The Bombing of Gaza and the Justification of Killing

War is killing. I hesitate to use the word 'murder', as war rarely involves the deliberate killing of specific individuals; but it certainly is premeditated. We shouldn't let ourselves be fooled by phrases such as 'surgical strike' or 'avoidance of collateral damage'. When high-explosive bombs are dropped on densely populated civilian centres with the avowed intention of destroying missile-launching sites located there, the people ordering the attacks know full well that many civilians will be killed and injured. They are therefore intending those deaths.

Israel – or at least, its government – is effectively claiming that its actions are motivated by self-defence: it is trying to prevent the killing of its own civilians by missiles launched on Israel from Gaza. In a court of law, however, a case of self-defence would have to prove that the actions taken were proportionate to the aim of eliminating the threat. For instance, if you were in an airport, and a terrorist or madman started firing a machine gun into the crowds of people on the side of the departure lounge where you were sitting, you couldn't say you were acting in self-defence if you got up and sprayed the other side of the lounge with machine-gun fire in order to eliminate the attacker: you'd have to prove you were aiming at the gunman alone and that you had a reasonable chance of killing him. Israel cannot claim that it is aiming at the missile sites alone, as the means it is deploying to eliminate them are more akin to the spray machine gunning: deliberately intending to cause loss of life to surrounding people. Similarly, the fact that Hamas redoubled its attacks on Israel in the wake of the Israeli bombing raids would tend to indicate that Israel has not succeeded in its aim of preventing those attacks. If indeed that was its aim. Guilty, m'lud.

But guilty of what? In a way, what you call it is irrelevant: murder, killing, homicide, self-defence, genocide. Whatever word you use inevitably carries overtones that then get wrapped up into either a justification for the acts in question or a condemnation of them. The more you try to build your understanding of the facts around such words and narratives, the more you risk blinding yourself to the brute reality: that innocent people are dying and suffering in a horrifying manner, and in large numbers. You have to think of them as individuals, families and communities. Think of them as your neighbours, because that's what they are: the next-door post office and its customers, all wiped out; the people who live across the green and their Labrador puppy, bought for the little daughter (also dead) for Christmas; the passengers on the No. 9 bus going shopping – all killed apart from Johnny, who's now an orphan. If someone thought fit to drop bombs on your street and your community because they thought you were harbouring a terrorist bomb factory, would they be justified? Use your imagination, picture the horror, think of your loved-ones and acquaintances lying dead and bloodied in what was once your home; and then say it's justified. Think of it as yourself: would your death be justified in stopping a deranged fanatic living in your neighbourhood from attacking some other neighbours of yours? Would you be willing to die if you thought your death might prevent someone else in the neighbouring town from dying? Which option would you choose?

Of course, the Israelis say, 'well, what about our communities and citizens who are getting killed and injured by Hamas's missiles?'. Well, yes, and that's not justified, either; but two wrongs don't make a right. As I said above, if the claim of self-defence is to stand, then it has to be proven that the measures taken are proportionate and effective. Prima facie, the overwhelming evidence appears to be that they're not. And the assessment is similar if you use the criteria for a just war: you have to prove that the evil you are trying to put an end to is so overwhelming that it justifies the by definition evil means taken to end it; but those means are justified only if you don't escalate the evil you yourself are perpetrating – particularly, through the mass killing of non-combatants, which immediately rules it out – and the end itself can be achieved by your actions. Again, not proven.

In any case, the point I am trying to make is that the justifications that tend to be advanced for this sort of thing are designed to blind people to the realities involved by substituting a logic of means and ends for empathy with terrible human suffering. If you were to experience at first hand the reality of death and destruction – on both sides of the Gazan border – especially if it were your loved-ones who were the victims, you wouldn't say, 'well, our Israeli / our Palestinian neighbours were right to do this to try to put an end to our attacks on Israel / our oppression of the Palestinian people'. The question of who is in the right, and whose life is worth more than another's, often just boils down to which side of the border or other divide you're on. The reality is people are dying on both sides; and the question should be 'how can we stop this', not 'how can we justify our killing while condemning theirs?' The way to stop it is through peace. And the way to peace is not a life for a life, or in this instance ten lives for a life or whatever the ratio is. Peace can come only through a massive and mutual effort towards reconciliation, forgiveness and atonement. But I can't see much prospect of that right now.

