(Originally penned and posted on December 12, ARSH 2011.)

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.
Matthew 5: 9

Well, according to all of the readers out there who attend the United Church of Insipid Music, General Dumb@$$ery and Worshiping of Our Own Self-Esteem, this Beatitude guarantees me a special place in hell involving a spit, a large fire of the “bon” variety, and a pack of starving hyenas. I certainly may spend eternity roasting on a spit being eternally consumed by hyenas, but it won’t be because of my failure to act as a peacemaker.

While it seems deeply counter-intuitive at first blush to think of an assault rifle-wielding wench who spends her spare time giving rowdy musloids driving directions to her home in a decidedly Dirty Harry-meets-Loretta Young pose as a “peacemaker”, the truth is, that is exactly what I’m doing.

In order to understand this, we have to get beyond Pastor Ashton, his super-fun rockband, and his Crackerjack chickenpoop “seminary training”. Dude, if those seminary curricula get any shallower, we are going to have bacteria beaching themselves en masse. I’m convinced that the totality of most modern Christian theological training consists of training Pastor Ashton and his ilk to figure out a dozen different ways of taking six minutes between the rockband and the interpretive dance number (barf) to tell people that they need to “learn to encounter the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives.” Uh, okay, Thomas Aquinas. Would you mind explaining just what EXACTLY that MEANS? Seriously. That’s like handing me a clod of dryer lint and a darning needle and telling me to go make a Blu-Ray player. I’ll get right on that. You betcha.

The problem we have here with this Beatitude is that the meaning of the word “peace” has been distorted over the course of the 20th century. Hold on to your britches, because here comes the truth:

PEACE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF WAR.
PEACE IS THE FULL APPLICATION OF JUSTICE IN CHARITY WITHIN A SOCIETY.

Let’s use North Korea as our object lesson. North Korea has been in a state of armistice since July 27, ARSH 1953. But, the people of North Korea have been enslaved under a despotic, and frankly bat-poop crazy dynastic dictatorship ever since. The North Korean people are held in slavery to this nutty regime by a combination of engineered starvation, brainwashing, and concentration camps. If you go to North Korea it is very, very quiet and very, very orderly. But is that PEACE? Absolutely not. PEACE can only come to the people of North Korea if they rise up, with help, and overthrow the Kim family and the human slime that enable them in the North Korean government and military, throw open the 38th parallel and reunite them with their fellow Koreans on the Southern half of the peninsula. In other words, the only way the North Koreans can ever have peace is by the forcible application of JUSTICE upon the Kim regime. And that would involve war against the Kim regime.

So yes, you are hearing that right: sometimes peacemaking requires insurrection or war. Sometimes the only way to achieve the full application of justice in charity is to gear up and kick some @$$.

Conversely, the refusal to live up to one’s responsibility to see justice done is a failure in charity to one’s community, nation or society. Refusing to enforce justice actually causes the LOSS OF PEACE and tranquil order, and thus pacifism, like all lies, actually yields exactly the opposite of what it promises. Pacifism doesn’t yield peace, it yields WAR, DISORDER, TUMULT and SUFFERING. This is the meaning of Amos 5:15

Hate evil, and love good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be the Lord the God of hosts may have mercy on the remnant of Joseph.
Amos 5:15

The phrase “judgment in the gate” means justice in the courts and seats of authority. In other words, do your duty in charity to God and your fellow men, both the innocent and the guilty, by enforcing just laws and waging wars of self-defense and defense of allies when necessary.

This is why law enforcement officers are called “peace officers”. That isn’t irony, it is truth. The very men who are trained to use billy clubs and firearms against criminals are trained and called to do so in order to see justice done in charity and thus MAINTAIN THE PEACE. Wyatt Earp was gifted a revolver by the people of Dodge City with a plaque on the butt with the word “Peacemaker” engraved on it. This wasn’t snark or irony on the part of the citizens of Dodge City. It was a statement of truth. Peace is the state of applied justice in charity within a society, and thus it is completely appropriate to emblazon a gun with the word “peacemaker”.

Does this sound familiar at all? Can you think of any examples whereby a nation failed to enforce its own laws in a spirit of “tolerance” and “pacifism”, and eventually moral sloth and callous indifference, and in that failure to see justice done upon criminals, both within and without, allowed a cancer of crime, theft, terrorism and general evil to metastasize and destroy said nation, and eventually an entire civilization? Hmmm?

So as much as some folks don’t want to hear this, every time I call out musloids and psychopath politicians and crony oligarchs, what I am doing is trying in my strange way to inspire a shift towards JUSTICE and the craving and demanding of justice in our nation, society and world, so that in that application of justice there can be the ultimate harvest of true, lasting, genuine PEACE. I am not so stupid or deluded to think that laying low and going-along-to-get-along is going to lead to anything except an escalation of injustice, suffering and eventual violence and death at the hands of the very people that our sick culture demands we “tolerate”.

This stupid nonsense all started decades ago when so-called Christian clergy began to twist and pervert the words of Our Lord in the Beatitudes into the lie of pacifism and touted effete weakness as a virtue and masculine strength as a sin. Today’s ministers are just too stupid, intellectually lazy, cowardly and money-obsessed to preach the truth. And so all they can say between rockband numbers is, “Always be nice!” while civilization crumbles around them. Fools.