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Just a Simple Question
Now that Russia is targeting civilians, schools, homes, and hospitals in Ukraine, it is apparent to me that we are witnessing an ethnic cleansing action.
Some say Putin wants to save Christian values and Western Civilization. I’m not sure how you do that by killing Ukrainian Christians, and Jews.
Now some say that Ukrainians are corrupt which implies that they are getting what they deserve. That’s fairly odd unless you believe that Russia and Putin are not corrupt.
That brings me to the question that goes back to the old belief from some so-called Christians that the Jews were being punished by God by being sent to the German death camps.
I heard that from a Fundamentalist pastor one afternoon and I asked him: What sin did Anne Frank commit that merited her death in a German concentration camp? I was met with silence.
So, what sins have Ukrainian civilians committed, especially children, to deserve death at the hands of Putin?
Published in History
Failure to bow down to the (soviet) motherland?
Not the face of “Christian Values.”
12 million died in total. So what about the six million who weren’t Jews?
I think the evidence is strong that Putin is a student of Saul Alinsky.
https://bolenreport.com/saul-alinskys-12-rules-radicals/
If Ukraine’s defence includes even a statistically insignificant number of national socialists, paint the whole country as Nazis thereby pulling the curtain open on Western hypocrisy.
It sounds like the pastor must have missed today’s Gospel reading.
Or, more secularly and prosaically:
The old “You brought this torture on yourself. If you’d just give us the list of your family and friends, I would stop pulling your teeth out. This is all on you, not me.”
Just a few simple questions. How do you think that you have any good idea about what is going on in Ukraine? How could you possibly know what the Russians are targeting?
I think that we can have some sense of the overall tactical situation, based on maps of troop locations. Other than that, I don’t see how anyone can know what is going on. We’ve certainly seen Ukrainian claims proven to be lies, time after time.
There is doubtless some damage to cities. Whether that is from targeting of civilians, or from targeting of Ukrainian military forces in those cities, I have no idea.
OK, this seems quite ignorant of Christian scriptures. The teaching is that everyone is a sinner, right? The wages of sin is death, right? Catholic or Protestant, that’s the basic teaching.
So your question seems to start with a denial of basic Christian doctrine.
I don’t know whether or not the Holocaust was a punishment from God. I do know that God told the Israelites that He would protect them if they were obedient, and would bring down horrific punishment if they were disobedient. That’s Old Testament, not New Testament. Go read Leviticus 26.
This is the point, I think, that the incomparable JD was making in a video that was posted here on Ricochet earlier. Lots of commenters apparently don’t “get”JD, and misunderstood him in the video. His point was that everything we know about this (and so much more) we know only from the Media. And they suck at truth, honesty, accuracy . . . .
As of yesterday, the U.N. says 351 civilians have been killed. Ukraine claims to have killed 11,000 Russians soldiers. That is 30:1, which doesn’t seem like the Russian military is targeting civilians. But, fog of war. Are there alternative facts/reports?
I don’t believe anything any government claims, especially in wartime.
Oh come now, Jerry how can you know those maps weren’t faked? Did you see the actual troops on the ground yourself? Are you sure you aren’t being misled?
And even if the locations are correct, the numbers might not be, or their composition…
Let me clarify my position on comments. I don’t reply to comments that don’t answer the question I posed in the OP by asking a different question.
Yes, the fog of war makes the truth difficult to find. However there is video evidence that schools, hospitals, and homes have been hit, in some cases hit multiple times. There is video evidence that civilians have been gunned down in their vehicles as they attempt to flee the fighting.
Finally telling me that I don’t understand Christian doctrine, I would suggest they do some research on the Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church.
Some severe begging of the question in the OP caused a few straw men to be sacrificed.
I reject the premise.
Which premise do you reject?
The whole thing, actually. “Some say,” (who?) . . . then “some say,” (who, again?) . . . and you cite a belief of “some so-called Christians,” and then you heard this story from someone, and then you ask an inflammatory question in the Fred Cole manner:
And I just reject it all. It’s a “when did you stop beating your wife” question. And it seems like you’re trying to start a flame war, and that’s a surprising thing for a moderator.
That’s a bit much. Everyone is a racist, and every attack is ethnic cleansing? No. Sometimes militaries just aren’t very good. Our military is about the first in the world to have the restraint expected of the incompetent Russians.
Exactly. There is way too much propaganda on both sides, but mostly we see the Ukrainian propaganda. I hope they win, but if you look at the results and not the propaganda, it appears they very well might not be winning.
No civilians deserve to be killed by an army, obviously. My take is that it’s the Russian Army in the East of the country not taking as much care with this as they should, but the numbers of civilian deaths aren’t indicative of ethnic cleansing. Especially as the proportion of ethnic Russians rises in the East and in urban centres.
DrewInWisconsin, Oi! (View Comment):
Some severe begging of the question in the OP caused a few straw men to be sacrificed.
I reject the premise.
Which premise do you reject?
The whole thing, actually. “Some say,” (who?) . . . then “some say,” (who, again?) . . . and you cite a belief of “some so-called Christians,” and then you heard this story from someone, and then you ask an inflammatory question in the Fred Cole manner:
And I just reject it all. It’s a “when did you stop beating your wife” question. And it seems like you’re trying to start a flame war, and that’s a surprising thing for a moderator.
Drew, this is Doug’s question in the OP:
“So, what sins have Ukrainian civilians committed, especially children, to deserve death at the hands of Putin?”
That’s not inflammatory at all. It is, as Doug noted, just a simple question.
If I’m not mistaken, we learn very little of what is going on in Ukraine from the media. We get most of our information from satellite photographs and Ukrainian people on the ground using cell phone cameras and Internet messaging. I don’t even know if there are any Western journalists on the ground in Ukraine itself. I haven’t watched a single newscast on the war and I get plenty of information elsewhere. This is unlike any war we’ve had in the past when it comes to information because the defenders are a first-world technological people.
Your sudden insistence upon epistemological closure for this issue is unsettling to me, at any rate. You are nit-picking the precision of offered obvious things while gleefully ignoring the larger context. For example — UKRAINE DID NOT INVADE RUSSIA!
Yes, I am shouting, in effect. Please feel free to report me.
Should have used bold, too. And maybe underlining.
After all, if GLONASS and GPS give different figures, then I guess the whole thing didn’t happen. Well, better luck next year.
Wisdom right there. How did you get so smart? [caveat — question not asked in OP and therefore rhetorical]
I find value in this comment. I also wanted to know “well who says this?”
On the other hand some of the comments rapidly filled in the role, if not the exact sentiments. Sigh.
So I’m a little but with you on your request for clarification, and a little bit depressed at how it was *effectively* (but not exactly) provided in the comments before you even asked.
Well, my intent is to be emphatic, not necessarily to be rude. I read much of value in some of Jerry’s comments, although his comments on Ukraine are usually not in that set.
None, obviously.
Indeed, this is probably an axiom: Civilians, especially children, have not committed sins that deserve death at the hands of the enemy.
Can we not go further: there are extremely limited circumstances in which a human deserves to die at the hands of another human because of their sins?
Obviously ‘deserve’ and ‘sins’ are doing a lot of work here. Just war doctrine is, in part, about when it is justified to risk the lives of (‘enemy’) civilians despite their not ‘deserving’ death at your hands. (Not that I’m suggesting this invasion is a just war.) The ethics of aggregates is very different from the ethics of individuals.
Where is just war theory on risking the lives of your own civilians? Or is it only about offence and not defence?