The same false logic of justifying killing by reference to a suffering it is ostensibly intended to end is employed in other circumstances where we try to circumvent the commandment 'thou shalt not kill'. In the cases of abortions and stem-cell research, for instance, defenders of such practices claim they are justified because they will prevent suffering: that of the unwanted child, the unwilling mother or sick persons for whom new treatments could be discovered. Such 'ends justify the means' arguments again help to blind us to the reality of the killing involved, which is personal, dirty and bloody: the beautiful, wonderful human embryo or foetus that could have developed into a baby capable of surviving and thriving outside the womb, but instead is destroyed to suit our own purposes – and just as much a human being as you or I, whether inside or outside the womb or test tube. Again, we must employ the 'what if it were me?' test: 'would my parents have been right to have me aborted if they hadn't wanted me?' Most people, I think, would prefer to have been born, albeit amid troubled personal circumstances, than to have been denied the chance of life. And yet, we think we're justified in denying the same chance to millions of living unborn humans aborted every year. 'It's not killing, it's "termination", we try to say'; but whatever terminology we try to wrap it up in, it's killing all the same. And does the trauma a mother might experience about an unwanted pregnancy really outweigh the fact of taking another human being's life; and if so, by what code of ethics? And who gives us the right to decree that an unwanted child will have such a miserable life that we're actually showing mercy by preventing them from being born? This is pure bad faith designed to assuage our consciences. How do we know a child born in such circumstances won't end up being loved and cherished, even if not by ourselves? And does the aim of preventing diseases really justify creating human embryos (living human beings) purely for the purpose of extracting stem cells from them and thereby destroying them – especially if this prevents us from developing other methods to achieve the same ends? 'It's research, science and progress', we say; yes, and it's also killing.

The irony is that the same people who defend abortions or stem-cell research often reject other forms of killing, for some of which a more credible justification could arguably be put together. I always remember the Labour MP for Hampstead and former actress Glenda Jackson saying she was as ardently in favour of the 'right' of women to have abortions as she was ardently opposed to capital punishment. And yet, capital punishment for people guilty of murder or other violent crimes is superficially a far more proportionate act than taking the life of a totally innocent human being, albeit an unborn one. However, we deny that abortion does represent human-killing, partly because we can't or won't see the unborn human – hidden in its mother's womb – as a real, living human being (and certainly not as a 'citizen' with rights) in the same way as a visible, clearly separate and independent, sentient human being and citizen, such as a murderer. But this is just a lack of 'vision', in both senses: because we can't see the unborn human as a living human, we can't or won't accept the ending of that life as killing. But it was human and alive, and our own life started in that form; and our decision to abort it ends that life. That's killing by any definition.

In a similar way, many people who favour stem-cell research are opposed to vivisection and drug testing on animals. Again, the 'logic' is astounding: it's OK to destroy human life for the purposes of medical research if that human life is far removed from how we imagine and perceive human beings as fully human, and as having full human rights (as born, living-breathing-moving beings of flesh and blood), but not fully grown animals that clearly are capable of experiencing pain. Admitted, the embryos in question may not – may not – feel pain when they are manipulated and destroyed in the test tube, or even when they are injected with animal genes. But they were human and alive, and now they're not: that's human-killing, whatever gloss or justification you put on it. They could have been implanted in a womb and could have grown into normal babies; but they were destroyed to help alleviate the sickness of other human beings, whose suffering is clearly thought more important than their deaths.

