STATEMENT OF THE SACRED EARTH AND SPACE PLOWSHARES
"Friends, what do you think you are doing? We are only human beings, mortal like yourselves. We have come with good news, to make you turn from these empty idols to the living God who made sky and Earth and the sea and all that these hold." (Acts 14:15)
We, women religious, naming ourselves SACRED EARTH AND SPACE PLOWSHARES, enter Peterson AFB, CO to unmask the false religion and worship of national security so evident at this US Space Command Center, Schriever AFB (the Space Warfare Center), Cheyenne Mountain (NORAD), the Air Force Academy and Buckley Base in Denver (referred to as Total Force Base).
We reject the US Space Command Vision for 2020:
·to dominate space for military operations
·to exploit space for United States interests and investments
·to control and own space as a US 4th frontier, making all other nations vulnerable to US conventional and nuclear attacks
·to integrate space forces for war fighting
·to abuse the Aleutian Islands and other land with interceptors and spy satellites
·to waste more billions and billions of dollars and more human and material resources, causing the destruction of Earth and desecration of space.
We reject the breaking of International Law, including the ABM Treaty of 1972 and the Outer Space Treaties. Above all we reject the breaking of God's Law. We reject the vision of the Space Command that "the way a nation makes wealth is the way it makes war." We reject that the United States must control space "as critical to both military and economic instruments of power --the main sources of national strength."
Our security is neither in wealth nor in war. It is in the God of the universe who calls us "to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. " (Micah 6:8) We believe deeply in the vision and practice of the nonviolent Jesus, in the Beatitudes (Mt.5), and the spirit of our religious vows. We choose:
·to open obedient ears to what justice requires: to act to unmask the heresy which equates power with violence and rejects the essential relationship between humanity and God's universe.
·to walk humbly in the way of Christ, a way of solidarity with the victims of violence and the impoverished, and to resist military technology, which increasingly targets the innocent and vulnerable, and poisons the resources on which they depend.
·to love mercy: to act to heal rather than increase the division between the "haves" and the "have nots" whom the Space Command fears will challenge a widening economic gap.
In this spirit, we act as an invitation to all to "hammer swords into plowshares . . . that nation will not lift sword against nation or will they ever again be trained to make war. " (Micah 4:3)