GOP Presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is unafraid to wear his Christian values on his sleeve. Indeed he has rocketed to frontrunner status on the strength of his popularity with Evangelical Christians in the US. But thanks to Lew Rockwell for pointing out the shocking anti-Christian core of Ben Carson’s “Christianity.” Carson rips to shreds a central component of the ancient Christian “Just War” theory: the idea of distinction once war has begun (Jus in bello).
According to centuries of thinking on the Christian conduct of war, the warring parties must make a distinction between legitimate military targets and non-combatants caught up in the conflict through no fault of their own. Christians are not to support the wholesale slaughter of civilian non-combatants regardless of their religious beliefs, skin color, customs, or nationality.
Dr. Carson, who is strongly opposed to killing American babies inside the womb, just as strongly supports killing the same innocent babies once they are out of the womb — as long as they are foreigners.
Dr. Carson believes that it is intolerable “political correctness” that “dictates we cannot kill innocent women and children” who get in the way of “destroying the enemy.”
The US should have completely annihilated the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Carson asserts, because “if the terrorists were foolish enough to choose to remain and to keep people from leaving, any ensuing deaths would clearly be their responsibility.” This despite the fact that the US had no legal or moral right to attack Iraq in the first place — a point that is no doubt lost on Carson.
This is the moral compass of the presidential candidate championed by millions of American Christians? God help us.
