Divine Justifications for War: Premodern Rationalizations and Assumptions (Part 2 of An Artificiality of War series)

Ben Zweibelson, PhD
20 min readDec 10, 2023

This is part two of a nine part series where I share some current research that I am working on concerning the nature of human conflict and how our species socially constructs reality within which, we clash swords, fling missiles, and destroy tangible and intangible constructs. This was something I worked on originally as a book chapter, but since then re-organized my third book project so that many of these concepts become their own dedicated chapter. So, this will be put here at Medium as an example of the writing process that I personally like to perform: Creating rough drafts, flinging them in series online, re-tooling them, and eventually getting to the great book projects that we usually want to dive into immediately, often unprepared. My preparation is as follows- research, think, write, edit, post, write more, edit more, post more, refine, and eventually cobble together a book. Somewhere in there is arguing with editors…

If you missed Part 1 of this series, it is located here:

Christ leading crusaders into battle, detail from an Apocalypse, with commentary (The “Queen Mary Apocalypse”), early 14th century, f. 37 (British Library)

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Ben Zweibelson, PhD
Ben Zweibelson, PhD

Written by Ben Zweibelson, PhD

Philosopher of Conflict; works at U.S. Space Command; All opinions my own!