Clumsily Cobbled Together Quotes From The Site

Basically, the idea of this dispatch is to allow anyone who hasn't been following my arguments thus far to get the general premise of my ideology in a reasonably quick fashion. It's like a disjointed, rambling manifesto!

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it." -Stephen Colbert

The soldiers of the devil march into battle with guns and swords. The soldiers of God march into battle with kindness.
Armed insurrection is never justifiable. Violence is a tool of coercion, a took of exploitation, a tool of self absorption and a tool of hate, and it will serve those ends. We cannot use our enemy's weapons against him, they will only strengthen his position and undermine ours. We must use our weapons, which are kindness, reason, love, sacrifice, and compassion. Only these weapons will serve as propaganda for the kind, rational, compassionate society we want to establish. Only the acts of love with serve as propaganda for love.
The sword may oust a tyrant and bring you to power, but in the very process it will make you unworthy of that power, so that you become a tyrant yourself. A bombing may inspire men to revolution, but it will only inspire them to a revolution of violence, to establish a system of violence.
If a man knows that his beliefs are true, does he tell lies? He does not need to lie: he knows that every act of reason brings others closer to his belief. How much less so if his belief is not a particular true thing, but the very concept of truth, or reason? Then it would be against his interests ever to lie, as every lie would be an affront to his belief; every lie would decrease the amount of reason in the world. Likewise if our cause is compassionate, then compassionate acts will benefit us, but if our cause is compassion itself, then any uncompassionate act is against our interests. If our cause is consistent with freedom, then we will benefit from freeing others, but if our cause is freedom itself, then any coercive act is against our interests...
Here is the exact method I propose for bringing about revolutionary social change nonviolently.
First, I advocate spreading a movement for radical personal change as far as possible, centered around embracing extremes of love and human compassion, renouncing egocentrism, and establishing an existential courage allowing action untempered by most fear and guided instead only by altruist-morality and desire for happiness. Essentially, to dethrone the self as the basis of men's lives, and replace it with the neighbor.
I would then have those influenced by the movement:
1. Reject and ignore the social order entirely: passively disregard the police, refuse to use money, own property, or work jobs within the capitalist system, refuse to vote or show loyalty to the ruling regime. (The passive aspect)
2. Establish communes which offer free housing to any, unconditionally; acquire the most vital supplies first, of which they take only what they need, and distribute the remainder to the poor in the larger society, devote any additional labor to aid operations, retaining no further profit of any kind, and, above all, systematically show unconditional love and kindness to all other members of society all the while. (The active aspect)
3. Aggressively and incessantly advocate their way of life and their ideas in the larger culture, through any and all means available, (television, radio, magazines, books, newspapers, graffiti, rallies, meetings, protests, any means they can) all the while citing their lifestyle as supporting evidence of their claims, deliberately showing respect and appreciation in particular for their detractors, in order to further substantiate their claims. (The activist element)
4. If the state or any other actor attempts to violently crush the movement, refuse to fight back, and ensure that the country is filled with footage of police representing the ruling regime, attacking protestors who refuse to fight back, but shout that they love them between blows. The popular backlash will be astonishing, if the state actually tries this, it is likely to fall the same day. (The pacifist element)
The movement need not ever encompass anything close to a majority of the society: they will become so wildly popular with the people for their kindness and constant aid as to become a conscience for the larger society and quickly push it to abolish the worst evils of its day, including capitalism and the use of military force. Alternatively, if the state is obstinate, it will find itself increasingly irrelevant as fewer and fewer of its citizens obey its laws when there is no officer standing next to them, and fewer and fewer are willing to be officers...
The state's power is not unlimited. It cannot retain control if eighty or ninety percent of the populace denies its legitimacy and considers its laws invalid (including eighty or ninety percent of its police force.) And just because we won't fight them doesn't mean we can't burn their buildings, destroy their currency, wreck their property, refuse to watch their news and boycott their services, if the situation calls for it. The ends ever justify the means, but the people can scarcely steal from themselves...
The thing is, if the idea is firmly set in the minds of the people that threats are invalid, then violence stops being rational, because it stops equating to any real force. You can kill people, sure, but you can't compel them to do what you want. Honestly, the remaining capitalists could continue killing people and being as condemned as the westboro baptist church throughout the country, or they could turn and be socially accepted, but they'd have no option to get their power back. If you say "I own this factory, all of you are trespassing, get out now!" And they say "no." then your ownership is only real in your own head...
