According to Matthew 5:9, Jesus said, ""Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,"
According to Luke 1: 76-79, in a vision attributed to the Holy Spirit, the father of John the Baptist prophesizes

"And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, . . . to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace

"Beulah Baptist Church is hosting War Games for teen-agers July 8-10 from 6-9:30 p.m. There will be fun, food, prizes and competitions. The Marines will battle the Navy in areas such as War Ball, Obstacle Course, Volleybomb and Huge Mud-Tag.
      There will be hundreds of dollars in door prizes. The event is for anyone going into the sixth grade through those who graduated from high school this year.
      Registration begins at 6 each evening. Call 407-656-3342 and pre-register for either team."
      This "church", it concludes, is "at 671 Beulah Road, Winter Garden, FL 34787".

"Imperial Christians who equate patriotism with militarism and nationalism now have a book to guide them : The American Patriot's Bible.' See The American Warmonger's Bible, which I haven't read, but imagine uses some of the deplorably scripture that I feature at WhatKindofGod.org.

Conservative Christian warmongers sometimes dare to quote the following words of Jesus to support war : "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." What a great example of mis-quoting someone out of context!  Here is the context :

Matthew 10: 34- 37  

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

It's obvious from the context that Jesus wasn't expressing support for what we call "war" vs. "peace" between countries, but rather the inevitability of strife within families when some members of the family want to follow Jesus and some don't.
        It's hard to imagine sincere people really believing that Jesus was endorsing war or violence in this passage ( or any other).
        Another conservative once tried to justify the ownership and use of guns to me by quoting these words of Jesus, "the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one."
        What a classic case of "quoting out of context" ! Here's the text preceding that passage:

Luke, Ch. 22: 35- 38  

He said to them, "When I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals (or a sword), did you lack anything?" They said, "No, not a thing." He said to them, "But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, 'And he was counted among the lawless'; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled."  They said, "Lord, look, here are two swords." He replied, "It is enough."

Does anyone think that Jesus was recommending the use of swords as anything more than a prop in a play, used not to intimidate, but only to educate?
        In Matt. 26:52, Jesus said, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword."

1.         "If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." 
           "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . . [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and . . . degeneracy of manners and of morals. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." (1793):
   James Madison
   "father of the Constitution" and later the 4th U.S. President
   

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2. "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as only one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidly ." (and )
   "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and are not clothed.  The world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." President Dwight D. Eisenhower

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3. " What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world."Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864

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4. "If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends.  You talk to your enemies." General Moishe Dayan

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5. "The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure." President Lyndon B Johnson

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6. "If you see injustice and say nothing, you have taken the side of the oppressor." Bishop Desmond Tutu.

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7. "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy." Mahatma Gandhi

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8. "After each war there is a little less democracy to save." Brooks Atkinson

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9. "The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service." Albert Einstein

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10. "Military power wins battles, but spiritual power wins wars." General George C. Marshall, ( 1880 - 1959 )

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11. "When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" Eleanor Roosevelt

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12. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." John F. Kennedy

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13. "When the rich make war, it's the poor that die." Jean-Paul Sartre

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14. "All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power." Ralph Waldo Emerson

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15. "The world is going mad in mutual bloodshed. And murder, which is considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse. The offenders acquire impunity by increasing their ravaging." St. Cyprian, 3rd century bishop of Carthage

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16. "Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent." Isaac Asimov

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17. "This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
    A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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18. "Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.  Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it . . ." General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

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19. "Patriotism is the belief (that) your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." George Bernard Shaw

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20. "We're not made by God to mass kill one another . . . and that's backed up by the Gospel.  Lying and war are always associated.  Pay attention to war-makers when they try to defend their current war.if they move their lips they're lying." Father Phillip Berrigan

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21. "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." Voltaire

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22. "We live under a system in which the many are exploited by the few; and war is the ultimate sanction of that exploitation." Harold Laski

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23. "To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain and a crime in the statesman." George Santayana

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    This site had determined that the correct version of the quote attributed to Ben Franklin is not
    "Any society that would (or "The that can") give up a little liberty to gain (or "obtain") a little security will deserve neither and lose both."  but
24. "Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFETY deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY." - (from the cover of a book published, but not actually written, by Benjamin Franklin.) Ben Franklin

