E*****m
发帖数: 25615 | 1 http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/18/my-take-six-things-i-d
My Take: Six things I don't want to hear after the Sandy Hook massacre
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN
(CNN) – There are a lot of things I am sick of hearing after massacres such
as the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Here
are six of them:
1. “It was God’s will.”
There may or may not be a God, but if there is, I sure hope he (or she or it
) does not go around raising up killers, plying them with semiautomatic
weapons, goading them to target practice, encouraging them to plot mass
killings and cheering them on as they shoot multiple bullets into screaming
6- and 7-year-old children. Much better to say there is no God or, as
Abraham Lincoln did, “The Almighty has his own purposes,” than to flatter
ourselves with knowing what those purposes are.
2. “Jesus called the children home.”
I don’t want to hear that Jesus needed 20 more kids in heaven on Friday –
that Madeleine Hsu (age 6) or Daniel Barden (age 7) were slain because Jesus
couldn't wait to see them join his heavenly choir. Even the most fervent
Christians I know want to live out their lives on Earth before going “home
” to “glory.” The Hebrew Bible patriarchs rightly wanted long lives.
Moses lived to be 120. Abraham was 175 when he died. Madeleine and Daniel
deserved more than 6 or 7 years.
3. “After death, there is the resurrection.”
In the Jewish tradition, it is offensive to bring up the afterlife while in
the presence of death. Death is tragic, and deaths such as these are
unspeakably so. So now is the time for grief, not for pat answers to
piercing questions. “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to
mourn and a time to dance,” says the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, and
now is not a time for laughing or dancing or talk of children raised from
the dead.
4. “This was God’s judgment.”
After every hurricane or earthquake, someone steps up to a mic to say that
“this was God’s judgment” on New Orleans for being too gay or the United
States for being too secular. I’m not sure what judgment of God would
provoke the killing of 27 innocent women and children, but I certainly don’
t want to entertain any theorizing on the question right now. Let’s leave
God’s judgment out of this one, OK? Especially if we want to continue to
believe God's judgments are "true and righteous altogether" (Psalms 19:9).
5. “This happened because America is too secular.”
Unlike those of us who are shaking their heads trying to figure out what
transpired in Newtown, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an evangelical
icon, apparently has it all figured out. We don’t need fewer guns in the
hands of killers, he said Friday on Fox News, we need more God in our public
schools.
“Should we be so surprised that schools have become such a place of carnage
? Because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity
, life, what responsibility means, accountability,” Huckabee said in an
astonishing flight of theological and sociological fancy.
Just keep plying people like the killer with Glocks and Sig Sauers. As long
as we force Jewish and Buddhist Americans to say Christian prayers, then the
violence will magically go away. The logic here is convoluted to the point
of absent, leaving me wondering whether what passes for "leadership" in
America can sink any lower.
6. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
If ever there has been a more idiotic political slogan, I have yet to hear
it. The logical fallacy here is imagining that people are killed either by
people or by guns. Come again? Obviously, guns do not kill people on their
own. But people do not shoot bullets into people without guns. At Sandy Hook
and Aurora and Columbine, people with guns killed people. This is a fact.
To pretend it away with slogans is illogical and revolting.
The question now is: Are those of us who have not yet been killed by guns
going to allow these massacres to continue unimpeded? Are Americans that
callous? Is life here so cheap? I have read the Second Amendment, and I find
no mention there of any right to possess any gun more advanced than an 18th
-century musket? Do I really have the right to bear a nuclear weapon? Or a
rocket-propelled grenade? Then why in God’s name would any U.S. civilian
have the right (or the need) to bear a .223-caliber assault rifle made by
Bushmaster?
If you believe in a God who is all powerful and all good, then covering up
for the Almighty at a time like this is in my view deeply unfaithful. Today
is a day to shake your fist at heaven and demand answers, and then to shake
it harder when no answers are forthcoming. To do anything else is in my view
to diminish the idea of God, and to cheapen faith in the process.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephen
Prothero.
Stephen Prothero - CNN Belief Blog contributor | x***x
发帖数: 3401 | |
|
