Where Is the Brotherly Love?

3. Why have religious efforts to bring peace failed?

³ Not long ago, Pope John Paul II warned that “all of humanity faced grave threats to its survival.” He emphasized that “those threats were best countered by joint efforts among diverse religious groups.” It is God’s will, he said, that religious leaders “work together” for “peace and reconciliation.” However, if that is God’s will, then why has God not blessed the centuries of efforts in this direction? He has not done so because these religions have not trusted in God’s way to bring peace by means of his heavenly Kingdom. (Matthew 6:9, 10) Instead, they have supported the politics and wars of the nations. As a consequence, in wartime, religious people of one nation have killed religious people of another nation, even killing people of their own religion. Catholic has killed Catholic, Protestant has killed Protestant, and other religions have done the same.

6. Why can Jehovah’s Witnesses say that they are “clean from the blood of all men”?

⁶ The World Book Encyclopedia says that 55 million people were killed in World War II. They were killed by people of every major religion except Jehovah’s Witnesses.

7, 8. How do some churchmen acknowledge their bloodguilt?

⁷ A Catholic chaplain for the airmen who dropped the atom bombs on Japan in 1945 stated recently: “For the last 1,700 years the church has been making war respectable. It has been inducing people to believe that it is an honorable Christian profession. This is not true. We have been brainwashed. . . . The gospel of the Just War is a gospel that Jesus never taught. . . . There is nothing in the life or teaching of Jesus that would suggest that while it is illegitimate to incinerate people by a nuclear warhead, it is legitimate to incinerate people by napalm or flamethrower.”

⁸ The Catholic Herald of London stated: “The first Christians . . . took Jesus at His word and refused to be conscripted into the Roman army even if the penalty was death. Would the whole of history have been different if the Church had stuck to its original stand? . . . If the churches of today could come out with a joint condemnation of war . . . , which would mean that every member would be bound in conscience to be, like the Christians, a conscientious objector, peace might indeed be assured. But we know that this will never happen.”