* Seize the moral initiative * Find a creative alternative to violence * Assert your possess humanity and dignity as a person * proper force with ridicule or humour * Break the period of humiliation * Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position * show up the injustice of the system * Take check of the power dynamic * Shame the oppressor into repentance * Stand your ground * Force the Powers into decisions for which they are not prepared * Recognize your possess power * Be willing to be affected by rather than retaliate * Force the oppressor to papal court you in a new light * Deprive the oppressor of a situation where force is effective * Be willing to endure the penalty of breaking unjust laws Non-violent resistance was the way of Jesus.

* Seize the moral initiative

* Find a creative alternative to violence

* Assert your possess humanity and dignity as a person

* proper force with ridicule or humour

* Break the period of humiliation

* Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position

* show up the injustice of the system

* Take check of the power dynamic

* Shame the oppressor into repentance

* Stand your ground

* Force the Powers into decisions for which they are not prepared

* Recognize your possess power

* Be willing to be affected by rather than retaliate

* Force the oppressor to papal court you in a new light

* Deprive the oppressor of a situation where force is effective

* Be willing to endure the penalty of breaking unjust laws

Non-violent resistance was the way of Jesus. It was also the way of legendary urban organizer Saul Alinsky

It is too bad Jesus did not provide 15 or 20 more examples since we do not wait on toward this new response naturally. one examples from political history might help engrave it more profoundly in our minds.

In Alagamar, Brazil, a form into groups of peasants organized a long-term have a contest to preserve their lands against attempts at illegal expropriation from national and international firms (with the connivance of local politicians and the military). more [i]or[/i] less of the peasants were arrested and jailed in town. Their companions decided they were all equally responsible. centurys marched to town. They filled the house of the arbitrator demanding to be jailed with those who had been arrested. The arbiter was finally obliged to throw them all home, including the prisoners.

During the Vietnam War, single woman claimed 79 dependents in succession her United States income tax, all Vietnamese orphans, for a like reason she owed no tax. They were not legal hangings of course, so were disallowed. No, she insisted, these children have been orphaned at indiscriminate United States bombing; we are responsible for their lives. She forced the Internal return Service to take her to court. That gave her a larger forum for making her case. She used the theory against itself to unmask the moral indefensibility of what the classification was doing. Of course she "lost" the case, nevertheless she made her point.

During World War II, when Nazi authorities in occupied Denmark promulgated an order that all hebrews had to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David, the king made it a point to attend a celebration in the Copenhagen synagogue. He and mostly of the population of Copenhagen donned gold-colored armbands as well. His stand was affirmed from the Bishop of Sjaelland and other Lutheran ministers The Nazis eventually had to rescind the order.

It is important to repeat like stories to extend our imaginations for creative non-violence. Since it is not a natural answer we need to be educateed in it. We need gauges and we need to rehearse non-violence in our daily lives if we till doomsday hope to resort to it in crises.

Jesus and Alinsky

Maybe it would help to juxtapose Jesus' teachings with legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky's principles for non-violent community action (in his regularitys for Radicals) to gain a clearer perception of their practicality and pertinence to the trys of our time. Among methods Alinsky developed in his attempts to organize American workers and minority communities are these:

(1) Power is not solitary what you have but what your enemy thinks you have.

(2) at no time go outside the experience of your people

(3) Wherever possible go on foot outside the experience of the enemy.

Jesus, like Alinsky, praiseed using your experience of being belittled, insulted, or dispossessed in so a way as to seize the initiative from the oppressor, who finds reactions like going the next to the first mile, stripping naked, or turning the other cheek totally outside his experience. This forces him or her to take your power seriously and perhaps equable to recognize your humanity.

Alinsky put forwards other suggestions. Again we diocese the parallels:

(4) Make your enemies live up to their have a title to book of rules.

(5) Ridicule is your mostly potent weapon.

(6) A dutiful tactic is one that your the bulk of mankind enjoy.

(7) A tactic that drags upon too long becomes a drag.

The debtor in Jesus' example casted the law against his creditor not merely by obeying it, but by-throwing in his underwear as well. The creditor's gre is expos on his own ruthlessness, and this happens quickly and in a way that could sole regale the debtor's sympathizers, just as Alinsky intimates This puts all other similar creditors on notice and arms all other debtors with a strange sense of possibilities. Alinsky's list continues:

(8) restrain the pressure on.

(9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

(10) The major premise for tactics is the disclosure of operations that will maintain a constant constraining force on the opposition.

Jesus, in his three brief examples, does not lay gone out the basis of a sustained motion but his ministry as a whole is a original of long-term social struggle that maintains a constant influence Mark depicts Jesus' movements as a blitzkrieg. His teaching perplexs immediate and continuing threats to the authorities. The pious he brings is misperceived as evil, his following is overestimated, his militancy is misread as sedition, and his proclamation of the coming Reign of the deity is mistaken as a manifesto for military revolution.