War, the Necessary Evil

[Tolouse]

if one was to read the holy scriptures, they would find that even God's people went to war with other countries.

 

with watching the over-population of today's world and total disrespect of law and order, i have come to believe that war is a necessary evil that we must have

 

war, in itself, has a way of showing one to appreciate life instead of taking it.

 

it also has a way of thinning out populations, but causes grief at the same time.

 

i think that is the reason why this world is so over-popuated is that people cannot come to terms with their own grief, and so to keep everyone around as not to cause themselves grief, they come up with keeping everyone around

 

can WAR in itself bring morality?

[CraigD]

i think that is the reason why this world is so over-popuated is that people cannot come to terms with their own grief, and so to keep everyone around as not to cause themselves grief, they come up with keeping everyone around

By definition, the world’s population is increasing because the birth rate exceeds the death rate.

 

I don’t believe coming to terms with grief or not has much to do with it. The single largest factor appears to be ability, primarily of women, to control the number of children they bear in the course of their lives. Most data and analysis of which I’m aware suggests this has mostly to do with the legal systems of the world’s various states – states in which women are legally unable to refuse being impregnated, or suffer privation or death if they refuse, tend to have the highest per-capita birth rates.

can WAR in itself bring morality?

In theological terms, all humans have mortality. Different religions have different explanations of why this is so, but none of the major ones, to the best of my knowledge, claim that war is the cause of human mortality, or that if there was no war, human beings would no longer die.

 

In objective terms, almost without exception, war brings death, both due to direct military actions involving bombs, guns, knives, etc, and greater numbers due to starvation, disease, increased infant mortality, and murder resulting from the disruption of civil services. However, even during periods of the greatest rate of war-caused death (WWII, in which 40 – 72 million people died between 1939 and 1945), these deaths constitute only a small fraction of the total death rate, and didn’t exceed the birth rate. (sources: wikipedia articles “World War II” and “World Population”)

 

In summary, world population increase – which has arguable resulted in the Earth being overpopulated, appears to be much more a consequence of high birth rate than low death rate. Because unusually high death rates, due to war, disease, or agricultural failure, tend to destabilize legal and economic systems, I suspect that it’s not possible, for more than a short period, to slow the increase of or decrease the world population by increasing its death rate.

if one was to read the holy scriptures, they would find that even God's people went to war with other countries.

I agree. Both the old testament, and objective archeological evidence, indicate that not only did the ancient people described in the OT go to war, but often killed great numbers, including civilian women and children.

 

At the same time, these scriptures and those of many other religious documents unambiguously state that one should not kill. IMHO, this is one of the more profound and puzzling apparent contradictions of most religious writing.

[Tolouse]

By definition, the world’s population is increasing because the birth rate exceeds the death rate.

 

I don’t believe coming to terms with grief or not has much to do with it. The single largest factor appears to be ability, primarily of women, to control the number of children they bear in the course of their lives. Most data and analysis of which I’m aware suggests this has mostly to do with the legal systems of the world’s various states – states in which women are legally unable to refuse being impregnated, or suffer privation or death if they refuse, tend to have the highest per-capita birth rates.In theological terms, all humans have mortality. Different religions have different explanations of why this is so, but none of the major ones, to the best of my knowledge, claim that war is the cause of human mortality, or that if there was no war, human beings would no longer die.

 

In objective terms, almost without exception, war brings death, both due to direct military actions involving bombs, guns, knives, etc, and greater numbers due to starvation, disease, increased infant mortality, and murder resulting from the disruption of civil services. However, even during periods of the greatest rate of war-caused death (WWII, in which 40 – 72 million people died between 1939 and 1945), these deaths constitute only a small fraction of the total death rate, and didn’t exceed the birth rate. (sources: wikipedia articles “World War II” and “World Population”)

 

In summary, world population increase – which has arguable resulted in the Earth being overpopulated, appears to be much more a consequence of high birth rate than low death rate. Because unusually high death rates, due to war, disease, or agricultural failure, tend to destabilize legal and economic systems, I suspect that it’s not possible, for more than a short period, to slow the increase of or decrease the world population by increasing its death rate.I agree. Both the old testament, and objective archeological evidence, indicate that not only did the ancient people described in the OT go to war, but often killed great numbers, including civilian women and children.

