The Sacredness of Life, War, and Evil

 

I wrote in a recent entry that I hold that life in sacred and thus abortion as birth control evil. I would like to extend that thought briefly. If life is sacred, then it is evil to factor in a certain number of horrors like bombing an Iranian girls school in pursuit of political-power objectives. Sickening. Horrifying. Absolutely so. If that is the price for a political objective, it may not be done. Thus I was also against the war in Afghanistan as retaliation for 9/11, because it factored into the action the possibility killing whole families at weddings, for example. That happened. Two thousand, nine hundred and seventy seven innocent people were cruelly murdered by the fanatics of 9/11; my country killed at least 70,000 innocent people in Afghanistan and perhaps 500,000 innocent people in Iraq, the other 9/11 war.  There was a real grievance against the Taliban regime but if life is sacred, then some violent actions are morally absolutely, unconditionally forbidden. Or the Hamas committing those murders against people at a music festival. The Palestinians have real, deep grievances against the injustices and murders inflicted on them by the Israeli regime. But if life is sacred, that was evil as are all the murders they in their desperation have carried out in retaliation to the injustices they have suffered. And the Israeli retaliation evil: perhaps 100,000 or more civilian deaths (mostly old people, women and children) in their arguably genocidal retaliation. (I think of the Gandhi thought: if an eye for eye, the whole world would go blind.) That seems the clear consequence of the idea that life is sacred – even ours, wounded creatures that we are, not pure innocent beings, except perhaps as children. My point is that this is unconditionally wrong, always, whoever does it, for whatever reason. 

 

    I can already hear the voices of realism telling me that, while that thought is morally admirable in sentiment, it is delusional in political reality. I hear the voice of reason argue that all political action involving force carries foreseeable civilian deaths, and that refusing such actions absolutely would amount to paralysis, allowing aggressors, terrorists, or tyrannies to prevail unchecked. The reasonable might further argue that leaders have obligations not merely to abstract humanity but to protect concrete communities, and that tragic “collateral damage” is sometimes the lesser evil in a fallen world.

     A second line of criticism would come from consequentialist reasoning: if refusing military action allows even greater atrocities later, then absolute prohibitions may perversely increase suffering overall. Thus the bombing that foreseeably kills innocents may be defended as justified by a sufficiently important end: preventing future massacres, deterring aggression, preserving national security, and so forth.

 

   Building on the earlier reflection about finitude, hinges, and faith, I would respond by questioning precisely this moral framework of calculation. Once innocent human beings become variables inside strategic arithmetic, something spiritually catastrophic has already occurred. The issue is not whether tragic deaths sometimes occur in a world of conflict – they inevitably do – but whether one may intend, authorize, normalize, or knowingly incorporate the destruction of innocent life into one’s political method. To really believe that life is sacred – and what loving parent could deny this – means that there are moral boundaries that cannot be crossed even for enormously desirable outcomes, because the value at stake is not commensurable with political advantage, national glory, ideological victory, or even historical justice. My position is not naïve optimism about politics; it is not a denial that governments have responsibilities of defense. It is rather the claim that realism without moral absolutes becomes spiritually self-devouring. As though Gandalf would have taken the ring of power to defeat Sauron, thus becoming Sauron. The modern state, revolutionary movement, or empire easily begins speaking the language of necessity: some innocents must die for security, liberation, stability, history, civilization, resistance, progress. But once that logic is accepted without limit, every horror becomes potentially justifiable under sufficient pressure. Hiroshima, October 7th, wedding bombings, torture chambers, terror bombings of cities, starvation sieges – all can be redescribed as regrettable necessities within a larger calculus.

    Human beings are radically finite not only intellectually but morally and politically. We do not possess the godlike standpoint required to calculate history infallibly. Leaders repeatedly justify atrocities in the name of future goods they cannot truly foresee. The twentieth century is filled with examples of regimes convinced that temporary horrors would produce permanent liberation, the Hitler regime included. Recognition of finitude should therefore deepen humility about consequentialist reasoning, not weaken it. The more uncertain our grasp of outcomes, the more dangerous it becomes to suspend absolute moral limits for supposedly greater goods.

      The voice of reason and realism will still press the hard question: what then should one do in the face of aggression or terror? My answer need not imply pacifism in every sense. One may perhaps use force in defense under strict conditions while refusing actions whose means intrinsically violate the sacredness of innocent life. Historically, this is close to strands of the just war tradition associated with Thomas Aquinas and later moral thought, though I suppose I radicalize its prohibitions more strongly i.e., understand the consequences of the sacredness of life a bit more with my heart. Under modern conditions of warfare, I am still not completely a pacifist. I think Poland’s resistance to Hitler’s invasion was just, for example. Though bombing German cities would have been evil, had Poland had that capability. Though I do not morally judge the men of that time and have pity for all that the men who flew the bombers had to endure – actually Christ forbade us to morally judge at all, knowing our finite, wounded hearts and minds: a great truth whether one is Christian or not –  I objectively think the Allied bombing campaign on Germany and Japan during WWII (and the dropping of the atomic bombs) was wicked because I believe human life is sacred.

 

    Underlying this whole reflection is a deeper anthropological claim: modern political consciousness tends to treat persons as units within systems: that is, as populations, demographics, strategic assets, collateral damage, human capital. The affirmation that life is sacred resists precisely this reduction. It insists that every child at a school, every family at a wedding, every teenager at a music festival possesses a depth of value that cannot be translated into political arithmetic without deep moral wounds.

