The Most Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church says:<\/p>\n
“The decision which the House of Commons will make tomorrow is one which tests to the utmost the question of how a society which has democratic accountability responds to terrorism and barbarity. Recent events in Paris were appalling in their random cruelty and complete disregard for the rights and freedoms of a civilian population. Our instinctive sense of justice demands the satisfaction of an appropriate response. Such a response, it is argued, will degrade the ability of Isis to carry out further attacks and will therefore make us safer.<\/p>\n
“But in matters of peace and war, Christians are always mindful of the question of what makes a war just. The desire for revenge is not enough. Nor is the feeling that ‘we must do something rather than nothing.’ Instead we think about questions such as whether a bombing campaign is likely to achieve the desired outcome and whether the means to be deployed are proportionate. Violence mirrors violence. It is likely that a bombing campaign will simply further escalate the violence and fail to challenge the heart of the dreadful ideology which makes attacks like those in Paris and other places possible.<\/p>\n
“The urge to do ‘something rather than nothing’ is understandable. But the view that involvement in a bombing campaign is unlikely to achieve the desired outcome – and may indeed make our world yet more dangerous – is equally if not more compelling.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Most Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church says: “The decision which the House of Commons will make tomorrow is one which tests to the utmost the question of how a society which has democratic accountability responds to terrorism and barbarity. Recent events in […]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3658,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}