Marginal Christianity

christiancentury.org /article/publisher/guns-are-americans-golden-calf Ancient Assyrian mosaic (Thinkstock) The death-by-gun crisis in America is not just a political issue. It’s a spiritual issue of the highest order. Having all but enshrined the divinity of guns, our culture has created an elaborate public liturgy for every mass shooting. Flags go to half-staff. Counselors turn out. Thoughts and prayers pour forth. We continue to make a sorry mess of the distinction between loving God and being charmed by idols that seek to thwart the glory of God. Our national infatuation with firearms has reached crisis proportions that should trouble every believer. All of us get sad, of course, when bullets eviscerate the joy in innocent victims’ families. If our eyes don’t water up when a tearful dad on the evening news alternatingly weeps and screams because a gunman senselessl...

Behold Your god Posted on October 13, 2015 by Peter H. Davids I have watched with fascination and then boredom as each mass shooting or attempted mass shooting has unfolded in the USA. There is, of course, horror and anger. Then there are the calls for keep weapons out of the hands of such disturbed (as often proves to be the case) people. Then there are those who argue that what is needed is more guns: more police, more weaponizing of the police, indeed everyone should be armed or at least a lot of people should be armed. It is in having one’s own weapon that security is to be found. Besides, it is a right. The guns-as-a-right attitude always wins, of course, for it is part of the national narrative. Colonists arrived in the Americas with guns, and that enabled them to enslave, oppress, or outright exterminate the Native Americans as they stole their land. If only those Native Americans had had the weapons . . . but too bad for them. The colonie...

(a repost from an earlier school shooting)                 Many (including myself) have taken a run at the “gun thing” in recent days in the wake of the terrible shootings in Connecticut.   The questions have been largely pragmatic (will more or less guns keep us “safer”?), political (what can or will the Obama administration do about guns?), constitutional (what, in fact, is the significance of the 2 nd Amendment?), or comparative   (what have other countries done and would what they have done work for us?).   All these are, of course, valid and valuable questions.                   Fewer responses have been genuinely theological.   Perhaps the responses from the Religious Right have seemed so wrongheaded and headed in a wrong direction that others have chosen to stay out of that part of the discussion. ...

From CNN: Most of the pundits have concluded that the main cause of this calamity is the dark, strange behavior of the gunman. Talking about anything else, they say, is silly. The New York Times’ usually extremely wise columnist, David Brooks,explains that this is a problem of psychology, not sociology. At one level, this makes sense, of course, as the proximate cause. But really, it’s questionable analysis. Think about this: are there more lonely people in America compared with other countries? Are there, say, fewer depressed people in Asia and Europe? So why do they all have so much less gun violence than we do? The United States stands out from the rest of the world not because it has more nutcases – I think we can assume that those people are sprinkled throughout every society equally –but because it has more guns. Look at the map below. It shows the average number of firearms per 100 people. Most of the world is shaded light green – those are the countries ...