www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Power, Responsibilty, and Trust

There may or may not be much to criticize concerning the American Governments takeover of Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm neither surprised nor disappointed that we found no WMD in Iraq. I think the issue is irrelavent. This has never been a Christian nation so why sweat the small stuff? The real issue is this "What is to be done, if anything about the continued brutalization of people and the continued emanation of terror from these countries?"

It is popular to blame the West for all of the troubles in the world. It's popular to blame the West for the tyrants who brutalize Christians in Muslim countries. The problem with that is that brutalizing Christians and Jews by leaders in many Muslim countries has been a way of life for 1400 years. Several attempts have been made to get Muslim governments to stop this, the Crusades, Imperialism, and now American intervention, but one would think from listening to American Academics and the American Media is that any intervention is evil.

I say, balogne! The Church is no friend of the world view that supports Western Materialism but I'm sick of the whining that so many countries offer about the mean old West being the cause of all of their problems. I'm even a bit impatient with some on this board who refuse to read or at least refuse to heed the many reports of even faithful peace loving Muslims who point out that the backwardness and barbarity in many Muslim nations is caused not by the West but by Islam itself.

It's not the Islam doesn't have some fine teachings. They do. But they also have some passages in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sunnah which without much effort can be cited in support of brutality against all who won't submit to Islam. It is also conceded that many Islamic nations have been hijacked by very ignorant and very brutal people.

But if a sinner is sinning who must be held most responsible for the sin. The sinner. If that sinner won't reform and does no harm to anyone else then the most an outsider can do is try to reason with him. However, if the sin harms others then it makes sense that those with the power to do so are compelled to take action to protect and rescue the suffering.

I'm cynical that we haven't gone after Saudi Arabia. But I'm cheered that at least we have gone after Iraq and Afghanistan.

I would that those who claim Church affiliation would lead us in doing something to help the suffering millions in so many countries and would stop whining about what the American government is doing.

I believe that it is childish and naive to complain about someone who is doing something when they themselves are doing virtually noting.

I have much more to say on the topic.

Dan L

In the London Times (May 1, 2005) a columnist pondered the do gooder approach to helping third world countries.

"Central to his thesis was the following, one supposes rhetorical, question: "Do we want to live in a world where trust seems natural?" Or, as a corollary, one in which "rivalry or mutual isolation are the obvious forms of behaviour?"

This is philosophical deep water, even for someone with a quite impeccable, top-of-the-range beard. We might reply simply by saying: "Yes, I'd rather live in a world where we all trust each other purely as a matter of course, rather than through a social contract formed by commonly assumed reciprocity of actions. However, beardo, that's the way it is, unfortunately."

We might also question quite what Rowan means by his deployment of the word "natural". Trust, like altruism, is wholly natural when it confers a reciprocal advantage. The problem with his rhetorical question is that the two states he identifies as antithetical are, in fact, not so at all.

Indeed, trust occurs precisely because we live in a world characterised by rivalry and mutual isolation. Therefore we need to construct an appropriate mechanism for ensuring co-operation. This may be a bleak view of the human condition - but simply because something isn't very nice does not mean that it isn't correct.

Thus it is with Third World debt. Like it or not, countries that reschedule and reschedule their debt burden, or have vast chunks of it written off, will find their credit ratings taking a hit. It is an inescapable effect of that thing we call trust or, rather, in this case, a profound lack of it. And it is why many Third World countries, such as Laos, resist such easy temptations. It is also why other Third World countries that are diligently paying off their debts and thus improving their economies get very angry when rival states are suddenly given a free ride because of their utter incompetence. Trust cannot be conferred upon an individual, or a country, simply because we have an insuperable desire to make the world a nicer place. If we were to do that the whole concept of trust would lose its meaning.

Similarly, the notion that we might eliminate Third World impoverishment simply by bunging vast amounts of money the way of, say, Somalia or Sudan is, these days, almost universally derided. There is a growing body of opinion which holds that aid has actually worsened the plight of Africa, encouraged misrule and led to economic collapse and civil conflict.

As Michael Edwards of the World Bank once put it: "Africa's crisis is one of governance."

Too often aid sustains regimes that are corrupt, violent, staggeringly useless or, usually, all three. Too often aid is used to finance opportunistic territorial wars against similarly corrupt and useless countries.

The recent 20th anniversary of Live Aid should have provoked us to examine precisely how the Ethiopian government behaved once Geldof and his friends had bunged in all that cash: repression, border wars, corruption, civil war. Instead we wrung our hands, noted that Ethiopia was actually worse off than it was 20 years back and insisted that more money be poured into that benighted country.

In other words, we reached for the easy answer - that Ethiopia's plight was not a result of human wickedness, untrustworthiness or stupidity, but a sort of act of God aided and abetted by the perfidiousness of the affluent West. Whereas, in reality, it is a result of very bad governance aided and abetted by the mindless magnanimity of the affluent West.

Williams is right - trust is the key to solving the problem of Third World debt. You may even, if you wish, concur with him that trust is a God-given quality. But either way it is a contingent commodity and cannot exist in a vacuum nor be artificially imposed.

When we look at Africa, and at our undoubted affluence, our conscience pricks us and we reach for the closest thing to hand to salve the wound - our money.

I would be interested to hear a Christian leader contemplate that this is altogether too glib and easy a solution."

How does one help others to become interdepedent and responsible rather than dependent and self destructive? Should America or the Church ignore the problems of the world? If we try to help shouldn't we be wiser than Rowan? Are there ways of helping without crippling?

These are simply open ended questions. I don't have an axe to grind, except perhaps a bit of frustration over seeing that both the state and the Church seems a bit hamstrung to actually help people of other countries.

Dan L