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Helen Bird's avatar

My grandmother survived WWII & the London blitz, taking in a young woman from Berlin and assisting a couple who helped Jews escape. I remember the many stories she told me while growing up in a post war Britain. But the one that has stuck with me all these years later, was the sheer brutality of the Russians. She maintained they were worse than the Nazis. Great piece Greg & Arthur. Thanks to you both!

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Earl Heflinger's avatar

Funny you should draw a parallel between the war in Ukraine and Evangelical Christianity with respect to the predictable three-act script in the war between good and evil. To me, there’s an interesting essential contrariness in those two scenarios. The Ukrainian ‘good guys’ have claimed their personal power and risen up in righteous indignation over having been wrongfully attacked; whereas the Russian soldiers are largely puppets, relying on some (to them) intangible force—Putin—to drive whatever motivation they have to continue fighting. Evangelicals may say they’re fighting the cosmic forces of evil—the Devil—but mostly these days they’re fighting a culture war against ‘woke’ individuals who have claimed their personal power—which is often why they’ve left Christianity. Meanwhile, the Evangelicals themselves, the self-appointed ‘good guys’, rely on their Big Daddy in the sky to bail them out. Your point about good supposedly winning in the end is well taken. But some wars involve guts, and some rely on faith.

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