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Friday, February 20, 2015

No Answer

This segment of Bill O'Reilly's show last night illustrates why pacifism seems irrelevant to a lot of people. O'Reilly had as guests two pacifists, one a Quaker and the other the editor of Sojourners magazine, Jim Wallis. He asked them what we should do to stop ISIS, but, despite being pressed by O'Reilly for an answer, neither of them would, or could, give him one. The most they would offer was a list of things we shouldn't do.
I don't see how else to interpret their refusal to offer any realistic measures to try to stem the barbaric evil being perpetrated by the Islamic State other than as a tacit way of saying that people in the lands under assault by ISIS should just accept their fate. It's apparently better in the view of O'Reilly's guests for these wretched souls to submit to having their daughters taken into sex slavery, their sons beheaded and themselves slaughtered than for anyone to use violence against ISIS to stop it.

O'Reilly is, even by his own admission at the end of the clip, obnoxious, and I rarely can bring myself to watch his show, but obnoxious or not, he was certainly correct when he said to Wallis that he's got nothing. His theology allows him no response to this evil except capitulation to it.