Now, I personally am not in favour of capital punishment. In fact, I think this is another case where human societies attempt to justify their murderous desire to circumvent the divine commandment not to kill; in this case, by dressing it up as a 'proportionate' punishment that fits the crime. But this is the same talion logic (eye for an eye, life for a life) that the Israelis are employing in Gaza. Does the taking of one innocent life exonerate the killing of those responsible, with the distinction that in the case of Gaza, the Israelis are taking so many innocent lives as well? If you sanction the execution of violent criminals, then you have reduced yourself to their level; and the violence and evil that led them to commit their crimes has taken hold of you. In the case of Gaza, we can see that the danger is that the cycle of mutual violence and hatred is perpetuated. In the case of crimes such as murder, can the rage and grief of the victim's loved-ones ever really be assuaged, and in some sense neutralised and 'dealt with', by taking the life of the person responsible, assuming society has identified the correct person? Is this really better for those loved-ones than long-term imprisonment? Killing the guilty person removes any possibility for those surviving the murdered individual to come to any understanding of, and maybe eventually forgiveness for, the crime; and it certainly eliminates any chance that the murderer themself may come to repent of their crime and seek reconciliation with the bereaved, albeit that that repentance should be accompanied, indeed facilitated, by a long period of atonement and of paying for the crime. Such an outcome has to be the hope of any Christian society; and is the only way that the murder of one person can in time lead to new life and hope for all affected, rather than death taking hold in the mind, hearts and actions of killer and victims alike.

Another example of this tendency to selectively justify killing (i.e. one form of killing, such as stem-cell research, is OK but others are not) is what's now referred to as 'assisted dying' (formerly known as 'assisted suicide' and, before that, euthanasia). Again, some people who are vehemently in favour of abortion or stem-cell research are opposed to assisted dying, which arguably has much stronger claims to being justified. Only the other day, Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, went on record as saying that he was opposed to bringing in legislation to allow relatives and medical staff to assist those suffering from painful, long-term chronic conditions from taking their own lives. And yet, he was firmly behind the recent Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which continues to sanction abortions in certain cases up to 28 weeks into the pregnancy and the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for the purpose of experimentation, alongside conventional stem-cell research. At one point, it even looked as though Brown would insist that Catholic Labour MPs should toe the party line and support the bill, which would involve voting against their consciences. However, he eventually backed down.

From my perspective, such late abortions and the experimental tampering with human embryos, and indeed with the human genome, are far more horrendous and human life-denying than enabling people suffering acute pain and terminal conditions to take their own lives. At least, in the latter instance, the death is chosen and self-inflicted by the person affected, rather than being perpetrated upon helpless, silent, unborn humans. All the same, it's still killing, as the increasingly euphemistic expressions employed negatively testify: they try to distance us and blind us ever more to the reality of killing involved.

But is this 'justified killing'. Well, the point I've been trying to make is that killing can and always will be justified: we'll always come up with words, arguments and explanations that sanction killing in one set of circumstances or another. But it's still killing, and it still contravenes the commandment 'thou shalt not kill'. The focus tends to be placed on the sick individuals seeking to end their lives; and understandably so. But in assisted dying, this still involves other people consenting to that death and effectively carrying it out, or at least 'conspiring' in it. And those individuals will have to answer for that killing, if not in a court of law, then maybe in another tribunal. The commandment is clear; and I don't think a plea of 'well, I never believed in all that religion malarkey' will necessarily wash. And even if that final judgement never comes, there's still the tribunal of conscience; and that still small voice that says 'killing is killing' and 'you have killed'.

We can justify our killing as much as we like; but in our hearts, we know it's killing, all the same.

 

Faith, Homosexuality and Vocation

If there's one thing evangelical-Christian and Islamic fundamentalists agree on, it is the moral 'depravity' of homosexuality. They agree on this point at least, even if some of their proponents reserve almost the same degree of condemnation for each other as they do for gay sex! If two credos that regard each other as so erroneous can still agree on the gay issue, then either they are both wrong about homosexuality or wrong in their judgements about each other. Either way, this on its own does not inspire confidence that their precepts concerning sexuality are always well grounded in faith terms.

In fact, however, there are many more areas of agreement on morals between strict, conservative Christians and devout Muslims; for instance, on the pivotal importance of the family and the roles of the sexes, with authority being invested in the male head of the household, or indeed of the church or the mosque. One could also mention the importance of regular communal prayer; of Sunday or Friday worship; the sacredness with which the little actions and rituals of daily life, particularly of home and hearth, are endowed; the importance of cleanliness and physical modesty, reflecting the sanctity of the bodily temple housing our immortal soul; and the reverence towards the Holy Book, whether Bible or Qur'an.

