Pretty unwanted answering to: 
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/agk/2022-03-14-letter.txt but I felt the need 
to put up my answers because I some kind of felt it just like a dog when 
sees a tree. This is a horrible example but I'm not able to put up 
something nicer right now.

!Letter of protest
 --- 
agk's diary 
14 March 2022 @ 20:35
 --- 
written on GPD Win 1
under blankets in garage loft bed
 --- 

>Father,

This is the atomicdisintegrator, uh... My nickname pretty sucks 
during these times.

>I hope I don't miss the mark with this letter. I 
>hope you read it in the spirit of charity, love, 
>and compassion from which I composed it.

>We have begun to pray each Sunday for peace, as I
>strongly feel is right. The church has also done 
>something I think wrong: it has first subtly, then 
>more boldly, chosen a side in a shooting and propa-
>ganda war.

Sadly, religious buildings are infrastructures meant to be part of 
bigger organizations aimed at a particular purpose. Not so differently 
from corporation's offices they got businesses as well as material 
entities are strongly related with material needs.

There's just a different nature in their "advertising": someone 
generally tries to get something like wisdom, comfort, peace of mind, 
whatever intimate need is felt when gets close to a religion. Usually 
promises of eternal peace or unlimited pleasure are the ads you can't skip.
Sadly, the deliver of those products is planned after consumer's death.

A relation to a religious "officer" generally tends to get a pretty 
submissive position. By taking xstianity as example you call that 
officer "father" despite there's no blood relationship with him. 
Probably because any son and daughter is expected to be respectful and 
obedient.

Why would a father is subtly taking a side to a conflict?
Isn't peace what makes a family worth of living for?

>I was a little unsettled after your sermon in which 
>your daughter went to a peace vigil. Of course 
>peace is good, but I'm afraid of the way the 
>vigils seem to equate peace with victory for the 
>people of Western Ukraine. I'm unsettled by rising 
>Russophobia in this country, by a flood of 
>propaganda and censorship worse than what we faced 
>from 2001-2003 as the US justified the beginning
>of our destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Peace and war aren't good or bad. Both sometimes tend to be necessary. I 
personally will never want endorse a war but living in peace without 
preparing for a war may put people under a losing position against a 
potential aggressor. But nowadays those kind of things are even less in 
people's hand. Because...

Propaganda, censorship and ignorance always proved to be a deadly mix 
for everyone and everything. People seems not to understand that Russian 
civilians (even those abroad) are just taxpayers _like them_ that are somewhat 
forced to follow their leaders whenever they want to lead them. Disobedience is punished.

Taking side for Satan™ is considered hostile behaviour inside a church. 
Since its supposed to change shape "believers" may become hostile toward 
the shape being confirmed to be Satan™ or related to it. It probably 
doesn't matter if it magically become a flag.

>We had none of this compassion over the last 8 
>years as the Ukranian Army and ultranationalist 
>"volunteers" shelled Donetsk and Luhansk and occupied 
>Mariupol, killing thousands of Ukranians, or when
>anti-Maidan protesters were burned alive en-masse 
>in the Odessa Trade Union building by Western-backed 
>ultranationalists. Similarly, Afghans currently dying 
>of starvation due to US sanctions and expropriation 
>of central bank reserves isn't on anybody's radar, 
>nor is the ongoing starvation and massacre of 
>Yemenis by Saudi with generous US assistance. Our
>outrage is encouraged only when it is geopolitically 
>useful.

In today's greedy and aestethic "cultures", if it's not good for making 
money or not trendy nobody gives a shit.
> === Our outrage is encouraged only when it is geopolitically useful. ===
I strongly hope that corporate medias get abandoned as soon as possible 
for this reason.
We got almost unlimited access to knowledge and basically world still 
looks the same... It's awful that corporate networks allow or censor 
hateful debates according to nationality despite their "polite" ToS. 

>The church may not be called to respond to suffering unless it's in the 
>consciousness of parishioners. That doesn't strike me as wrong. When we 
>in the congregation are troubled by events unfolding in the world, the 
>Church has a profound responsibility to guide how we think about those 
>events as Christians.

"to guide how we think"? That doesn't sounds so different from propaganda...

>I'm a preacher's kid; I watched my dad struggle 
>with how to be faithful with things like this. 
>That's why I'm writing now. From a sermon illust-
>ration we escalated to ending the service with
>Ukraine's national anthem and starting a small 
>group on Ukraine and theology. How can the church
>guide us to follow good Christain habits, not bad 
>ones?

I've noticed that some xstians that want to love their god but not their 
religion. Probably they were pissed off at someone telling them how to 
be a proper follower and decided to learn god's teachings by themselves. 
Maybe they are tired of those trends too.

