With some reluctance I’ll admit to being a bit of a woos... a softie...!  Reluctant... because I’m a male - and while I may not be of the Alpha variety - I know it’s not cool for a male to admit to ‘woosiness’.  Why do I say this?  Well, after the movie, The Power of One came out in 1992 one of my daughters had to watch it for her high school studies.  She invited her mother and me to watch the movie with her.  I did... for about 10 minutes.  A year later when Schindler’s List came out I had a sense of deja-vu when I was again invited to watch it with my daughter - although I don’t think I even made it to the ten-minute mark.  The strange thing is that I absolutely enjoyed the Lord of The Rings trilogy of movies.  I didn’t even mind seeing the blood and gore of slaughtered Orks flying around the screen.  The difference, you see, is that the one is clearly fiction, the other is grounded in actual historical reality.  So the violence of fiction is one thing, the violence of real life is quite another.  For me, viewing the butchery of imaginary Orks is tolerable entertainment, viewing details of Hitler’s Final Solution is viewing what is intolerably evil.

All this had some ramifications for me after the recent attack by Hamas in southern Israel.  The unspeakable atrocities - even as portrayed in censored newsreels - were too much for me to view.  So, how come that some of us can’t even watch the censored news reports about more than 1200 people brutally killed in one day... while fellow human beings - creatures made in God’s image, just like the rest of us - can actually perpetrate that kind of insane violence on other fellow human beings?  And... I might add... not only perpetrate those unspeakable atrocities but actually find delight in slaughtering babies and whole families?  Why?

One answer might be just sheer hatred.  Another might be that generational racism has desensitised people to such an extent that they can take delight in attempts to exterminate another race of people.  A further answer might be that violence thrives when the rule of law breaks down.  We have a good example of that in the book of Judges in the Bible.  It too has some shocking scenes of violence and it comes in a context were there is that common refrain: “There was no king in Israel, everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”  Of course in the case of the Hamas terror event it was not a breakdown in the rule of law - it was just a case of a perverted version of law overriding our western form of law and order.

Another question that I find myself asking is this: To what extent has my Christian faith - with it’s call to love both God and my neighbour - sensitised me to the point where I baulk at watching real violence?  Of course some would argue that even watching the violence in fictional movies like Lord of the Rings tends to desensitise us towards violence.

In all of this historian and author, Tom Holland, has offered some telling insights.  In a recent book (Dominion...!) he argues that the brutality of the ancient world shows that there is no natural law making us good.  Holland is realistic enough to admit that the Christendom too has contributed its share of violence over the centuries.  Yet Holland (who makes no claims of being a believer) claims that it was the revolutionary nature of Christianity which moved us from the cruelty of the ancient world to a civilization that can only gasp in horror at the atrocities that took place in southern Israel on October 7th.  Holland writes that the Christian faith “revolutionised sex and marriage, demanding that men control themselves and prohibiting all forms of rape.”  It elevated the place of women and stressed the truth that all of us - regardless of race - are made in the image of God and invited to join the Kingdom of Christ.  Holland claims that it was particularly through Paul’s letters that this civilizing influence came as the church gradually developed the ideas of human rights.

Interesting isn’t it?  Jesus Christ is not just the Saviour of individual souls but He has also made a difference to the culture in which we in the Western world find ourselves.