These characteristics of the world's two leading faiths are in fact common to all the world's great religions: orthodox Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists all cherish these sacred, ritualistic and religiously prescribed features of daily, family life, and particularly the sanctity of the bond that unites husband and wife. And they all in different ways condemn active homosexuality as a 'sin'.

Perhaps, then, if the religions to which the great majority of humanity to some extent adheres all agree on the essentials of what constitutes a holy life, and all repudiate gay sex, there may be something in it. Either that, or they're all wrong - which is the understandable response of many gay persons. But my point is that maybe what is 'wrong' and 'sinful' about gay sexual activity needs to be seen in relation to the call or vocation to a holy life that all religions are essentially there to articulate and direct. Can a life in which a person asserts and enacts his or her 'right' to an active gay sex life truly be said to be 'holy'?

It seems almost oxymoronic to pose the question in this form. But this is perhaps precisely because the two categories - holiness and active homosexuality - are mutually inconsistent. Christian or Muslim conservatives cannot conceive that a gay sex life could have any place in a life dedicated to seeking God's will and striving to grow in holiness. Conversely, defenders of gay lifestyles and relationships - even religious liberals - never (at least, in my experience) claim that gay sex could be the expression of any sort of religious vocation: that God him- or herself is actually calling two people of the same sex to dedicate their lives to one another and express their mutual love in sexual activity. There may indeed be people and religious communities that celebrate such a view; but this sort of thinking certainly does not form part of the pro-gay mainstream, whether religious or not: gay rights are not advocated in the name of holiness.

Maybe this is how the 'sinfulness' of active homosexuality should be described: that it is inconsistent with a life of wholehearted dedication to seeking the will of God; with our religious vocation to holiness. In other words, an active gay lifestyle could be something that prevents an individual from being fully open and responsive to what God is calling them to: his infinitely loving purpose for that person's life here on earth and throughout eternity. This is because the gay person may be putting what 'I want'- even if that is to express love for someone of the same sex in a physical way - ahead of what God wants. In one sense, it's not the 'wanting' gay sex that is the problem but the structuring of a life around the satisfaction of those wants - rather than around the carrying out of God's will to the best of our ability, as we are able to discern it.

If the absence of any defence of the gay lifestyle in the name of holiness - which is not to say that actively gay people can't be generally good people and even good Christians; just that the gay sex itself is not holy - is an implicit recognition that it is not a holy way of life, why is this so? On one level, paradoxically, I'd argue that this not because of any 'inherent' sinfulness of homosexuality per se; and indeed, the Catholic Church does not teach that it is sinful to have a homosexual orientation and even the desires that flow from it, but merely to indulge in those desires in thought or deed in such a way that they override one's Christian duties. The 'non-holiness' of gay sex is the same as the non-holiness of any sexual activity that takes place without reference to the properly sacred character that sex is intended by God to have within marriage: as an expression, manifestation and acting out of God's undying love and commitment to us human beings through all our weaknesses and faults; a love which also is at the origin of all new created life, and present with us at and beyond the end of our mortal lives - meaning that marriage is an essential, consecrated means, established by God, for us as human beings to participate in his creative and redemptive work.

The sexual act is meant to be sacred, and in marriage that purpose is consecrated: sacred both in the divine love and grace for which it is a chosen vessel and, integral to that, in the new human life that is intended to arise from it. The gay sexual lifestyle can no more partake of this sacredness than can a straight relationship outside of marriage; which is not to say that those extra-marital relationships are not in their own way sacred and carry duties on the part the individuals involved towards each other. But these are not consecrated, sacramental, unions - not, therefore, unions as such: expressive of the very sacred, mystical union of Christ with humanity - through his birth, death and resurrection - which transforms our mortal flesh into a vessel of new life.

