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I was not raised a pacifist. Like many of my generation, I was brought up hearing tales of World War Two heroism, my parents having been born just after the war. There was no squeamishness about warfare in my upbringing. For us children, it was quite normal for us to spend our weekends clambering over tanks at military museums.

Even so, for most of my adult life I have leaned more towards pacifist ideals than enthusiasm for militaristic patriotism. Given a childhood spent playing with toy guns, army action figures and model dioramas of conflict scenes, I often wonder where this inclination towards nonviolence came from.

Of course there is the other side of my upbringing. We were a church-going family, raised on the Christian gospels, the bible regularly read in our home. Out of all of my siblings, I was perhaps the most literalist in my understanding of whatever we were taught in Sunday School.

If we all listened to the Sermon on the Mount as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, it seems that I alone took the directive of turning the other cheek to one who has already slapped your right cheek as an absolute. Indeed, the first time that it occurred to me that we were not supposed to take this literally was when my mother asked why I did not stand up to a bully on the school bus.

That literalism, it turns out, may be rooted in the chromosome disorder which now shines light on many of my developmental delays, including my late acquisition of language. In some studies, it has been shown that some children with this condition exhibit weaknesses in pragmatic skills such as in the comprehension of figurative language.

But perhaps this condition is relevant in more ways than simply informing my literalist interpretation of the biblical messages I inculcated in my youth. A characteristic often associated with this condition is increased shyness and a passive personality. Could this in fact be the overriding factor influencing my preference for pursuing peace?

Certainly, I find myself at odds with many of my male counterparts, for whom martial combat is considered a fundamental component of manliness. Even those that vocally demand pacifism of their enemies reveal themselves to be belligerent advocates of warfare in defence of their nation or strongly-held ideals. These reveal a strange inner schizophrenia.

For my part, I know that my natural stance is problematic. Thus I have adapted it towards a more pragmatic response to the world as we find it. If one group of people did not repel another, I realise, there would be absolute corruption on the earth, as the powerful trample the weak without pause. We only need to look to the behaviour of the world’s superpowers with respect to poorer nations to see that this is true.

And so it is that I reconcile myself to texts that in earlier times would have deeply troubled me. By nature, I prefer peace to conflict, forgiveness to discord. But if a people are being oppressed or tyrannised, then of course I recognise that it is their right to resist. I suppose that’s what all those tales of heroism recounted in my youth were supposed to convey.

Yes, so fight those that fight you, but do not transgress the limits. And if they incline to peace, likewise incline to peace. A better understanding for our times.