. . .

One of the things that puzzles me about myself and others who think of themselves as Christians is the fact, based on my experience of life and my study of history, that Christians (and indeed Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists) are not clearly more virtuous, do not embody more goodness, than the non-religious. Virtue, vice, and goodness seems to be rather equally distributed among humanity regardless of belief system, unless the belief system is an ideology of evil, of which Naziism may serve as a paradigm case (Naziism was premised on the idea that much human life – basically, all “non-Aryan” life –  was unworthy of existence.) It disturbs me that the men who started the recent string of wars in West Asia/Middle East professed to be Christians. But why should it? I profess to be Christian (at least profess to being a not-very-good Christian) and I have done things unworthy of a soul, even if not on the scale of starting wars. I don’t have and power or authority, but if I did, who knows? And all of these wars involved securing the oil supply for a global economy based on luxury consumption, and economy that is burning up the world (among other evil things like created mass poverty and exploiting producers – treated as a commodity – more of less brutally). And here I am, really against my better judgment, on my laptop, using the Internet, all dependent on the same damn oil at some level that these wars were at least partly about. Thus I am also “in a small way” implicated.

    Still it disturbs me that I in my “small way” and presidents on a larger scale profess to be Christians and treat life as though it were no sacred. I recall a question Thomas Aquinas deals with in the Summa Theologiae I, q. 20, a. 2: “Whether God loves all things?” His answer: 

God loves all existing things. For all existing things, in so far as they exist, are good, since the existence of a thing is itself a good; and likewise, whatever perfection it possesses. Now it has been shown above that God's will is the cause of all things. It must needs be, therefore, that a thing has existence, or any kind of good, only inasmuch as it is willed by God. To every existing thing, then, God wills some good. Hence, since to love anything is nothing else than to will good to that thing, it is manifest that God loves everything that exists.

 And later in the same article: 

Nothing that exists can be evil formally as existing, but only so far as it is deprived of some good; and thus evil cannot exist except in something good. 

This answer is relevant to my reflections on the sacredness of life. Aquinas argues that God loves all things that exist because existence itself is good, and whatever exists participates in goodness insofar as it exists. God’s love is not merely emotional affection but the willing of the good. Indeed, for Aquinas, God’s love is the cause of the goodness and being of things: “To love is to will the good of another.” And the first good of all is existence. And because God is the source of all being, Aquinas concludes that God loves all things insofar as He wills their existence and goodness. He even cites Wisdom 11:24–25 (a book of the Bible that Protestants exclude for reasons I am not certain of): “Thou lovest all things that are, and hatest none of the things which Thou hast made.” True, God does not love all things equally. Rational creatures participate more deeply in goodness than stones or plants, and some creatures receive greater goods than others. But being loved by God even such things make a claim to exist and be valued. How much more the human soul, made in the image of God.

      The metaphysical idea is that evil has no independent being of its own. Evil is a privation or corruption of good. Thus God loves the being and goodness even of damaged or sinful creatures, while not loving the privation, disorder, or sin itself. That distinction is what I have been circling around in your reflections: the sacredness of human life, the refusal to reduce persons entirely to evil acts, the distinction between condemning actions and refusing absolute judgment upon souls. For Aquinas, even the wrongdoer retains goodness simply in existing as a creature. That goodness is never wholly annihilated. Hence one may hate murder, cruelty, or injustice while still affirming that the murderer, as a being, is not pure evil. Evil parasitically depends upon a good nature it wounds.

     This is also why your my judgment that indiscriminate bombing is objectively evil fits into a Thomistic framework. If existence and life themselves participate in goodness and are loved by God, then treating innocent lives as expendable variables in political calculation violates something metaphysically profound, not merely socially agreed-upon norms.

    I also think this philosophy-theology makes explicit truths that are scriptural: that God is the source of being, that God is love, that God loves the world and keeps it in being through love, that he gave part of himself, his “son”, to show us the way. 

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p.s.

I found this in the Internet 

• Afghanistan (2001–2021): the best-known estimates place civilian deaths roughly between 46,000 and 70,000+, depending on methodology and whether indirect deaths are counted. The Costs of War Project estimate for direct civilian deaths is around 46,000, but many scholars believe the real toll is substantially higher once indirect mortality is included.
• Iraq (especially after 2003): estimates vary enormously because methods differ. Conservative counts based on documented deaths are in the low hundreds of thousands, while excess-mortality studies have produced estimates reaching into the hundreds of thousands or even above one million total war-related deaths over time. Civilian deaths alone are commonly estimated somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000+ depending on what is included. There is no universally accepted single figure.
• Gaza (since October 2023): this is currently one of the most disputed casualty questions in the world, but increasingly even external demographic and epidemiological studies suggest the official counts were probably underestimates rather than exaggerations. Recent peer-reviewed and demographic studies place direct deaths roughly in the 70,000–100,000 range or higher by late 2025/early 2026, with women, children, and elderly people comprising a very large proportion of the dead.
• Iran (current war in 2026): reliable figures are much harder because the conflict is ongoing. Multiple organizations, including the Iranian human-rights group HRANA, currently estimate roughly 1,400–1,700+ civilian deaths in Iran so far, including hundreds of children, though these are explicitly described as minimum or provisional figures likely to rise.

This is so horrible that my mind cannot really process it.