Violence begets Violence

Osama Bin Laden was killed by American Navy Seals yesterday. They stormed a compound in Pakistan, shot him in the head, took his body and buried it at sea.

Another nail in the coffin of peace.

Violence begets violence and yet we continue with the violence.

Bad guy does violence, so good guy is justified to do violence back. The myth is that good guy violence will eventually win the day and bring peace. The myth has been told since the dawn of time. It started in Babylon, with their creation myth. Long before the Jewish creation story was written down in Genesis, the Babylonians had their own creation myth that has infiltrated the hearts and minds of fallen man ever since. It has permeated every single aspect of our culture and continues to this day to feed the violent, scapegoating tendencies of all of us.

Here is how the myth goes. Apsu, the father god and Tiamat, mother god, gave birth to all the other gods. The children gods frolicked so much that Apsu and Tiamat decided to kill them all. The children hear of the plot and kill Apsu first; Tiamat in a rage, seeks revenge. Frightened that their mother will anniliate them all, the children turn to their youngest sibling, Marduk for help. They appoint him as saviour. He negotiates a deal - if he wins, all the gods must make him the ultimate, all powerful chief and bow down to him forever and the children all agree. Marduk springs a trap for Tiamat; he kills her with an arrow and splits her heart; he also splits her skull and scatters her blood and stretches out her corpse and from her blood and her flesh the cosmos is created; and from the cosmos, mankind is created. (Wink, 1998, The Powers that Be)

The Babylonian creation myth requires that man is created out of violence, death and gore; chaos (evil) creates order, which is diametrically opposed to the Genesis creation story, which has God creating everything in an orderly fashion and calling it good after He had done so.

The Babylonian creation myth set into motion a belief system that has been entrenched in our fallen hearts ever since - that violence can be redeeming; that violence is redemptive. Think about it....every movie, every TV show, every cartoon, every heroic story that we grew up watching, believing, and enacting, uses the same Babylonian myth. Innocent people are being terrorized; a hero, a savior shows up, gets beaten up by the bad guy, but then comes back, uses his own form of violence and saves the day and the people. Cowboy movies, cop movies, Dirty Harry, Gladiator, Braveheart, Popeye, Mighty Mouse, X-Men - absolutely every single story we hold up as our hero stories uses violence as the thing that redeemed us.

So today, American forces used violence to kill Osama Bin Laden. A people party in the streets and say "we are saved, we are saved, the world is a safer place". But violence begets violence, just like the promise of the Babylonian creation myth.

And we all know what the Word says about Babylon the great in the end times. We, who are smug and call ourselves the good guys, with truth and justice on our side - are we not playing out the myth of redemptive violence and are we not just as much Babylon as "they" are?