>I think the worst Christian habits were the Crusades
>and the Jesuit advance guards of colonialism. This 
>war is explicitly framed as a crusade (against 
>asiatic tyranny, judeo-bolshevism, the roman 
>catholic bulwark against barbarian russian orthodox
>rites, etc). Our wars for conquest of Iraq and 
>Afghanistan were also framed as crusades. Ukraine 
>has been a neocolonial vassal of the US since at 
>least the US-backed 2014 Maidan coup. A good bit of 
>the US foreign policy establishment's antipathy to 
>Russia comes from it clawing back a lot of 
>sovereignty from the U.S. in the decades after 
>Yeltsin's US-backed coup destroyed and subjugated 
>Russia.

Who got a hammer that likes so much sees nails everywhere.

>I'm not trying to convince you to take a side. I'm
>pointing to dangers. My political consciousness was 
>shaped by the time between Yeltsin's coup and the 
>1998 Russian financial crisis. Most of my friend 
>group of Russians, Belorussians, Ukranians, and 
>Armenians fled here from the US "Chicago boys" 
>gleeful looting and destruction of their country,
>theft of savings, creation of oligarchs, and the 
>subsequent collapse of life expectancy.

Yeah, lack of danger awareness... This is a really good point.

>The bloody breakup of Yugoslavia at that time also
>profoundly shaped me, through personal relationships
>with people who lived through it, some just surviv-
>ing, some trying to build peace when possible. It
>inocculated me against simplistic black-and-white
>thinking. Wars kill civilians, including economic
>wars, and everyone, combatant and non-, who lives
>through a war has to do shameful things. There are
>no good guys in war.

I quite remember a guy that told awful stories about surviving in that 
shit. Trading lighters and ammo for food and medicines, struggling to 
keep his family fed and safe... He reminded that he got lucky to have a 
pretty big family because many lone people got robbed and died. Since 
then I think that nowadays individualism and generational gaps aren't 
just a coincidence. But who knows... I hope to be wrong.

>What's should be the Christian response to this war?
>It's so hard to understand. Propaganda and censorship
>oversimplify it. I'm sure some parishioners have lost
>touch with someone they love who was sleeping in the 
>subway, trying to avoid being conscripted at gunpoint,
>or trying to evacuate despite US/Ukranian-backed neo-
>fascists who want to use them as human shields. Maybe
>some have Russian friends who lost jobs en-masse as 
>everything closed, whose currency lost half its value, 
>who face a propaganda environment as confusing as 
>ours, who feel there's no future for them.

>I don't know. I don't say we should play the anthems
>of all the belligerents along with Ukraine: DNR, LNR,
>Russia... or all the cheerleaders of Russia and 
>Ukraine's destruction: Poland, U.S., etc. The prayer
>for peace is tremendously focusing. Beyond that, I
>believe prayer can guide us into proper relationship 
>with conflict and propaganda. 

I believe that awareness and deep independent investigations can do a 
lot more.

>To pray vaguely for Ukraine brings us too close to 
>the ghouls who wore blue-and-yellow to the State of
>the Union and exhibited the morose Ukranian 
>ambassador, who certainly knew that the people 
>clapping for her had sabotaged two peace talks with
>Russia that week, and supported a strategy of arming
>Ukranians like they armed Syrians: in hopes of 
>creating an extended quagmire. Almost nothing could
>be worse.

>I pray for universal demilitarization of conflict
>(demilitarization of U.S., R.F, Ukraine, France, 
>Israel, China), for successful and fair diplomacy,
>for compassion for all who suffer from the war, 
>for wisdom and mercy by political leaders, for 
>understanding and brotherhood, particularly with
>anyone I am encouraged to hate, for kindness and
>patience and slowness to anger, for protection of
>noncombatants, for God to use this war as an 
>inflection point, that the future may be brighter
>for ordinary Ukranians regardless of language or
>creed than it's been for the last 8 terrible years.

I believe that the only way to stop warlords is to make it so expensive 
and risky that they will lose the will.

>Jesus wants me to be in relationship, not to be 
>right. So I'm writing to you nervously, hopeful
>that you will hear my inarticulate concern and hold
>it in prayer. Our strength is in our weakness, 
>after all. 

>I was beaten, jailed, and interrogated a number of 
>times for providing medical aid with teams of 
>street medics to protesters who challenged the 
>doxa of 2001-2003, that conquest was liberation,
>that we were threatened by WMDs, etc. People in the
>anti-war movement had the FBI and joint anti-terror
>squads assigned to us. This time, when warmongering
>is peace, I have a child and I'm afraid to risk
>another public stand. But I can write to you from
>my weakness, and maybe somewhere in my tangle of
>thoughts there is something faithful to the Gospel
>and the work of Lent that can assist you in your
>work of guiding us to live Christian lives.

>Anna
>===================================================

Don't expect to be following holy guidelines that much.
If they don't agree just don't give a shit and keep up!