the fresh-fallen snow prior to then, and that the decision to bomb two cities was (if you really look closely and hold it up to the light in certain way) the most moral decision we could make.
I've only pointed out that it's all drivel; we were going to burn Japan to the ground to win the war, and we knew it before we fired the first shot.