Sex, through marriage, is therefore intended by its creator to be part of a consecrated life, just as every part of our life and all our actions, for the devout Christian or Muslim, should be part a constant act of prayer and praise to God. Extra-marital sex, even gay sex, is of course not the only way in which we Christians (I can't really speak for Muslims) constantly fail to fully live out our vocation - but continue to be forgiven, held and revived through the mercy and grace of God. As such, gay sex - if allied to a predominantly caring, faithful and loving life - is not deserving of the special condemnation, indeed vilification, it receives from those whose own lives so often are not exemplary. Indeed, oftentimes, we Christians have much to learn - when it comes to love - from those we tend to despise; whether gays or, indeed, Muslims.

Embryos, Persons and the Mind Of God

“What one always has to bear in mind is that it’s the children that should come first - not chronologically or causally in this instance, of course, but in our thinking about what ultimately is in the mind of God for his children, as ‘our’ children have lived in his mind for all eternity. Does he want our children to be born of a father and a mother, and to grow up in the love of their father and mother? There can be no doubt, from the perspective of Christian faith, that the answer to this question is ‘yes’”.

The above is a quote from a post of mine on another blog. There it inspired a couple of comments, one of which was to the effect that if it was in God’s mind to bring children into this world through the loving union of a father and mother, wouldn’t he just do this? My reply - paraphrasing myself - was essentially ‘no’: it might be God’s will that this should happen, but our sin impedes and distorts God’s will, and must therefore be allowed to damage creation (if our freedom to choose evil as well as good is to be genuine); and that God could not arbitrarily alter the laws of biology he had made to reflect and express his loving purpose in creation simply to prevent us from abusing those laws to create and destroy human life without regard to the moral law.

This got me thinking about how we live in the mind of God, both during our temporal existence as living and breathing human beings, and in His eternity (which we view from our time-bound perspective as ‘before’ and ‘after’ our mortal lives). And how does that relate to our human personhood, and the ethics of human reproduction and embryo research?

My point is this: from the perspective of faith, human life by definition is always personal in the sense that it is an embodiment - a bodily image or reproduction - of the personhood of God himself: Father, Son and the love of the Spirit that unites them and gives rise to the whole of creation as the expression and reflection of the divine love and self-understanding (the Word). In this light, insofar as any actual human life form comes into existence, it necessarily has this essential personal character - as part of its DNA, one might say. This is the case from the moment of conception: the human person that has lived in the mind of God for all eternity now also lives in a time-bound, physical form. The Concept (the Word) has manifested itself in a material body: conception; the Word becomes flesh; a human being is made in God’s image. That human personhood is therefore as complete in a single fertilised ovum or a collection of undifferentiated embryonic stem cells as it is in a newborn baby or mature adult: alive, and able to survive and prosper outside the womb.

When I say that this intrinsic personhood of human life is built into our ‘DNA’, this is also a reference to the fact that, with respect to our genetic inheritance, we are all the expression and product of the union of our biological father and mother, even if the loving moral and spiritual union of our father and mother that God wills for us was absent from the specific biological process of our conception. God loves us into being even when love is absent from the human reproductive processes involved.

Those who attempt to morally justify embryonic stem-cell research seek to do so by denying that undifferentiated embryonic cells do constitute a ‘human person’ or ‘human being’ that might have rights similar to those of born human beings or even foetuses, such as the right to life; the right not to have medical experiments conducted on one’s body / person against one’s will; or the right not to have one’s fundamental genetic structure manipulated and combined with that of other species. It is doubtless scientifically and descriptively true - looking at the question from a materialist perspective - that a collection of undifferentiated embryonic cells does not (yet) have the characteristics that one tends to think of as defining personhood: the beginning of the formation of a recognisably human body, with all the immensely complex variety of cell and tissue types, and bodily organs.

But firstly, the religious - or certainly, the Catholic Christian - moral objection to stem-cell research is not based on such a definition of personhood: the bodily characteristics that appear to denote our status as human beings and persons are in a sense only the ‘outer’ material form of our personhood that in essence lives and exists in God. Once those cells exist, a human person that lives in the mind of God has begun to unfold in time and space, and to reveal and be a small but integral part of God’s loving creative and redemptive purpose.

