Jeremy Pierce and I have been having a long discussion in the comment thread on my post Doug ridicules Christian pacifism. Here I want to bring out one issue which came up in his most recent comment. In an earlier comment he had written:

It’s simply a moral principle that we should protect others

and I had replied:

This is where I fundamentally differ from you, especially if in doing so we kill or wound a third party. I’m not saying it is always wrong to do so either, but there is no sense in which this is a moral imperative for all, where the others have not been specifically entrusted to our care. To go beyond this is to be a “meddler” [referring to an earlier discussion of 1 Peter 4:15], as so well defined by you as “an enforcer of morality in places where you have no authority to do so”. So, yes, protect your own children, and play the hero when you see a mugging if you like (but don’t deliberately shoot the mugger dead), but it is not your responsibility to protect the children of Iraq.

To this Jeremy responded:

I have very strong resistance to the claim that I have no responsibility to treat the people of Iraq as my neighbors. Just because they don’t live next to you doesn’t mean they don’t count as neighbors in the sense that Jesus had in mind in the Good Samaritan parable. He deliberately chose a case of a foreigner helping an Israelite, indeed a foreigner most Israelites wouldn’t have seen any responsibility toward.

But does the parable of the Good Samaritan imply that as a Christian I should abandon pacifism and support armed intervention in Iraq? I don’t think so. Continue reading →

Doug Chaplin’s blog Metacatholic is one of my favourites, for me the best new blog of 2007.

But Doug does sometimes make some absurd claims. His most recent ones relate to Christian pacifism in the Anabaptist tradition. Here is some of what he has written Continue reading →

Apparently the 2011 UK census will be run by a private company, and one of the two leading bidders for the contract is the US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. There are various reasons why I find this objectionable:

• Perhaps the least of them: the company manufactures arms. I am not a lover of arms manufacturers, but perhaps they should be encouraged to branch out into peaceful activities like running censuses.
• This is a foreign company and should not be given access to sensitive information about British citizens.
• “They also focus on intelligence and surveillance work and boast of their ability to provide ‘integrated threat information’ that combines information from many different sources. … This [census] information would be very useful to Lockheed Martin’s intelligence work”.
• The choice of Lockheed Martin could compromise the usefulness of the census, because “fears that the data might not be safe could lead to many people not filling in their Census forms.”

The last two points are taken from this post, which also explains what action you can take if, like me, you wish to express your objection to this.

But then I would not want to suggest that the UK government itself runs the census, given its continuing appalling track record on protection of confidential personal data.

Thanks to Pam for drawing this to my attention.