Welcome and Peace!

I would like to recommend to you John Dear's autobiography A Persistent Peace The forward to the book was written by Martin Sheen, a political activist who has been arrested with John on a few occassions. John gave me permission to include the forward so that you can see what a "normal" person has to say about this man. Below you will also find a clip of John speaking in New York about his book. the lecture was given 11/12/08 at St. James Church
Johnson City, NY.
To read the Forward click here.
Just to give you a little info, John made the point that Gandhi said that Jesus was the most active person of nonviolence. He mentioned that from 1903 to 1948 Gandhi reflected from 4:00 AM to 5:00 AM and from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM on the Sermon on the Mount every day. How many Christians spend more than an hour a year reflecting on the Sermon?

Please note: this video is provided by Essential Dissent and there are sponsors that I do not agree with, but I can't cut.

Now I'm going to share with you something that many Christians will probably take exception with. I don't know if Jesus was the second person of the Trinity incarnated or not. Could a human being have had such a charismatic aura that he could have empowered a large number of people without being God? How many people believed in Mithra or the ancient gods of the Greeks or Romans?
How can we prove anything that Jesus was supposed to have taught?
More thoughts on this later.

"There is no question anymore that the Christian church of the first 3
centuries regarded itself as a nonviolent community. It makes perfect sense.
Since their Master faithfully modeled the nonviolent love of friend and
enemy that he taught, they tried to do likewise. And by and large they
succeeded, despite terrible persecutions from Rome, under much of whose
brutal domination Christianity was a capital offense until about 300 C. E.
The first Christians tried to be faithful to Jesus' commandments to "put
away the sword," "do good to those who persecute you," "pray for those who
despitefully use you," "love your neighbor as yourself," "turn the other
cheek," "love your enemies" and "love as I have loved you." They regarded
the human body as God's temple here on earth, and, knowing that violence to
a temple was desecration and therefore forbidden, they refused to kill, and
therefore also refused to join and kill for Rome's military. Martyrdom was a
preferred option rather than even using violent means for defense. And the
church flourished in spite of it! The Roman Emperor Constantine recognized
Christianity as a valid religion around 313 C. E. and the persecutions
stopped. The church gradually evolved into the state-church, and before long
Christians were endorsing the un-Christ-like use of homicidal violence in
war. And Christianity has never been the same since.

The dark history of Constantinian Christianity's abuse of power and wealth
is difficult to relate. Christians started joining the military in large
numbers, and by 416 C. E. it was unlawful to be in the Roman army unless one
was a Christian! The police and soldier-enforced tortures of "heretics" by
the church and the massacres of non-Christians in the Crusades was soon
followed by massacres of fellow Christians. The Inquisitions were next, with
church-administered torture and murder of Jews and heretics. Bloody
Reformation wars between Catholics and Protestants were fought with the
blessings of the pope, Luther, Calvin and King Henry VIII of England. In the
Middle Ages, the organized church started actively persecuting, torturing
and murdering millions of women who were feared as female intellectuals,
midwives and "witches."

The use of atomic bombs against the civilian targets of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was perhaps the low point in Christendom's history of
un-Christ-like cruelty and inhumanity to man. It is a little known fact that
ground zero for bomb 2 was the largest Christian church in the Orient. The
Nagasaki Urakami Cathedral's community, which Imperial Japan could not
annihilate over a period of 200 years, was vaporized in 9 nanoseconds by
fellow Christians. And "christian" America still refuses to repent of this
or any of its other war crimes that happen routinely in war.

The above 4 paragraphs are from an essay by Gary G. Kohls, M.D. entitled
Christian Nonviolence and the Church. You can read the whole article by clicking
here.

John F. Kennedy had serious issues with the C.I.A. Kennedy wanted to get the U.S. out of the war in Vietnam and was considering shutting down the C.I.A. This may have been the reason why he was killed, not by Oswald, but by C.I.A. Assassins who were allowed access to positions where they could kill Kennedy and save themselves from being put out of business.

I believe that both Bush and Cheney deserve to be impeached just so the Constitution will be inforced. We are headed down a dark road to facism. The United States is in real trouble now.

