Bill Bingham reflects on truth, justice, peace and Zen. Photo: Olly Coffey / flickr CC.
Wake up?
Bill Bingham reflects on truth, justice, peace and Zen
I have noticed an interest in Zen Buddhism arising amongst some Quakers today. I think all Friends should be aware that Zen Buddhist monks encouraged the young men of Japan to take up arms on behalf of the emperor during the second world war.
Some Christian ministers, of course, also encouraged other groups of young men into combat, and thereby defied and denied the principal teachings of their very own spiritual guide, Yeshua of Nazareth.
It should be further noted that Zen Buddhism was first introduced to Britain by the QC Christmas Humphreys, who took part in the war crimes trials that were held in Tokyo when the hostilities of the second world war were brought to an end by the unholy use of the atomic bomb by a ‘Christian’ country.
World governments now spend billions on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) whilst many unfortunate people in this world are starving to death and dying of treatable and (often) curable diseases. Some of our fellow men and women don’t even have enough clean water to drink: ‘When did we see you thirsty Lord?’
It also might be of interest to Quakers to note that Christmas Humphreys was the prosecuting counsel at the trial of Ruth Ellis, who was the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955.
Ruth Ellis was twenty-eight years of age at the time of her death, and she did not deny her complicity in the shooting of her abusive boyfriend. However, had this unfortunate young woman been born a few years later she would have received a custodial sentence, and been saved from the barbarity of the gallows rope.
It is also possible that Ruth Ellis might have been visited in prison by some Quakers who would have helped her come to terms with her situation and would have counselled her on getting her precious life back on track. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord.
It is not our place to take another human being’s life, neither through warfare or by our own very ambiguous, manmade ‘laws’; but we all know this already, do we not? Well, some of us do at least.
Perhaps it is time all of humanity had a ‘wake-up call’ to the complexities of the human condition. There was a time when even the Boys Brigade carried (wooden) rifles!
As I enter my eightieth year, it now appears to me that many of us, including myself, are very slow learners indeed. Onward Christian soldiers?
