On the other hand, war, like natural disasters such as earthquakes, produces in many deep thinkers a despair of religion, a loss of faith. What sort of god could look himself in the mirror when he shaves in the morning after he had done the sorts of things that happen during wars? The great earthquake that shook Lisbon in 1755 shook European religious faith. "How could God do this?" they asked, or, "Can there be a God, if this can happen?" The disaster inspired Voltaire to parody Leibniz, author of the great justification of God, in the form of the fictional Dr. Pangloss in Candide (1759). By this reckoning, there should be no theologians in foxholes.

Many Christians, beginning with Jesus himself, have preached against war. Some years ago the Pope proclaimed, in his Christmas message, that there should be no more war, for which one cynical columnist mocked him with faint praise; after all (the colummist wrote), the Pope might have said, “War! let’s have lots of war!” But of course, Christians have at the same time waged many wars, justifying themselves by claiming that God is on their side--and I don’t just mean the Crusades (see “The Great Pumpkin Goes to War” on this blog). Monty Python brutally satirized this aspect of Christianity (and the Crusades) in the scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which the Archbishop of Canterbury blesses all the weapons, grenades and so forth, intoning in high church rhetoric the destructive power of each one. The Quakers and other Christian conscientious objectors are always in the minority.

Some religions avoid the moral ambiguity about war that Christianity wrestles with by having a god who is frankly warlike, who drinks hot blood and is precisely the sort of person you would think could have thought up a place like the detention camps in Guantanamo. Hindus, for all their philosophical idealism (or perhaps, more precisely because that idealism frees them to think the very worst of apparent reality), are much more realistic about the relationship between god and war. They worship gods like the goddess Kali, who has a necklace of human skulls and a girdle made of childrens’ hands, or the god Shiva who, like Nero in Rome, dances/fiddles while the universe burns--indeed, whose dance is precisely what makes the universe burn.
The Bhagavad Gita, one of the major texts of Hinduism today, is a conversation in which the incarnate god Krishna persuades the hero Arjuna to fight in a war against his friends and cousins, a war from which Arjuna had recoiled.

But some of the Hindu gods (and even these same gods, in another mode of worship) also promise a deeper, more philosophical peace, not the sort of peace that comes when you’ve won the war by massacring hundreds of thousands of people whose land you wanted to take over, but the peace that comes when you’ve figured out that there is no reason ever to have war at all. This seems to me a highly reasonable sort of faith.