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25. "Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later." Ben Franklin

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26. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." Jimi Hendrix

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27. Human beings do not fight for economic systems: who would be willing to die for capitalism? Certainly not the capitalists.Sidney Hook

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28. Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. - Joseph Heller, (in "Catch 22")

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Dwight D. Eisenhower

1. "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
2. "In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?"
3. "How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
4. "We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
5. "Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace."
6. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
7. "War settles nothing."
8. "Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions whose chief concern is the long future of themselves and their children will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it."
9. "Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative."
10. "Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends."
11. "I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."
12. "Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

"The war hype was not related to reality.  Iraq posed no imminent threat to the United States.  Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attack.  Attacking Iraq was a policy decision made before the Bush Administration took power on January 20, 2001.

• There were no weapons of mass destruction.
• There was no atomic capability.
• There was no germ warfare that could be made ready in 45 minutes.
• The American case was so weak that major allies would not join the war effort.
• The propaganda that called these troops "Coalition forces" was stretched beyond reasonableness.  It was an Anglo-British force with a sprinkling of others.
• The cost of the war was grossly underestimated.  The cost of reconstruction has only recently begun to be embraced.
• The "pinpoint" new precision weapons that were supposed to minimize civilian casualties were a joke since we know that some 14,000 Iraqis died, about half of them innocent citizens.
• There was no exit strategy.
• Terrorism is not fought with bombs and missiles.
• Terrorism is fought by addressing the causes of despair and hopelessness that give rise to a willingness to die in order to inflict pain on those the terrorists hold responsible for your pain.
• The truth about this military adventure was never told.
• The benefits do not offset the loss of more than 500 American lives.
• Unilateral military action breaks trust in the family of nations.

1. The first President George Bush had made a mess of the first Iraqi war.  Not only did he not complete his mission but he encouraged dissident Iraqis with promises of help to rebel against what he thought was a crippled Saddam Hussein.  They rebelled, received no help and were murdered by Saddam, while that first President Bush stood by meekly, hoping to ride his "victory" to a second term in the White House.  He failed.  His son, the second President Bush, wanted to clean up his father's mistakes.
2. Iraq had oil reserves, which American oil interests wanted.  Neither North Korea nor Libya, both of which posed a greater threat than Iraq to their neighbors and to the world with their known arsenals of destructive weapons were invasion targets.  In these places we sought a diplomatic or "negotiated settlement."  The difference?  Neither North Korea nor Libya has oil.
3. After 9/11, the leaders of Saudi Arabia told the Bush administration that they could not survive politically if American military personnel continued to operate from Saudi Arabia.  The U.S.  needed a Middle Eastern country to solidify its military presence in that region.  Iraq was the choice.  These facts mean to me that this present administration has not been honest with the American people.  They, therefore, do not have my trust.

When President Jimmy Carter spent a year negotiating with the Iranians for the release of over 60 Americans whom they were holding, this Democratic president was considered a whimp because it took him so long to liberate these hostages and bring them all home.

        President Gerry Ford, on the other hand, was considered a macho hero because he wasted no time bringing home the crew of the Mayaguez, a merchant ship captured by Kmer Rouge forces in May 1975.  It didn't seem to matter to anybody (apart from their families) that in the fierce battle that resulted in the rescue of those 39 Americans, the lives of 43 heroic other American military men were lost (and others were no doubt wounded), because the rescue was so dramatic, forceful and hasty.

In the eyes of (former) Pastor Ted Haggard, the founder of "New Life", one of America's most powerful megachurches, and the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, as quoted by Jeff Sharlet in "Inside America's most powerful megachurch," in the May 2005 Harper's (speaking of emerging evangelicals in the Ukraine) :
        "They're pro-free markets, they're pro-private property. . .  That's what evangelical stands for."
        "I teach a strong ideology of the use of power," he says, "of military might, as a public service."  He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible's exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because "the Bible's bloody.  There's a lot about blood."
        [ from http://www.harpers.org/SoldiersOfChrist.html ]