Jack M. Balkin, Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale University says this, “The president is right about one thing Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction. Manifesting an aggressive bulling attitude who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed. This person belligerent arrogant and sure of himself truly is the most dangerous person on earth. The problem is his name is George W. Bush and he is our president"

Over the last several years I have tried to understand why Christians have given up on the "commandments" of Jesus who told his followers to love their enemies to pray for their persecutors and not to resist injury.

"Impeachment is more important now than ever. The most serious crimes against peace and humanity and crimes of war have been committed in plain view on TV, worldwide. Iraq lies bleeding and angry with uncounted, unmentioned tens of thousands dead, slaughtered, cities in rubble, hospitals overflowing with critically injured men, women and children, but few emergency medical supplies".Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General.

George W. Bush enlisted with the Air National Guard in Texas and had strings pulled so that he could enlist to dodge the draft that might have sent him to Vietnam. Bush was rumored to have been using drugs and when the Guard changed policy to require random drug testing of pilots, George became unavailable to continue his duties as a reservist without seeking legal separation from the service.

Links on Nonviolence

I would also encourage you to visit some of the web sites where I get my moral and spiritual support.

The first web site is Pax Christi USA. Pax Christi is the national section of the international Catholic Peace Movement.

John Dear, a Jesuit who was coordinating the chaplains who were taking relatives of those who died in the twin towers, is now living in Taos, NM and has This web site where you can read articles as well as talks that he has given. I have read his book Jesus the Rebel: Bearer of God's Peace and Justice. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn why Jesus was really killed.John is currently on tour speaking about his autobiography, A PERSISTENT PEACE: One Man's struggle with a nonviolent world. I am reading it now and I recommend everyone read it. The forward was written by his friend Martin Sheen.

John also has an article about remembering a World War II POW in the Philippines, Fr. Richard McSorley. Richard left us on October 17, 2002. may he rest in peace with Jesus and all of our brothers and sisters. Richard spent a couple of weeks in the diocese of Baton Rouge one August a few years back. I was fortunate to meet with him and even was able to have him speak at St. Joseph's Cathedral in Baton Rouge for Hiroshima Day along with the Japanese Counsel General from the Consulate in New Orleans.

There are many other areas that I would like to share with you but I'll be adding them to my web site as time goes on.

Peace!

I also would like to hear from people on these thoughts, whether you believe as I do, or not. You can e-mail me by clicking here

What If Every Church Had Been A Peace Church?

Gary G. Kohls, MD

Christians have been the major perpetrators of homicidal violence against each other as well as against the world’s non-Christians for the past 1700 years. One of the most embarrassing recent examples is Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants have been killing each other for generations. Rwandan Christians brutally massacred hundreds of thousands of their fellow Christians in the mid-1990s. US Christian soldiers, with the prayers and blessings of their Christian churches back home, mercilessly destroyed, physically, emotionally and spirituality, hundreds of thousands of innocent Central American peasants during the Reagan era. That same church-endorsed military continues its destruction, which includes the spraying of lethal pesticides on peasants and their farms in South America, under the guise of a long-since discredited US drug interdiction policy. And the organized church, perhaps exhibiting a lack of faith in Jesus’ clear gospel commands to practice unconditional love of friends and enemies, remains almost totally silent on the indiscriminate human slaughter that is modern war.

When one looks at the last 1700 years of Christianity through the uncensored lens of honest historians, one can't feel anything but disgust at the cruelty that has been perpetrated with the knowledge and consent of the church of Jesus Christ.

The reality of the Crusades, where Christian soldiers killed without mercy the so-called "enemy of God" pagan occupiers of the Holy Land, is a dark blot on the history of Christianity.

The Inquisitions, where Jews, wise women and other "heretics" were tortured and burned at the stake, often during religious celebrations, went on for 600 years, with the blessings of official church leaders.

The reformation and counter-reformation wars started in the 16th century by those in charge of church doctrine. All sides, Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic and Anglican, believed that one could follow Jesus and simultaneously kill each other as well as any other member of the body of Christ who happened to have a different interpretation of the Bible.

