What is the destination of those who obey their authorities and fight in unfair wars such as Vietnam – will their obedience elevate them to heaven?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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question in today’s wars those who are forced by their authorities to fight for unfair causes such as American soldiers in Vietnam will they get credit for obeying the authority or what will be the destination answer it largely depends on individual consciousness and in a specific context cannot give any general answer we have to look at the three modes of material nature the broad principle is those who are in goodness are elevated those in passion stay where they are those are degraded as Krishna says in 16.18 in the Bhagavad Gita so that means that essentially depending on the kind of consciousness people are having that would determine their destination specifically if they die fighting a particular war you know okay today’s wars are rarely fought on dharmic principles or fought for establishing dharma and some wars were fought simply for say fueling the economy the fueling the arms industry or whatever other horrible vested interests so in such wars what will happen to the to those who are forced to fight each person has been given intelligence and they have to use their intelligence to choose to act responsibly and just saying that our authority told us to do does not exempt anyone from their individual responsibility in fact in fact in recent history when you remember Nuremberg trials where the nazi soldiers and generals were tried and they used this defense in the holocaust when they tortured and murdered millions of jews and others they said we were simply obeying authority so that was not accepted as a defense they consider culpable because needless torture and genocide were deemed as crimes against humanity which no ideology can justify so while in today’s world there is moral relativism with respect to what is what universal morality is nobody knows but what it isn’t at least those tribes agreed to that that you know situation is torturing and killing people whether killing people justified unnecessary especially so the point i’m making is that both that from today’s law court perspective which is highly relativistic still there was something which was considered universal and genocide was unacceptable and even if it’s even if it’s justified by saying they’re obeying authority so we are of course in a tradition spiritual tradition where obeying authority is considered important but also taking responsibility for our choices is also considered equally important and the bhagavad-gita calls for such individual contemplation and decision at its end it’s not just applying adherence to gods to the words of anyone even those of god so those who are conscientious objectors to needless violence you could say they are a little more in sattva because they’re at least thoughtful and those who are don’t object just go along they are in rajas or tamas we could say that because they are unthinkingly being misled so we’re all responsible for our actions and we all have been given a conscience all the conscience may vary from person to person and may not always be accurate but that doesn’t mean that we can abdicate responsibility to those who manipulate our consciousness so those who are say for example jihadi terrorists can they say that they are misled by their ideology that’s why they kill innocent and they’ll be forgiven no so overall we have to take responsibility for our actions even when we are following some authority and depending on whether the following authority leads us to sattva, rajas or tamas accordingly we will get a destination thank you