Seeing as we have this population, and the technology to sustain it, we shall have to use it. So advanced agriculture will have to stay, and with it, the social structure involved in running it. Property absolutely has got to go, and not just in the minds of the people; we must have property's teeth out. That means the abolition of the state, the violent division of the bourgeoisie infrastructure. Once the only possible source of assistance in making sure that the hungry people at the gate don't take bread is broken, anyone who can't afford bread and can't acquire the wages to buy bread will take bread. The landowners will scream and stand on the porch with shotguns and cry that the whole society will come crashing down if we don't respect their property, and then we will steal their guns and proceed to blatantly not starve at them, and the whole society will fail to come crashing down. If there are really food shortages, then more people will go and farm. If there are complex issues, they will, by and large, listen to relevant experts if there aren't a thousand very powerful interest groups trying to buy their opinion. Everyone is very quick to believe in the prisoner's dilemma when it comes to other men, from their position of luxury supported by fear, but when a famine comes and there being enough food to eat depends on enough people farming, it's always shocking to see how quickly they farm, property or no. I suppose it's rather like why people vote in democracies.
And so on with other basic necessities. Other things that people want grow out of having a larger labor pool than is necessary to support the population, and we certainly do. But there must absolutely not be a concept of "unemployment" or a "job shortage" in a society that has plenty. Furthermore, and we must be absolutely resolute about this, there can be no production of goods and services that are valuable to no one, and only support their own existence: parasites leeching off of the economy, accomplishing nothing but to spread moral rot among the people, things like advertising, and everything for sale at the dollar store.
Religiously we must abolish the church and return faith to the people, where it belongs.
Politically, we must be absolutely brutal to their ideals of power, hierarchy, consequentialism, merit differentials and superiority, compromise, ownership, and egoism wherever they appear, we must take no prisoner. If an egoist organization rises up, then an intensely organized altruist resistance made up of the devoted and disciplined must rise up against it in the same moment.
The general philosophical model to be followed is this: always do what is in the best interests of individual others, and consider all individual others equally valuable for this purpose...
Pacifism has to be anarchist, otherwise it isn't pacifism. Unless standing armies, arrests, beatings, shootings, and tear gassings don't count as violence.
Might pacifism get me killed? Yes. Nobody lives forever. I think I care more how I live than how long, when it comes right down to it. Sometimes, it's necessary to sacrifice your life for your friends. There were plenty of martyrs in the nonviolent civil rights movement, for example. But that movement was also ultimately successful. Not everyone in the civil rights movement was killed, though. Not everyone in Ghandi's India was killed either. There's a chance you could die, not a certainty. And there's a chance you'll win, even if you die. As with combat.
Would you prefer to live your whole life doing whatever people tell you, even when it's wrong and monstrous, and then die in your bed an old man? Seeing as I must die, I don't see being shot for doing the right thing as a bad way to do it...
If someone is willing to kill for their ideology, nonviolence is the only thing that might change their mind. It's outside of their experience, anomalous. That sort of thing eats away at you until you can gain understanding of it.
Ask yourself this question: what could cause a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a violent, deeply prejudiced person, to be reformed? Not just stopped, but reformed?
Kindness. And only kindness. Here's an example of it.(Look under the NAACP header.)...
Is God a god of war? God must, at the very least, not be merely a god of war, but also a god of love, self-sacrifice, and unlimited mercy, if his fullest expression was as a man on a cross, dying for people who didn't love him back. You might as their detractors have said of the pacifists say "he was annihilated," "he was a victim," "it was suicide," and so on, but he was also victorious...
When I read the gospel, I find "resist not evil," "turn the other cheek," "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword," and "love your enemies..."
Sadly we do not have demons to slay, only men. Evil men, like us, yes, but men for whom Christ died, who are always within the possibility of redemption. There is just no standard by which you can kill the "evil" men, but not the ones you claim to be protecting. All men deserve death, but it's not to you they owe their lives, it's to God. And in the same breath that God has offered to pardon you, he has unnegotiably demanded that you forgive others. The Lord's Prayer says "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," forgiveness is offered on no other terms. Likewise, Christ instructs us to forgive our neighbor the same sin not seven, nor seventy, but seventy times seventy times. Christ would not even let the crowds execute the law by stoning a woman caught in adultery, he gave her back her life, though rightfully it belonged to him.