 

At the same time, these scriptures and those of many other religious documents unambiguously state that one should not kill. IMHO, this is one of the more profound and puzzling apparent contradictions of most religious writing.

 

 

to keel the issue, i was talking about Morality, not Mortality

 

from what you pointed out about the birth rate overdrafts the death rate seems to prove this theory to a point. in any war, there are always women and children, and i don't think that should be the factor of not having war. in fact, it affects everyone. throughout history, there has always been wars and battles. with increasing laws preserving people and over-population, the economy, as a whole, decreases.

 

after WWII, the economy was stablized, jobs increased, babies boomed, and life was good. why was it good? it has to do with the mentality of war also. how can you know peace unless you have experienced war? how can you know what is good if you have never experienced bad?

 

so, in this mindset, i believe war increases the morality (not mortality) of a nation. i think that was also the lessons of the OT, that though there may be war, there is also the higher being that you look towards in your last moments

[HydrogenBond]

If we put aside the subjectivities of war and look at it from a distance, but objectively, it thins the herd and disrupts cultural bias. The loser gets their culture disrupted directly, so a potential is added for change even if it is not wanted. If a culture is at steady state, there is little potential for change. War will change that for better or worse. The winner gets more resources, thereby adding potential for progress.

 

If you look at the main characters of war, it is young men. The old dudes gives themselves a buffer layer. War seems to be a way to get rid of young dudes. If you have too many young dudes they can upset a stagnant culture with their idealism and restless energy. It is better to use that energy to upset another culture. During the Viet Nam war, many of the restless young dudes stayed home in protest. They were suppose to fight Charlie, and reek havoc elsewhere. Instead they remained internal and reeked havoc in our own culture, causing a radical change in the status quo. War can help to avoid this internal havoc.

 

One may infer that if a culture is not able to accommodate the restless young males, they begin to act up. If you don't give them an outlet within culture, they could cause problems. So pile them together in an army and harness that restless energy, but use it up elsewhere. This thins them down while also adding more resources, so when they come back, they are more settled. As long as a culture can evolve, this restless energy is absorbed. Dictatorships are often stagnant cultures so they can't absorb the restless energy. They may need to project it outward for internal stability.

[Tolouse]

that makes a lot of sense, HydroBond

 

thanks

[CraigD]

to keel the issue, i was talking about Morality, not Mortality

:evil: That one extra letter makes a big difference. My misreading sent me off on an irrelevant tangent, pretty much for the rest of my post :(

 

after WWII, the economy was stablized, jobs increased, babies boomed, and life was good.

You could add to that list boosts in engineering, medicine, and a host of technologies, plus heightened public support of basic science leading to many great scientific achievements, general improvements in education, profound influence on the arts … the list defies summary.

 

So I can clearly see the reasonableness of the subsequent claim

after WWII, the economy was stablized, jobs increased, babies boomed, and life was good. why was it good? it has to do with the mentality of war also. how can you know peace unless you have experienced war? how can you know what is good if you have never experienced bad?

I also, however, can see several flaws with it.

 

The first, in order of its severity to humanity, is what I term “the orthodox resolution of Fermi’s paradox” (or what is more commonly termed “the doomsday argument”), which I believe to be the one Fermi had in mind when he’s said to have chatted up the idea with fellow physicists and nuclear weapon designers in 1950. In short, this resolution answers the question “why can’t we find any advanced civilizations in space” with the grim conclusion “because shortly after any civilization becomes capable of engineering capable of making them detectable from other star systems, they also become capable of destroying themselves, and within a short time, do.”

 

War is not immune to improvement, and while, as the population statistics I cited previously indicate, we have not yet managed to conduct it so effectively that we reduce the world population, it is far from certain that we will not, possibly in the very near future. Though a subject of considerable debate, cold war era estimates of a world-wide nuclear war killing about half of human kind in less than a year are not, I think, unlikely to be correct, nor are estimates that biological weapons could be even more lethal. The achievement of spaceflight, and likely increases in space engineering ability within the next century suggest to me that future weapons capable of suddenly annihilating all large animal life on Earth are very feasible.

