{"id":2024,"date":"2011-05-02T10:20:22","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T17:20:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2024"},"modified":"2011-05-02T10:20:22","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T17:20:22","slug":"measuring-bin-ladens-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/05\/02\/measuring-bin-ladens-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Measuring Bin Laden&#039;s Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As an American citizen, and a beneficiary of the freedoms of Western democratic culture, I&#8217;m grateful that <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Blotter\/osama-bin-laden-killed\/story?id=13505703\">Osama bin Laden is dead<\/a>.\u00a0 Without doubt, this mass murderer, this leader of terror, this ideologue of hatred, earned his own reward.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want my relief and gratitude, however, to pretend at joy.\u00a0 As a Christian, I can take no joy in violence, even necessary violence.\u00a0 There is no redemption in bin Laden&#8217;s death as a death.\u00a0 Though bin Laden died, his victims are not raised.\u00a0 As bin Laden lived, he died, a circle of death complete and unbroken, violence to violence, dust to dust.\u00a0 It is all death, all an enemy &#8212; our most wanted enemy and the Last Enemy in unholy communion.<\/p>\n<p>There is only sorrow in death and war.\u00a0 Perhaps in some deaths and in some kinds of wars there is an underside of sorrow that becomes a sort of hope.\u00a0 A world without master terrorists, in pragmatic terms, is a much better world.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, the making of this better-but-not-best world reminds us of this persistent idea of the &#8220;best&#8221; world.\u00a0 Here is a glimmer of a world in which the cycle of terror and retribution ends, a world in which a just man dies to free the unjust, a world in which the death of a servant calls all power to account, a world in which the one who died rose again and defeats death forever.\u00a0 That is the undiscovered country we long to reach.<\/p>\n<p>Related:\u00a0 Daniel Kirk on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jrdkirk.com\/2011\/05\/02\/economy-of-death\/\">The Economy of Death<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As an American citizen, and a beneficiary of the freedoms of Western democratic culture, I&#8217;m grateful that Osama bin Laden is dead.\u00a0 Without doubt, this mass murderer, this leader of terror, this ideologue of hatred, earned his own reward. I don&#8217;t want my relief and gratitude, however, to pretend at joy.\u00a0 As a Christian, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-wE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}