Loving your enemies in the context of postmodern warfare (Sermon on the Mount)

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Ben Mordecai

Puritan Board Freshman
Loving your enemies is a commandment, but in order to follow that commandment we need to know what it is - and is not saying.

My take on this is that it refers to loving your personal enemies. These would be the casual people you engage with in your ordinary life. These are the people whom you turn the other cheek for, you pray for, etc. It is a part of the Sermon on the Mount which seems to be mainly talking about Christian behavior between individuals.

Clearly there are situations where Christians are required to go to war and those Christians are not in sin for doing so. However, it would be a strain to argue that you are "loving you enemies" whom you are simultaneously trying to kill. Likewise, military actions often involve other tactics which would be sinful if done interpersonally between individuals. For example, if you came upon an enemy's supply cache, you would steal it, no question. You would also engage in tactical deception, feeding the enemy cunning lies to catch them by surprise. That's just part of what it means to be fighting a war. You don't have allied troops in the trenches launching gospel tracts to the other side, for example. By the very nature of physical war, it must be conducted with carnal weapons: guns, bombs, jets, code, intel.

Where this gets very interesting is in the postmodern world where wars are now fought primarily with propaganda, disease, and economics. The enemies of Western nations and of Christians are using cultural revolution, primarily through mass media, big tech AI, corporate sponsorship/cancellation, and so forth to wage a cultural war to destabilize and neuter us. Hundreds of thousands of articles have been written about "white supremacy" blaming everything from the naming of birds to the decision not to eat bugs. We've gone from a time when Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama would publicly claim they do not support gay marriage to the point when Republicans would call you a bigot for not supporting gay marriage (in under 10 years). We have efforts to surgically transition the sex of children. The effectiveness of this propaganda is difficult to overstate.

The way this propaganda works is not through effective argumentation but through constant unrelenting pressure. Their points are irrefutable by reason not because they are reasonable but because there are too many to actually refute. Before you finish refuting one, you have ten more lies. They are also so absurd on their face that you cannot even begin to debate them.

As the targets of this propaganda, we are all in this war, and as such we have to determine the appropriate weapons for our warfare or else lay down and die or watch our families, friends, churches, and businesses be lost. However, because this is a war primarily of deception, there is denial that we are even in this war. There are no bombs or guns. So there exists a tension between Sermon on the Mount behavior and war behavior.

We want to be sure to retain our personal willingness to suffer for the sake of the name of Christ, but I am considering the fact that our counter-warfare to the propaganda war might not resemble the Sermon on the Mount behavior, which applies to one's personal willingness to suffer offense or loss when engaging with neighbors and personal enemies. When we (selflessly) wish to defeat the LGBT agenda, the CRT agenda, and the various other ways the enemies of God, his church, and western nations attack, we will need more than turning the other cheek, meekness, and proclaiming the gospel.

Sometimes the most effective responses to propaganda is ridicule, personal attacks, raw assertions of dominance, keeping records of wrong and presenting them in the most aggressive way possible, wearing down the opponent, demoralizing the opponent, making the opponent want to quit, making it personal, and so forth. These behaviors would normally not be good if you were dealing with your neighbors or with the casual enemies that we face in daily life, but I am convinced these have an important place in the counter-terrorism movement against propaganda.
 
Memelord here. Memes are real info war. So much so that the EU outlawed them
Not sure it is strictly true that the EU banned memes. The original version of the new copyright law may have threatened them (whether intentionally or accidentally), but the final version exempted them, as I understand it. Did I miss something?

 
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