 

History shows that, due to “the mentality of war” aspect of human nature, militaries sometimes attempt to utterly annihilate whole nations. The large scale success of such attempts appears to have failed only because of technical inability – it’s simply, technically, difficult to kill every human being in large area. This technical shortcoming is not necessarily insurmountable. If humanity becomes technically capable of total genocide, and the mentality resulting in the will to attempt it remains, humanity may, succeed in self-anihilation.

 

Most of the other flaws I can see with the argument that war accomplishes good things that no other activity can are technical and semantic, of much less significance, so I’ll omit their mention. The assertion that the act of waging or the experiencing of war imparts a vital moral lesson that cannot otherwise be learned, while perhaps objectively irrelevant, is very significant if one accepts the worldview that matters of soul/spirit have primacy over those of the material world. If this is the case, I think a crucial question is

what is war?

In particular, is the activity necessary to gain the vital moral lesson only war can impart the same as the activity that, per Fermi’s hint, carries the potential for human self-extermination?

 

Or could an activity other than the application of the best available science and engineering by sovereign states to the resolution of disagreements through the use of force teach the same moral lesson. For example, is the settling of personal disputes through mortal combat – dueling – equivalent or better at imparting the necessary moral lesson, than all-out modern war? Or, is civil violence, such as engaging in and defending against violent crime, or belonging to a violent gang?

 

Could, and should, a civilization that has eliminated warfare such as WWII, promote, sanction, or even require lethal or non-lethal violence activity by individuals and groups, as a means of satisfying a critical human psychological or moral need?

[REASON]

that makes a lot of sense, HydroBond

 

thanks

 

No! Sorry Tolouse. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

 

Talking about war being useful because you can thin out the population of "young dudes" while harnessing their energy in destructive forays abroad to capitalize on the resources of other nations sounds a lot like insanity to me. Not to mention utterly illegal according to international laws for which we are signatory.

 

I'm trying to understand what you're getting at Tolouse. It sounds to me like you're saying that because war has the ability to reduce populations of people while simultaneously making us more aware of the value of life, we should see it as moral. Huh? Is that what you're stating? Is that why you put a discussion about war in a theology thread? Doesn't that seem completely oxymoronic to you? It's like saying, "the more we kill, the more we recognize the value of life." :evil:

 

Even you stated that the end of WWII resulted in a baby boom. Obviously any population reductions due to warring would be offset by these baby booms here at home don't you think? Then we have more "young dudes" to deal with. I guess we'll just have to send them back out to the front lines again for more warring.

 

Can you not see how hugely dysfunctional this is for a society and for international relations? Do you see how taking this position and talking like this presents us as a threat to peace and stability to people in other nations? Is that what you want to project for our democratic society and for our notion of liberty and justice for all?

 

Listening to you guys (with the obvious exception of CraigD) sit there and find some pathetic way of rationalizing the ravages, destruction, and utter definition of social failure war represents from the comforts of your home computer desks only reveals the level of ignorance and denial you are in as to the wrongdoing for which we are currently involved, and your inability to express empathy for those whose lives are torn apart by this or any war.

 

The only time there is any morality in war is when it is used in legitimate defence of a nation or nations under military attack by another nation or nations. Aggressive or so called "preemptive" war policy is immoral by it's very nature, and leads to more immoral behavior by those who perpetrate it, justify it, and defend it. All you have to do to recognize this is to consider the abundant amount of secrecy, falsehoods, and scare tactics that are born of such conflicts.

 

IMHO, your imperialistic, moral war mentality raises some serious red flags, and is dangerous to our image as a beacon of justice and democracy, and our long term survival as a society and a nation.

[Tolouse]

i was simply stating that an off-balance of the populace could also do good even when meant to do harm

 

also, throughout history there has always been violence and wars. i don't think we've seen the end of it any time soon.

 

but what i was trying to get at is tilting the balances of war and non-war on a global scale. and the positive and negative side effects of such

[modest]

if one was to read the holy scriptures, they would find that even God's people went to war with other countries.

 

with watching the over-population of today's world and total disrespect of law and order, i have come to believe that war is a necessary evil that we must have

 

Tolouse,

 

I think you’re taking the wrong message from the old testament.

 

The motivation in warfare was not to thin the human population. The Judeo-Christian mindset follows the biblical instructions to be fruitful and multiply. Making warfare to limit population growth would be counter to that mindset.

