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To: bourbon

If you were oppressed would you for one second question your right to fight to free yourself by any means necessary ? Would you feel any moral imperative to confine your actions to nonviolence whether they were successful or not ? Frankly, I don't believe for a second that you would.


188 posted on 02/27/2005 3:50:11 PM PST by Sam the Sham
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To: Sam the Sham
If you were oppressed would you for one second question your right to fight to free yourself by any means necessary ?

This may surprise you, but I wouldn't, especially if peaceful means were both available and efficacious. Violence ought to be a last resort.

With reference to the civil rights movement, peaceful means were a viable and morally preferable alternative. King's deliberate choice of these means was a powerful witness which won many converts to his cause.

And yet you denigrate his name in favor of a radical who proposed violence as the first option! For the life of me, I cannot understand that.

Btw, I asked you earlier if you were a Christian, and you responded with silence. Why not say, "yes", as you have said before?

Would saying "yes" have made it difficult to defend your preferences for a Muslim militant over a Christian leader like MLK? Or would it have made your "by any means necessary" ethic that much harder to defend?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Para. 2264:
Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:

If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one's own life than of another's.

Para. 2308:
All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war.

However, "as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed."

194 posted on 02/27/2005 8:34:41 PM PST by bourbon (You see me here, and yet I am already changed, already elsewhere.)
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