Nuclear Arms Are Frightening, But Not Sinful

I will add my "thank you" to Rabbi Hirschfield for his excellent commentary, and I also appreciate the thoughtful and on target responses by the several responders who have preceded me. Well Done!

I think that nuclear power is here to stay, and like it or not, that includes nuclear weapons. Some kind of international containment policy is desirable, but we should not delude ourselves into believing that there is any way to be absolutely certain a rogue nation or rogue individual will not make or steal and detonate a bomb. We can hope and try to prevent such evil, but we cannot insure that it will not happen.

There is not likely to ever be a world social order based on either justice or love, but until the bomb falls (or germs get loose) I can try to inflict both justice and love on my little corner of the world.

I do not know what it is that "God wants", or doesn't want, for that matter. Noone else does, either. It is all talk from sitting positions that philosophize and theorize about what is Unknown, and extrapolate from interpretation of what are regarded as Sacred Text.

What is far more clear is what humans want. And that is what is far more a present and pertinent issue. A human may base his or her opinions, philosophies, votes, on their beliefs of "what God wants", and that is the power of religion. But it is still what the human wants that is at issue, and the point.

Rabbi Hirschfield makes several good points, and one of them is that there has been "no military technological capacity that has ever been put back in the box." I do not know if that is exactly true, but I would bet a bucket of bucks that none that have been effective have been disregarded. And from a purely military standpoint there has been no other form of weapon in history that is as effective at killing. If you can control it, that is, and if you have no interest in near future maintaining of viability of enemy infrastructure and usefulness of the land.

Humans have over centuries added to their knowledge and skills and abilities, and currently live as gods, if seen from the mind of earlier societies. We are unlikely to forgo the conveniences and powers that we employ. But we are arguably far too adolescent yet to deal with some of the moral and ethical aspects of powers that we have at our fingertips. Nuclear weaponry is one of those powers that I fear we are far too immature to deal with.

Yet like the child that gets a loaded gun in their hands, here we have it in our hands. You and I may know better, and put the gun down. How do we keep it out of the hands of the disturbed kid that wants to play war, for real?

An interesting, thoughtful essay. However, I wonder if it is true that we have always wished to become more and more like God, a view that, arguably, has been with the West since the Renaissance.

It might be more accurate to say that we have, since the late Middle Ages, endeavored to become the anthropomorphic god of our Greek imaginings. God, as an abstract notion, God, as obligation to justice, has not often been our model. Nor should it be. We can never "become" that God. What we can do, but won't, is to acknowledge our responsibilities to It.

The foregoing is from an atheist. If she believed, the God she described would be the One she worshiped.

This is an excellent essay. I especially like the point about power and how religious leaders often have so little to say about power. I would, of course, make Reinhold Niebuhr an exception to that statement. His "Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist" explains, like so many of his other writings, why an adequate social ethic must be based on justice rather than love. It is however important to note that nuclear weapons are different. Never before in the development of weaponry has there been such a distinction between defense (where a weapon for deterrence can be used shoud deterrence fail) and deterrence (could these weapons be used? in an all out nuclear war the ends would not be just.)

Thank you, Rabbi, for the most eloquent response to the question. I especially liked:
"It is simply a realistic acceptance that the entire arc of human existence has been one in which we take on greater and greater power, both the power to heal and the power to destroy, the power to nurture life and the power to destroy it. In fact, it seems that the two capacities have always gone hand in hand, and it doesn't seem wise to step back from that empowerment."

Indeed, the evolution of our species is one in which altruism and xenophobia walked hand in hand to produce us, a species with true choice about which of our dual natures we embrace, sure in the knowledge that other people and the organizations they construct must face the same choice. We must walk the dynamic path between compassion and wariness. Weapons are not the problem, where and when to use them is the problem and their absence when needed is a fatal problem.

The president's vision of a world where nuclear weapons or any weapons at all are not needed is a fine Utopian ideal, but we live in a world where the price of freedom is still eternal vigilance.