Tony Blair claims God told him to invade Iraq.
Tony Blair uncorked a howler yesterday when he claimed that God had told him to invade Iraq. This is totally irrational and in part explains why the otherwise rational and pragmatic Prime Minister made the completely unconscionable decision to go to war with Iraq. All I can say is that if God directs those in power to invade other countries and destroy 180,000 of their people, then I want no part of his heaven. The problem is that anybody can claim that God told them to do it to justify an evil action. Murderers, for instance, can go to a school, shoot up a bunch of elementary kids, and then say afterwards that God told them to do it so that they could go to heaven. This is the kind of absurdity that happens when people claim that they have a hotline to heaven.
People who claim that God tells them to do otherwise irrational things forget that the God of the Bible never asks his followers to check their brains at the door. The Book of Acts praises highly the Bereans, who checked the Scriptures for themselves to find out if what Paul was saying was the truth. Even fundamentalists themselves frown on this kind of thinking; there are apologetics ministries all over the country whose purpose it is to equip their followers to defend their version of Christianity against other religions. So, Blair's brazen attempt to claim the mantle of God places him outside the mainstream of even right-wing fundamentalist thought; Paul taught that if people get a revelation that claims to be from him or even an angel in heaven and it contradicted what was written in the Bible, then people should not listen to it. Time and time again, he warned the Ephesian church in the book of Acts against falling for anything outside the mainstream of Christian thought.
But by their own standards, there is no Biblical basis for attacking Iraq. Blair violated the commandment against lying in order to justify the invasion. Blair ignored the fact that Jesus himself was called the Prince of Peace in Isaiah, meaning that we were to work for peaceful solutions to conflicts. He ignored the fact that we are warned in the New Testament by John the Baptist against doing violence to any man. And God would not let David rebuild the Temple because he was a man of war and had shed much blood. He wanted a man of peace like Solomon to build his temple.
But most important of all is what God did not do. God did not command the Christians to learn how to fight wars and then throw off the rule of the Romans. All this happened despite the fact that the Romans were every bit as bad as the Iraqis with the way they exposed infants, threw Christians to the lions, appointed Emperors who killed people just for the fun of it, poisoned each other, shamed each other into committing suicide, killed and enslaved millions of people during their conquests, and completely destroyed cities that they conquered so that they would not rise up again. Despite the fact that the Romans were so bad that they made Saddam look like a real humanitarian, God did not tell the Christians to take up arms and rise up against the Romans. Instead, Paul commanded the Christians to live quiet lives without interference and to respect the laws that they lived under. He himself used the fact that he was a Roman citizen to fight trumped-up charges against him. And Jesus commanded followers to render into Caesar what was his due.
If Blair, Bush, or their apologists want to claim there is a Biblical justification for what they are doing, then let them give me chapter and verse. And the wars of the Old Testament are not a valid argument; God does not command those of us in the New Testament to act the same way. We do not have a hotline to God; we have a Bible so we can reason these things out for ourselves. God does not expect us to check our brains in at the door.