Appalling US military suicide rate & what it speaks to EU

[Username1]

Have a guess how many serving members of the US armed forces were killed in action last year.

Then have a guess how many committed suicide last year.

Then have a guess how many ex servicemen and women killed themselves last year.

Okay, here are the answers:

295
349
6,500

Yep, you read that right. More serving US military personnel died by their own hand last year than at the hands of an enemy in combat, which is shocking enough. But that sad statistic is dwarfed by the appalling incidence of suicide among veterans. Now it goes without saying that this is a tragedy in and of itself.

Clearly something is very very wrong with the way veterans are cared for - or not - by the Pentagon and the Government. You can read the full story here:

guardian.co.uk/world/2013/fe … ic-veteran

But one passage in the article really struck me:

For William Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist who directed the marine corps’ combat stress control programme, William Busbee’s expressions of torment are all too familiar. He has worked with hundreds of service members who have been grappling with suicidal thoughts, not least when he was posted to Fallujah in Iraq during the height of the fighting in 2004.

He and colleagues in military psychiatry have developed the concept of “moral injury” to help understand the current wave of self-harm. He defines that as “damage to your deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. It might be caused by something that you do or fail to do, or by something that is done to you – but either way it breaks that sense of moral certainty.”

Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. Top of the list of such injuries, by a long shot, is when one of their own people is killed.

“I have heard it over and over again from marines – the most common source of anguish for them was failing to protect their ‘brothers’. The significance of that is unfathomable, it’s comparable to the feelings I’ve heard from parents who have lost a child.”

I find it highly instructive - not to mention heartbreaking - that these guys are so deeply traumatised by the perceived failure to protect their comrades. Is this not a shining example of how deeply the concept of salvific love for our friends and family is ingrained within us.

I find it both farcical and deeply offensive that many who would dismiss Universalism do so on the grounds of its perceived emotionalism. Oh, you believe in EU because you’re a soppy bleeding heart liberal with an overly anthropomorphic view of scripture, doctrine and divinity. You judge God’s righteous action in condemning sinners to ECT by your puny, fallen human standards. Don’t you know God is sovereign? If he decrees ECT for rebel humans, who are you to question the rightness of that?

Well for goodness sake, how else am I to judge? And why the blinking flip did my Creator implant this notion of justice within me; why did He make it so that the loss of those we love eviscerates us emotionally if He is going to throw so many of them onto the fire to burn forever? Answer me that, John Piper. Explain how I, a miserable human sinner, can be more merciful than Almighty God, Mark Driscoll.

And if you cannot, which of course you cannot, then don’t you dare call me a heretic for not believing it. In fact, don’t speak to me at all. I despise your smug self-righteous selfishness, and the diabolical horror that dwells in your black hearts.

Johnny

[Cindy_Skillman]

Johnny, first you bring tears to my eyes http://www.sherv.net/cm/emo/sad/sad-face.gifand then you crack me up with your magnificent tirade. http://www.sherv.net/cm/emo/laughing/hearty-laugh.gif I actually got called “heretical” just yesterday for the very first time (that I can remember). By a guy who thinks our Father created some human beings for the sole purpose of torturing them forever to glorify Himself. He said so himself, when I pressed him. And not only that, he’s a gnostic. He thinks knowledge (the right knowledge – that is, knowledge that agrees with his view of things) is what saves us. Sad. So sad . . . http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/no/animated-no-smiley-emoticon.gif

[Eric_Fry]

Bravo, Johnny.

I’m beginning to think that some these full-on anti-EU people are some of those with ‘seared consciences’ and others are ones who have the truly anthropomorphic view of God.

What does it mean when the Bible says we are created in God’s image? To hear some of the ECT crowd, it means the truly anthropomorphic view that we are made to look like God in our physical form. But that’s not at all what I get when I contemplate the Imago Dei within us all. I see the heart that breaks at the senseless deaths of friends and strangers, the tears that fall at the sight of the suffering, the righteous anger at seeing people oppressed.

But not the ECT crowd. That image hits a bit too close to home; it might mean we have to accept the fact that every person on the planet is truly our neighbor. Too hard to contemplate doing that, much easier to think of humans as simply looking like our idea of ‘god’ and keep on separating them into groupings of 'saints’and ‘sinners’.

Of course, to truly buy into the ECT crowd’s claim that these emotions of love and compassion are ‘wrong’ in some way when contemplating God, you’d have to accept the idea that these emotions are somehow satanic in nature.

I call BS on that notion.

[Cindy_Skillman]

Wow! Eric!

You go, guy!

[Username1]

Hi Cindy, hi Eric

Thanks for the feedback. Personally, Cindy, I wear the badge of ‘heresy’ with pride - when the accusation is levelled at me by someone who believes God is either too weak or too callous to save all his children.

And Eric, I second every word.

But not the ECT crowd. That image hits a bit too close to home; it might mean we have to accept the fact that every person on the planet is truly our neighbor. Too hard to contemplate doing that, much easier to think of humans as simply looking like our idea of ‘god’ and keep on separating them into groupings of ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’.

Mainstream Christianity is all about who’s in and who’s out, all about avoiding hell rather than thirsting after righteousness. Well listen up folks - we’re all forgiven sinners, only some of us haven’t realised it yet.

When will the likes of Driscoll and Piper and all those who’ve been led astray by them face up to the truth that the destruction of sinners doesn’t ‘glorify’ God - it emasculates and denatures him in the most blasphemous way. I know the imago dei is in them two fellas somewhere, but I’m having a jolly hard time discerning it .

Love to you both

Johnny