I heard confusion among us about the death of Osama Bin Laden, and the confusion echoed in my own mind. The conclusion I came to is a familiar one: if my thinking about something leads me to confusion one of the causes of that might be that I am trying to reason about something not amenable to reason. I'm a lawyers so I can take a lot of different sides and argue them convincingly, but I once had a poster on my wall that said "People who argue better are not necessarily right."
Thinking about how to react to the killing of Osama Bin Laden is confusing because, like all issues of morality, reason cannot help but fail us. But that's fine because I don't need reason to know how I am supposed to react to this.
My experience has been that any time I have used coercion (or entertained the possibility)--be it physical force or sarcasm--to protect myself or someone else from something I perceived as threatening or something I feared I have not been made safe and my condition has been compromised in the effort.
Christ/The Light has made it clear to me that, regardless of the harm I do others in this regard, I do harm to myself, to my spiritual (and psychological and even, perhaps, physical) condition. I know because it has been revealed to me (no thinking necessary) that as the powers and thrones and governments (and those acting under their control) struggle and war among themselves around me I am supposed to resist being sucked into it (by thinking errors like the "just war doctrine" or some concept of "justice") and, if the way is opened to me, to do what there is to do to ameliorate the suffering and damage done to all involved.
I can't say if that's what others are suppose to do, but I know it's what I am supposed to do. It's not that this "makes sense" to me or that it "stands to reason"--because often it doesn't. It's just that if I don't go with what I know, as opposed to what I can be persuaded (or persuade myself) to do, I am going to hear about it later and I am going to be sorry.
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