Churchgoers from around the world are trying to prevent the next Eastern European genocide before it happens.
Their tool in the fight is a weapon that is thousands of years old — but still as relevant today as ever.
Four thousand copies of the Holy Bible are being issued to soldiers in the Serbian army in an effort to create a moral transformation in the nation’s military, as first reported by The Telegraph.
The program is being led by the Bible Society, a Christian group based in Britain, and funding has been contributed to the group from sources worldwide.
Colonel Sasha Milutinovic, the Chief of Religion Section, General Staff of the Serbian Army, welcomed the move.
Milutinovic said, “I hope it will not only improve our morals but to bring us, in the 21st century, back into to this time when really people believed in eternal life.”
He continued, “My view is that it’s about God’s love. I want to bring people back to these eternal values. We made some mistakes in the past and we forgot the New Testament. The New Testament is better than international law: humanitarian laws are based on this. Our codes of conduct are from the New Testament and we use them in our codes of behavior. We want to come back to this. We believe in this traditionally, but it is hard to find a Bible in an Orthodox house. But this situation is changing.”
The Serbian Army was accused – and many of its leaders convicted – of international war crimes for their role in ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav civil war and the fight in Kosovo in the 1990s.
If the military, their leaders and the politicians tried to live by the teachings of the Bible a most of our problems would disappear. Of the problems we saw with abuses by our own military in the Middle East many stem from the lack of teaching of absolute right and wrong. The Bible is good at teaching the absolutes. Secular society seems to teach a spectrum of grays where there is no right and wrong. Absolute right and wrong and a future judgment day can go a long way toward more humane treatment by the military.
Godd advice for EVERYBODY.
Nowhere in the New Testament are we taught to do anything but defend ourselves. In the early days of Christianity, a man who joined the Roman Army was immediately dis-fellowshiped, because the Roman Army was seen as an army of conquest. As such, its actions would have been seen as inconsistent with the values taught in the New Testament. We are taught to defend and protect the weak and the innocent, so an army of defense is necessary to repel the forces of evil.
That having been said, “post-Christian” Europe has been ridiculously complacent in their idea that generosity will beget benevolence in Muslims and an adoption of “Western values”. European socialists / liberals are learning, to their dismay, that there are some people in the world, who are interested in taking everything you have (including your life), no matter how benevolent you are toward them. They are outraged that Muslim radicals are behaving viciously toward them. They don’t get it that Muslims consider themselves morally superior to Westerners and that they hate Westerners for their immorality. (Because Mohammed preached violence against “infidels” it is consistent with their theology.) It is not surprising that they attack those whom they see as decadent in precisely those venues that are symbolic of that decadence. It is ironic that pulling Bibles off the shelf, dusting them off and handing them out to the troops, is seen as a way to pacify Europe. We live in interesting times.
The bible IS a war crime.
The Bible is a love remedy.
I do know there is a bible in every motel room drawer & I have never seen a war take place in a motel room in the USA, so it obviously works!