 

Warfare in the old testament was geared toward killing people who weren’t part of your tribe or race or “children of [your ancestor].” Once that’s accomplished you can take the land your enemy inhabited and cultivate your own population there. The message and intent wasn’t to limit all human population – only the uncircumcised or non-Jewish population.

 

The closest modern analogy is probably Germany’s treatment of Poland in world war II. Neighborhoods of one people were liquidated and replaced with another kind of people. Or, the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda.

 

Of course, this isn’t moral. It wasn’t moral when Germany did it and it wasn’t moral when the Israelites did it. But, that’s what religion is for. It takes a bad idea – an idea people know is wrong deep down in their conscience – and makes it seem justified. A good example (and related to the topic) is birth control. Birth control seems moral and justified. On it’s on merits it can be successfully debated as a good thing. It takes religious rules of conduct to make that idea seem bad. It takes religious rules of conduct to make warfare and the complete and utter annihilation of a different group of people seem like a moral thing.

 

-modest

[Tolouse]

Tolouse,

 

I think you’re taking the wrong message from the old testament.

 

The motivation in warfare was not to thin the human population. The Judeo-Christian mindset follows the biblical instructions to be fruitful and multiply. Making warfare to limit population growth would be counter to that mindset.

 

Warfare in the old testament was geared toward killing people who weren’t part of your tribe or race or “children of [your ancestor].” Once that’s accomplished you can take the land your enemy inhabited and cultivate your own population there. The message and intent wasn’t to limit all human population – only the uncircumcised or non-Jewish population.

 

The closest modern analogy is probably Germany’s treatment of Poland in world war II. Neighborhoods of one people were liquidated and replaced with another kind of people. Or, the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda.

 

Of course, this isn’t moral. It wasn’t moral when Germany did it and it wasn’t moral when the Israelites did it. But, that’s what religion is for. It takes a bad idea – an idea people know is wrong deep down in their conscious – and makes it seem justified. A good example (and related to the topic) is birth control. Birth control seems moral and justified. On it’s on merits it can be successfully debated as a good thing. It takes religious rules of conduct to make that idea seem bad. It takes religious rules of conduct to make warfare and the complete and utter annihilation of a different group of people seem like a moral thing.

 

-modest

 

yeah, i probably took it wrong from the OT. how is birth control moral though? i thought what was taught was be fruitful and prosper.

 

but you do have a solid good point though about how religion seems to have been using religious principles to have wars

 

maybe its because i am active duty military, i see it as a way though. and how so many positive things came from so many bad things.

 

i mean, there wouldn't be a US if there wasn't a Revolution or Civil War. there would not be freedom if not for war. and also the technological advances produced from advances on the battlefield

 

there is a reason that China is over-populated as it is because they have not been involved in any recent wars. there are countries that have had to off their babies simply for the reason of population control

 

i know there is a lot of religious views in having wars, but there are also a lot of secular views

[modest]

yeah, i probably took it wrong from the OT. how is birth control moral though? i thought what was taught was be fruitful and prosper.

 

You apparently didn't take to heart what I said about the difference between religion and morality.

 

there is a reason that China is over-populated as it is because they have not been involved in any recent wars.

 

You apparently didn't take to heart what REASON and CraidD said about war and population.

 

-modest

[Tolouse]

So I can clearly see the reasonableness of the subsequent claim. I also, however, can see several flaws with it.

 

The first, in order of its severity to humanity, is what I term “the orthodox resolution of Fermi’s paradox” (or what is more commonly termed “the doomsday argument”), which I believe to be the one Fermi had in mind when he’s said to have chatted up the idea with fellow physicists and nuclear weapon designers in 1950. In short, this resolution answers the question “why can’t we find any advanced civilizations in space” with the grim conclusion “because shortly after any civilization becomes capable of engineering capable of making them detectable from other star systems, they also become capable of destroying themselves, and within a short time, do.”

 

War is not immune to improvement, and while, as the population statistics I cited previously indicate, we have not yet managed to conduct it so effectively that we reduce the world population, it is far from certain that we will not, possibly in the very near future. Though a subject of considerable debate, cold war era estimates of a world-wide nuclear war killing about half of human kind in less than a year are not, I think, unlikely to be correct, nor are estimates that biological weapons could be even more lethal. The achievement of spaceflight, and likely increases in space engineering ability within the next century suggest to me that future weapons capable of suddenly annihilating all large animal life on Earth are very feasible.