The American Civil War resulted in the deaths of over 600,000 American soldiers, virtually all claiming Christianity as the faith of their fathers, the North using the Bible as justification for total war, the South justifying the institution of slavery. Both sides participated unhesitatingly in the mutual carnage.

Both World Wars I and II were started and fought by Christians against fellow Christians, with the pulpits on all sides ringing with flag-waving patriotism - the people in the pews shouting for blood, glory and victory for the fatherland.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki (and the obliteration of that city, the historical and spiritual center of Oriental Christianity) is still regarded as totally pointless overkill by all credible historians; but the bombing was carried out by an all-Christian bomb crew, whose mission was solemnly blessed by its Catholic and Lutheran chaplains on that day, the infamous August 9, 1945.

The on-going genocide, both military and economic, of indigenous peoples since the arrival of Columbus, is still being perpetrated with the full knowledge, consent and participation of decent, "God-fearing" “bible-believing” Christians and justified by passages found mainly in the pre-Christian scriptures.

Most of the non-Christian world knows without a doubt that Jesus was a pacifist and preached active, nonviolent resistance to evil (rather than the justified violence against "evildoers" that is commonly preached today in most of Christendom). Outside observers know that Jesus was a merciful and compassionate teacher/prophet who renounced homicide and violence in all its forms. Given those facts, one has to wonder what has been going on inside the Christian churches for the last 17 centuries. (It is instructive to recall that Gandhi, a devout Hindu and widely considered the most Christ-like figure in the 20th century, often said that the only people who don't think Jesus was nonviolent are Christians.

And therein lies a serious spiritual problem for the church. History documents clearly that the Christian church of the first three centuries took Jesus' teachings of unconditional love of friend and enemies seriously. Indeed, the church that sprang up among the followers of the nonviolent Jesus started out, as one would expect, as a true peace church. So, if the church of the first few centuries was a peace church, and the latter churches of the last 1700 years have virtually all been either Holy War churches or Justified War churches, one has to wonder: 'What would the world be like now if every church had been a peace church?" A little clear thinking for those who know a modicum of history would come up with a multitude of tantalizing possibilities, including the following:

1) The baptized Catholic Adolf Hitler would have been raised within a progressive peace church by a strong pacifist Catholic mother who would have nurtured and loved and protected little Adolf from the cruelty of his father and the cruelty and anti-Semitism of the Austrian Christian culture he grew up in.

2) The Lutheran Adolf Eichmann, the Russian Orthodox dictator Joseph Stalin, and the Catholics Benito Mussolini and Joseph Goebbels and most of the rest of those of Nazi infamy were baptized Christians, but none of them were ever taught that the Sermon on the Mount was central to the theology of Jesus and that therefore nonviolence was at the core his politics.

3) If every church had been a peace church, the American Christian churches of the South would have rejected the brutal enslavement of blacks Africans and the American Civil War would not have happened.

4) If every church had been a peace church, Christian European monarchs and their obedient Christian soldiers would not have raped Africa, Asia and the Americas into colonial submission over gold, silver and slaves, and the bloody armed revolutions of liberation a century later would not have been fought.

5) If every US church was a peace church, a unified, benevolent United States would be working hard right now to nurture and reconcile with, rather than demonize and marginalize, the officially feared and hated minorities such as Muslims, Palestinians, Jews, blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, and non-white foreigners of various ethnicities and religious persuasions.

6) If every church was a peace church, there would not be the current crippling military budget which makes every program of social uplift unaffordable.

7) If every European church had been a peace church, there would have been no World War I, no oppressive Treaty of Versailles, no Nazi party and no World War II.

8) If every church was a peace church American Christian children would not be cruelly bullying their weaker brothers and sisters in the Columbine high schools of this land, and the victims of bullying would have no reason to shoot back.

9) If every church had been a peace church, professed Christian presidents would not be trying to outspend their predecessors on lethal weapons systems, nor would they become gleeful hanging judges with a need to disprove their suspected wimp-hood by saber-rattling their nations into World War III.

10) And if every church had been a peace church, those who claim discipleship to the nonviolent Jesus would be leading the world to peace, rather than into war.

And the Peaceable Kingdom of God would be at hand.