Witness Colorado over this past weekend:
Three people were shot to death and six were wounded in Colorado on Sunday in two church-related shootings in the U.S. Christian heartland...
The second one has 7,000 people in the megachurch when the shooting happened. A security guild finished off the gunman. The first shooting happened at a Christian missionary training center seventy miles away, with the gunman escaping, so it's reasonable to bet that the incidents might be related and rather chilling to suspect they might not.
It seemed about time for the violence to reach the megachurches, situated as they are in the heartland where gun control is weakest. So many people in one place. Centers of community, therefore natural gravitation points.
Oddly enough, the first incident was sparked by the refusal to house a stranger, which some might consider an un-Christian act:
In the Arvada shooting, a young man came to the door of the Youth With a Mission dormitory asking for a place to stay, the group said in a statement.
When he was told he could not be accommodated there, he pulled out a handgun and opened fire. Two youth staffers were killed and two were wounded. They had been up late cleaning up after a Christmas party.
The mission is an international and interdenominational Christian organization that trains young people to work as missionaries.
As to the site of the second attack:
The New Life Church was founded 20 years ago by pastor Ted Haggard who resigned in disgrace a year ago after admitting to sexually immoral conduct following a friendship with a male prostitute.
Now, I don't want to imply that the churches brought these terrors upon themselves. Maybe a more pious person might believe that those very infractions, the inhospitality and the homosexuality, marked these organizations for God's wrath or Satan's messenger. Joseph and Mary didn't open up on all those innkeepers who told them sorry, all rooms already booked. It just seems that religion is on the front burner, poised to boil over.
The early Presidential race, particularly the GOP preach-off, has put it there. You've got Mitt Romney asking to be included among like-thinking Jesus worshippers, and Mike Huckabee acting like his God is finally giving him props.
Romney's speech prompted lefty Dem Lawrence O'Donnell to go nuclear on the Mormon religion -- something he helps portray on HBO's Big Love -- this morning on the McLaughlin Group:
This was the worst political speech of my lifetime. Because this man stood there and said to you "this is the faith of my fathers." And you, and none of these commentators who liked this speech realized that the faith of his fathers is a racist faith. As of 1978 it was an officially racist faith, and for political convenience in 1978 it switched. And it said "OK, black people can be in this church." He believes, if he believes the faith of his fathers, that black people are black because in heaven they turned away from God, in this demented, Scientology-like notion of what was going on in heaven before the creation of the earth.
Whether or not you agree with O'Donnell or his own righteous fervor, it's a wild clip, as each other other commentators (Buchanan, Crowley, Clift, John himself) descend into anarchic contention, professional pundits suddenly made incredibly uncomfortable and not having the time to settle back into their usual bullshit. O'Donnell's the bomb thrower and everyone allows themselves to get blown up, over and over until saved by sponsor.
And whether or not you agree with O'Donnell, the big issue he's igniting is whether recent religions are actually synthetic monsters, not worthy of being spoken of in the same breath as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, uh, Islam. Is Scientology a religion, or a collection of extremely misguided believers in kooky myths built by con men? Is Mormonism the same, just with a century and a half headstart?
Do any of their faithful have a place in the highest seat of American political power?
Is that even safe?
Even Conservative pundit George F. Will has a problem with Mike Huckabee, per this generally derogatory bunch on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. (Cokie Roberts: "You're getting back to the same problem, the Republicans don't have a candidate, that's your problem!") And Huckabee is looking a little less lovable after revelations of the past week, a rapist/murderer released for political reasons, and sticking to his 1992 position on quarantining AIDS sufferers.
The Catholic Church, which had it's breakdown over the past decade, is still recovering, awkwardly.
If you take O'Donnell's assault on the founding and beliefs of relatively recently minted religions to their natural philosophical conclusion, all religions are built on unprovable supernatural beliefs, hence all strict believers are too nuts to be President.
This is why the Romneys, Huckabees and, yes, Bushes of the world should be embracing the separation of church & state. Imagine that a Mormon hater gets in, uses Cheney-era precedents to wiretap Romney, rendition his sorry ass, and torture him with impunity. It's good to be king, but nobody gets to be king forever.
And if you take the questions O'Donnell sparks all the way down the line, one might ask, is religion itself the Root of All Evil?
Or, as George Carlin so hilariously reveals, religion is...well...why is God so bad with money?
No comments:
Post a Comment