“Why are you killing me for your own benefit? I am unarmed.”
“Why, do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer, but since you live on the other side, I am a brave man and it is right.”
I recently read this dialogue between a soldier and an unarmed man in Blaise Pascal’s Pensees. He ponders how killing a man from one side of a river (the man’s homeland) is murder, while killing a man on the other (an enemy country during wartime) is heroic. Being born on the right side of the river, in Pascal’s critique of the arbitrariness of human justice apart from God, bestows an unarmed man his rights. “It is a funny sort of justice,” he later remarks, “whose limits are marked by a river; true on one side. . . false on the other.”
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/ki
“Why, do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer, but since you live on the other side, I am a brave man and it is right.”
I recently read this dialogue between a soldier and an unarmed man in Blaise Pascal’s Pensees. He ponders how killing a man from one side of a river (the man’s homeland) is murder, while killing a man on the other (an enemy country during wartime) is heroic. Being born on the right side of the river, in Pascal’s critique of the arbitrariness of human justice apart from God, bestows an unarmed man his rights. “It is a funny sort of justice,” he later remarks, “whose limits are marked by a river; true on one side. . . false on the other.”
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/ki
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