Secondly, from a purely logical perspective, it is quite arbitrary to declare that after, say, 14 days from conception, what had previously been regarded as a mere collection of undifferentiated cells is now to be regarded as an embryonic human person with rights that it did not have during the first two weeks of its existence. The embryonic person would not exist now had it not gone through 14, or however many, days of undifferentiated-cell existence. This is a continuous process; and to declare that in the later stages of its development, the embryo has a humanity or personhood (humanity defined as personhood) that it did not have in the necessary earlier stages that went before seems completely illogical and self-serving; and it flies in the face of our intuitive perception of when our lives as human persons begin: from the moment of conception when the DNA structures that define who we are started to be laid down.
Besides which, the time limit from which embryos and foetuses are recognised as human beings or persons with legal and human rights is arbitrarily moveable depending on the purpose that is being justified: 14 days in UK legislation with respect to regulating stem-cell research, but 24 weeks when it comes to the legal limit for abortions. When does an unborn human person become a full human being and, as it were, a citizen with full legal rights? It appears to be the case that what defines the threshold for an embryo or foetus to be recognised in law as a human person in this way is merely the point at which they become physically (visually) recognisable as viable, autonomous human entities from the particular perspective that is invoked: that of the medical researcher who recognises that, beyond a certain point, he is extracting cells not from an amorphous, undifferentiated mass but from an actual living embryo that is starting to take on the visual, albeit microscopic, form of a human body and person; or the perspective of medical practice and childbirth, where the 24-week abortion limit was based on the latest stage at which a foetus could not survive if plucked untimely from the womb - a time limit which, for that very reason, is being revised in the current UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, as medical advances have made it possible for foetuses to survive from an earlier age.

This really is a rather primitive and, indeed, material, irrational and superstitious way to decide when an unborn human entity becomes a human person: simply when it corresponds to our bodily image of a human being - paradoxically defining the humanness of unborn life purely in relation to the appearances and conditions for survival of born life. The unborn clearly don’t stand a chance if the odds are so heavily weighted against them. In reality, the vision of faith and the science in this matter fundamentally concur; at least when the science is logically understood as describing a process whereby recognisable bodily-human personhood (what we think of as our existence and personhood) necessarily begins in the undifferentiated (’unrecognisably’ human) embryonic stem-cell state. If we are living human beings and persons now, that is because what we are now was already laid down and was potential within what we were from the moment of our conception - and, in the light of faith, within the eternal mind of God.

This is why, for me, it is so revealing that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which has provoked such heated debate in the UK during the last week owing to prime minister Gordon Brown’s initial refusal to allow his Labour Party MPs a free vote on its morally controversial aspects, should sanction such diverse measures as the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for the purposes of stem-cell research, and the removal of a legal reference to the ‘need for a father’ on the part of children born to Lesbian couples through IVF or other assisted-conception treatment. This latter provision extends to the very birth certificate of such children, in which it will now be possible for both women to be registered as the real (biological) parents, even if neither of them actually are the genetic parents (for instance, if a fertilised egg from another couple is used as opposed to IVF using the eggs of one of the women). This means that such children are officially without a father. They retain their existing legal right to try and trace their genetic father as soon as they reach the age of maturity (18 in the UK); but they will never be allowed to officially recognise that person as their true father - in the eyes of the law, he becomes a ‘mere’ sperm donor and no more.

The thread that these two measures in the Bill have in common is that they involve a denial of those two aspects of unborn human life that are fundamental from its very beginning: that it is personal and a product of the union of a man and a woman, in the sense that, from conception, the human entity is an individuated, unique and living combination of the DNA of its parents - DNA which in turn defines their personhood. And from the faith perspective, the unborn human being is also of course sacred: a living human person ultimately made by God in his image, which we are therefore commanded to respect and protect. And such is, not just the vocation of the believer, but the true calling of science: not so much to determine the ‘mind of God’ through empirical and theoretical enquiry into the material world that is in God but is not God; but to seek ways to cure the ills of our mortal existence that do not violate the purity and beauty of human life that is called in Christ to share God’s mind and love for all eternity.