The Demise of Conscience, Part 1

Jacob Hornberger writes:

"After all, can an immoral act be converted into a moral act simply by having the government do it? If stealing is wrong on a private basis, even when the money is used to help others, how is that same act converted into a moral deed when the state is doing it?"...

"Why do Americans continue to embrace the welfare state despite its manifest immorality, damage, and destructiveness? My hunch is that they have lost faith in themselves, a loss that they have replaced with faith in government. They want to be relieved as much as possible of the difficult choices and decisions that life presents them. By delegating the responsibility of making peaceful choices about what they do with their money to the welfare state, they have rendered unto Caesar the things that belong to God, including the exercise of free will. The result has been a demise of conscience..."

"Everyone agrees that neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi people ever attacked the United States. Everyone agrees that no Iraqi participated in the 9/11 attacks. There is no question but that in the Iraq War, the United States is the aggressor nation and Iraq is the defending nation..."

"How could the killing of any Iraqi be morally justified, given that the U.S. government was going to be the aggressor in the conflict? How could killing people while serving as part of an aggressor force be reconciled with God’s laws? I can’t help but wonder how many U.S. soldiers who were struggling with their conscience before the invasion are bedeviled by it today..."

"Thus, the circumstantial evidence led strongly to one conclusion: The real purpose of the invasion of Iraq was not to protect the United States from a WMD attack or to enforce UN resolutions but rather to simply achieve what the sanctions had failed to achieve throughout the 1990s — a change in the regime governing Iraq."

"So what would be wrong with that? What’s wrong with it is that it’s morally wrong and a violation of God’s laws to kill the people of another nation simply to achieve a change of administrations within their government. The government that is seeking the regime change through an invasion is the aggressor nation. In fact, an invasion for the purpose of regime change is also illegal under the UN Charter, to which the United States is a signatory."

The Demise of Conscience, Part 1