Is God so weak that he cannot exact judgement without our assistance? Or are Christ's words so weak that they should be ignored? Or is our faith so weak that we cannot follow his instructions and trust him to take vengeance or not as he sees fit, when he has said "vengeance is mine?"...
God is perfectly capable of killing his own enemies. You've been instructed to concern yourself with loving yours...
Christ has established the new covenant. It is here. There is no sense in disobeying what the new covenant says because it is not what the old covenant says.
If God wills war, then to war! I will lead the charge. But if God wills war, why did he absolutely, unambiguously forbid violence under his new covenant with man out of his own mouth when he was incarnated as man, and then include it in the canon of the New Testament, his word?
The only possible conclusion is that God does not will for you and I to make war..
Why would Jesus say "blessed are the peacemakers", prevent Peter from fighting in his defense, say that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, say not to resist evil, say to carry a load an extra mile if compelled by an occupying soldier to carry it one, say to love your enemies, stop a crowd from lawfully stoning a woman, say to forgive your neighbor no matter what he does, not speak in his defense at his own trial, and not call angels to slay the Romans when they put him to death if what he really meant was that violence was perfectly permissible as long as you've got a good reason for it, but you should maybe try to avoid it sometimes if it's not too much to ask?
Paul accepted the protection of soldiers, yes, but one can only suppose he did so because killing and seeming likely to kill are two different things, and, in all probability, because it was in someone else's benefit to see him thus protected, whether weaker Christians who feared their leader's death, or others unspecified who were consumed with worry for him, or the guards themselves, seeing as when it came down to it, he willfully allowed himself to be martyred.
Upside down.
Was Peter's desire to prevent the incarnate God, a totally innocent man, from being horribly killed on false blasphemy charges unjust? Was it needless? It was the single most just act of violence ever attempted- and still Jesus stopped it.
Was it the civil war, of the civil rights movement that turned the tide of racial hatred in the United States? The Civil War was fought with all its just violence, and slavery was only been replaced by Jim Crow laws for three hundred years. Then comes the civil rights movement, with much compassion and few executions, and within about a decade legislation has passed in a democracy affirming the equality of all men, the principles of compassion and loving-kindness, and the exact antithesis of all that, prior to the civil rights movement, had been widely believed about race: meaning that a majority of the population now supported these things. The civil rights act wasn't the content of the civil rights movement- it was its trophy...
How will it come to pass that doing evil will have good effects? If nothing else, it becomes a question of whether we value the present stability of society or the eternal state of our souls. But I don't think that doing the right thing will hurt anyone. If Jesus told us not to repay evil with evil, but to repay evil with good, then I intend to do so. If it seems to me that it will have negative effects, then I intend to do it anyway as an act if faith. After all, the instruction comes from the one who controls all causation. What social benefit could we possibly gain that would be better than doing what is right and obeying God?...
Freedom is inextricably tied to satisfaction. One of the paradoxes of life is that the chief thing people want to do, and will fight for the freedom to do, is establish intimacy with one another and thereby neccesarily limit their future options. If freedom is introduced it immediately dies, replaced by love; but love cannot be established any other way. It simultaneously requires as a predicate and nullifies freedom.
Man needs freedom, yes, but not so that he can become "no more likely to do one thing than another." He needs it so that his love for others may rise up and constrain his options to a single necessity: the right choice. Freedom is not "freedom from the expectation of doing good, as enforced by the authorities," but "freedom to do good, unhindered by authorities who would surely try to stop you..."
My point is that the system is unworthy of your faith. It doesn't care about you. The system is perfectly willing to write you off as collateral damage in its view of the greater good. Its terribly, terribly, fallable view...
Listen to yourself! In defending the justice system, you've had to come down against kindness and care as impossible, love as insufficiently just, morality as out of our grasp, and, in your last post, Jesus himself. You've had to justify things you admit are horrible "for the greater good." What evil action in history hasn't been justified in the same way? How are good actions justified? You find people making appeals to empathy, to mercy, to love, to compassion for specific people. If not now, when will it be the time for what is truly moral? Of course it doesn't seem like the right time, I don't think it ever has. What time can be the wrong time to do what is right? If your heart tells you that what would be truly be moral is to punish no one, then so be it.