Monday School: Does God allow school shootings?

Today’s Monday school comes to you with a heavy heart. Like many people on Open Diary, I am saddened by the horrific events of last Friday in Connecticut, and it’s hard to talk about anything else when twenty children under the age of six are going to be buried this week.

So here come’s today’s lesson: Does God allow school shootings to occur?

It’s a valid point. If this God everyone keeps praying to exists, and atrocities like this still happen… why isn’t anyone blaming God for not stepping in and saving everyone? I think we all know the real reason why people don’t blame God, and the fact that people keep turning to the intangible parent in the sky despite the evidence against his/her/it/their existance, and the fact that no one cares to step in and stop the violence proves how delusional religious people really are.

So this week I’m going to rehash the gun issue on Monday School. A few months ago, I posted another Monday School entry titled “Would Jesus pack heat?” and that was a short time after the theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado during the midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Once again the US is in mourning as an elementary school was the site of twenty-eight dead people, and I have to ask the question again to all the gun nuts out there: What would Jesus do?

As I pointed out in the previous entry after Colorado, Jesus was throughout the alleged good book a pacifist, as there are countless verses where Jesus told people not to raise arms against the Romans and advocated non-violence. Since Jesus himself it appears refused to carry any weapons, it’s safe to think he would never pack heat in today’s society had he still been around. Jesus would definitely be against the use of guns, so why aren’t his followers especially in the United States?

Despite the horrors of last week’s shootings, some very stupid people of faith have stepped forward to put their foot in their mouth. Some religious folk have gone as far as to do some very inappropriate finger pointing regarding this horrible atrocity. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee weighed in on the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown on Friday, saying the crime was no surprise because we have “systematically removed God” from public schools.

“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee said on Fox News. “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Hey Huck, where was this ‘all powerful, all good’ deity when 20, count them T-W-E-N-T-Y, children were being mowed down by gunfire? The same place it is during every bad (and good) situation: in your fantasy world.

Of course we can’t forget that religious people aren’t violent, right?

Did Huckabee pretty much miss all of world history?

Does Huckabee forget that the shooter in Norway was a Christian?

Huckabee also forgets that Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Bundy were also Christian.

Religion doesn’t make someone less violent, but other nations around the world have proven that restricting guns from some people does work. If you have a history of mental illness, I’m sorry but you should never be allowed to own a gun. If you have a history of violence or a criminal record, it should be illegal to sell you a gun. These restrictions work and because of that gun violence in all the other developed nations is a fraction of a percent of what is in the United States.

Also, a comment I’ve been using to rebut this whole idea that the shooting never happened because God was expelled from public schools is this: God is accepted in Churches, but that never saved young boys from being raped by their pastors. Where was God for those young boys? You can’t say that their pain could have been avoided by simply letting God into their building, because this atrocity occurred in his building.

Truth is you cannot remove an invisible friend from a building. The reason why is quite simple: it never existed in the first place.

The truth is this tragedy occurred because unstable people have unfettered access to powerful assault weapons. This needs to stop, and I hope that after last week’s shooting, something will finally be done to keep these horrible weapons out of the hands of people who mean to do harm to people rather than hunt small animals for sport.

To those people who have been praying and hugging their children extra hard over the weekend, that is not enough. You need to contact congressmen and senators and push for gun control. Washington needs to hear that this is not acceptable and that change needs to be made. Civilians have no need for military grade assault weapons and they should be banned to prevent slaughters like this from happening so easily.

Praying to an intangible figment of the imagination will not save the kids who might be the victim of the next horrible shooting. But you can do something. If the people push for gun reform to make sure disturbed people who are either mentally ill or just bat shit crazy cannot get access to guns easier than they can a mental care professional. The power is your hands, not God’s. If you do nothing, this will happen again. Go to one of the following links below and make your voice heard:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments

http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Last week’s shooting to me is further proof that God doesn’t exist. No ‘good’ God would ever let something that horrible happen on their watch. This would also mean that the atrocities going on right now in Africa, the slaughter in Rwanda and other terrible things are also proof of what little any God has done for the human race. For people who actually believe in God, you have my pity. One atoricity after another you must feel abandoned but your diety, when in fact the reason for his/her/it/their absence is evident: they don’t exist.

The sooner you realize that, the sooner you will make a bigger contribution to actually solving the world’s problems not by putting your hands together and doing nothing, but but actively taking part in actual change by writing letters, participating in protests and seeing actual changes happen for the better. The first step to making that change is to stop asking someone else for help, get up off your knees and be the change you want to see happen.

Peter