10 December 2007
God Defends Those Who Defend Themselves
That's the moral we're invited to draw from the account of the security guard who brought down the Colorado killer yesterday. She credits her victory to divine protection, even as a father at the Colorado Springs megachurch mourns the deaths of two daughters, who were killed before God kicked the volunteer rent-a-cop's butt into gear. Apparently, God wanted to save everyone in the church except those two girls, and didn't care about the people at the missionary training center earlier in the day. None of this should surprise us though, since like many an absolute ruler, God's decisions are consistently arbitrary. God may indeed be a figment of the collective imagination, but people's perception of him reflects some basic wisdom about power, if not any wisdom about their own pathetic claims on God's favor. A world that has a Lord is inevitably ruled by caprice, never by law in any humane sense of the term. So we can imagine what the gun nuts will say after their predictable idolization of the security guard leads to the deaths of innocents in crossfires between killers and would-be heroes: "Those that died, it must have been their time. The Lord just called them home ..."
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3 comments:
Why does a Christian church - a religion that is meant to be completely passive and non-violent - need to hire an armed security guard? If they are the faithful servants of God, shouldn't they have faith that God won't let anything bad happen? And if God is omnipotent, doesn't the fact that the gunman killed a number of church members prove that God must have wanted them dead? So again, why the need for an armed security guard?
Seems to me that these "christians" aren't willing to trust all that much to God's good graces.
To update the story, we now learn that while the security guard is still credited with dropping the gunman,he managed to finish himself off. I don't think that takes the guard off the hook for killing on God's ground, but I also don't think modern American Christians are too worried about such ethical niceties. They are a church militant, all denials by way of contrast with Islam aside, because since Cold War times Americans have asserted a right to defend their faith by force against those who would supposedly destroy it -- Commies then, Muslims now. They have conveniently forgotten Jesus's warning that those who live by the sword, even in his defense, will die by the sword.
Either that, or god wanted those people up in heaven, singing the glory of his name (along with the millions of other dead christians) and the gunman was the most convenient way of getting them there. Of course that means the gunman was doing god's work.
Hell, maybe god wants all christians dead so they can all sing the glory of his name, since he never seems to have enough members in his heavenly choir. I know I certainly wouldn't complain if every god-fearin' christian suddenly disappeared of the face of this planet. Good riddance, I'd say.
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