 

History shows that, due to “the mentality of war” aspect of human nature, militaries sometimes attempt to utterly annihilate whole nations. The large scale success of such attempts appears to have failed only because of technical inability – it’s simply, technically, difficult to kill every human being in large area. This technical shortcoming is not necessarily insurmountable. If humanity becomes technically capable of total genocide, and the mentality resulting in the will to attempt it remains, humanity may, succeed in self-anihilation.

 

Most of the other flaws I can see with the argument that war accomplishes good things that no other activity can are technical and semantic, of much less significance, so I’ll omit their mention. The assertion that the act of waging or the experiencing of war imparts a vital moral lesson that cannot otherwise be learned, while perhaps objectively irrelevant, is very significant if one accepts the worldview that matters of soul/spirit have primacy over those of the material world. If this is the case, I think a crucial question is

 

what is war?

 

In particular, is the activity necessary to gain the vital moral lesson only war can impart the same as the activity that, per Fermi’s hint, carries the potential for human self-extermination?

 

Or could an activity other than the application of the best available science and engineering by sovereign states to the resolution of disagreements through the use of force teach the same moral lesson. For example, is the settling of personal disputes through mortal combat – dueling – equivalent or better at imparting the necessary moral lesson, than all-out modern war? Or, is civil violence, such as engaging in and defending against violent crime, or belonging to a violent gang?

 

Could, and should, a civilization that has eliminated warfare such as WWII, promote, sanction, or even require lethal or non-lethal violence activity by individuals and groups, as a means of satisfying a critical human psychological or moral need?

 

i agree. and i am starting to see this as a Philosophies & Humanities discussion more than anything.

 

and i did read the Fermi Paradox

 

it may be more a psychological need than a moral need

 

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself

See also: Doomsday argument

Technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or space flight technology. Possible means of annihilation include nuclear war, biological warfare or accidental contamination, nanotechnological catastrophe, ill-advised physics experiments, or a Malthusian catastrophe after the deterioration of a planet's ecosphere. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in mainstream scientific theorizing. Indeed, there are probabilistic arguments which suggest that humanity's end may occur sooner rather than later. In 1966 Sagan and Shklovskii suggested that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales.[27] Self-annihilation may also be viewed in terms of thermodynamics: insofar as life is an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, the "external transmission" or interstellar communicative phase may be the point at which the system becomes unstable and self-destructs.[28]

 

From a Darwinian perspective, self-destruction would be a paradoxical outcome of evolutionary success. The evolutionary psychology that developed during the competition for scarce resources over the course of human evolution has left the species subject to aggressive, instinctual drives. These compel humanity to consume resources, increase longevity, and to reproduce — in part, the very motives that led to the development of technological society. It seems likely that intelligent extraterrestrial life would evolve similarly and thus face the same possibility of self-destruction. And yet, for species self-destruction to provide a good answer to Fermi's Question, it would have to be very nearly universal. That is, this possibility would have a probability of very nearly 1.0. It has been suggested that a successful alien species would be a superpredator, as is Homo sapiens.[29]

 

total anihilation is a big issue though, and any country could try that at any given time

[Southtown]

The bible is not moral. It is a means to an end. The lineage had to continue until Messiah. Now all are free, even the dead.

[Boerseun]

The bible is not moral. It is a means to an end. The lineage had to continue until Messiah.

The Bible is neither moral nor a means to an end. The Bible is merely an historical account (somewhat incoherent and often self-contradictory) of the Jewish people (the Old Testament) and a flimsy conglomeration of stories that contradict each other about a guy who claimed to be the Son of God (The Gospels are contradictory - pick one and discard the rest, but which one???)

Now all are free, even the dead.

As long as you have to work for a living, with being fired and starving of hunger in poverty the alternative, nobody's free.

And the dead are just that, dead, albeit in various stages of decomposition.

 

But besides that, we're getting sidetracked, and off-topic.

[Southtown]

I value your opinion above that of the preachers', but that isn't saying much.