There is an article in the Christian Science Monitor that describes the conlict of ostensibly Christian values over the Middle East situation.

To me, both are inadequate bases for judgment, to put it mildly:

"Jerusalem is suffering," says Galen Bowman of Old German Baptist Brethren Church in Belkite, Ind. "We're trying to help out. We need to support Israel" as visitors, he says, because Israel is God's way of preparing the Messiah's return.

and

"I think people [in my congregation] recognize the weight of the moral mandate is with the Palestinians, simply because they are occupied and oppressed," says the Rev. Richard Signore of Bourne, Mass. "Some lay people say it's too complex and we should leave it to the experts, but I don't accept that. To me, this really is an issue of moral imperative for a people to have self- determination."

The article summarizes the juxtaposition thusly:

Now, engaged Christians take sides largely according to one of two perspectives. One is that faithfulness equals pursuit of justice by ending Israel's occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories. The other is that being faithful means supporting Israel to honor God's prophecy as stated in Ezekiel 37:21: "I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land."

Sorry, but, from my perspective, both of these perspectives are loony.

My prism is democracy, pluralism, secular statism, and liberty. From that perspective, Israel has it all over the Palestinians, and the rest of the Arab world.

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Sincerely,
Carter
oldpaladin@aol.com

Well, as a devout Christian, I find both of these attitudes a little strange. The automatic sympathy for the underdog "Palestine is occupied and oppressed" doesn't make sense in the historical context of what has actually happened there. The apocolyptic version doesn't really make sense either. Prophetic utterances are difficult to interpret with any degree of certainty.

I wish that the Christian Science Monitor should ignore the vast majority of Christians whose ideas on this subject are much more complex than this article would suggest.