36 reasons to oppose war
Thursday, March 4th, 2010Tonight my friend and former pastor Sally Schreiner Youngquist, now community leader of Reba Place Fellowship, showed me some pictures and documents that belonged to her father, C. Bryson Schreiner, a Pittsburgh-area attorney who passed away earlier this year at the age of 96.
One of the treasures she shared is a statement that he and two other members of a peace committee submitted to their congregation before the U.S. entered World War II. They warned about the “imperceptible poisons of propaganda, prejudice and passion” that make can us act contrary to our better judgment about the effects of war. The statement appeared in the Pittsburgh Press on November 12, 1939, as a letter to the editor from the peace committee’s chair, Daniel R. Carroll.
Read on …
WHY WE DO NOT WANT WAR
No one wants War. But in addition everyone owes it to himself, his country and his fellowmen to think out clearly why he does not want War before the imperceptible poisons of propaganda, prejudice and passion make it difficult or impossible to do so. To help in this task your Christian Peace Committee has prepared the following brief list of reasons why we are convinced that the United States should not engage in any war except as a very last resort and in self-defense only. For these reasons also we should constantly thank God for thus far sparing our country and implore his mercy upon all of the unfortunate belligerents.
WE DO NOT WANT WAR BECAUSE:
ECONOMICALLY -
1. War is a non-productive use of capital and labor.
2. War destroys property and man-power.
3. War is expensive to wage.
4. War dislocates the economic system, stifles initiative and competition.
5. War creates future burdens; debts, taxes, disabled veterans, widows and orphans.
6. War is followed by economic depression, unemployment, poverty.
BIOLOGICALLY -
1. War kills human beings.
2. War produces starvation and malnutrition.
3. War wounds and disables, often for life.
4. War spawns new plagues and increases the virulence of diseases.
5. War throws off balance the ratio of the sexes.
6. War causes deterioration of the human race by leaving the less fit to survive and propagate.
POLITICALLY -
1. War results in confusion of loyalties and shifting of boundaries.
2. War disturbs international and domestic law and order.
3. War creates subject nationalities and oppressed minorities.
4. War sows the seeds of future rebellion and revenge.
5. War requires centralized regimentation which is the death of individual liberty.
6. War subordinates democratic processes to military despotism.
CULTURALLY -
1. War distorts the reason and warps the mind with passion and prejudice.
2. War debauches science into an agency of destruction.
3. War stifles the arts, and destroys works of art.
4. War perverts institutions of learning into bureaus of propaganda.
5. War sidetracks education from pursuit of the true and useful.
6. War interrupts cultural progress.
MORALLY -
1. War cheapens the value of the human individual.
2. War breaks down moral standards and right inhibitions.
3. War brings out and inflames the worst in human nature.
4. War deepens the grooves of national and racial egotism and selfishness.
5. War breeds crime waves and trains gangsters.
6. War is an incompatible means for attaining the goal of moral perfection.
RELIGIOUSLY -
1. War disobeys the Sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”
2. War usurps the judgment seat of God to whom alone vengeance belongs.
3. War violates Christ’s command: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. ”
4. War transgresses the Golden Rule.
5. War contradicts the Brotherhood of Man, and Fatherhood of God.
6. War exalts the national state above the Kingdom of Heaven.
Respectfully submitted,
Christian Peace Committee of the Mt. Lebanon United Presbyterian Young Peoples’ ForumDaniel R. Carroll, Chairman; C. Bryson Schreiner, Frances E. Mayne.
