You would rather be shot than “contribute to violence”? What if you were between a gunman and an elementary school? I suppose that is your choice.
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A real Christian would have the strength to say “I forgive you” to the shooter.
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P.S. Jesus did NOT walk around with a tricorn hat, gun and the dinosaurs!
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I’d rather talk the gunman down. Besides, I don’t carry a weapon, so I’ve little other choice in this scenario.
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On top of that the shooter in this latest massacre didn’t target Christians. He asked people if they were Christians and shot them regardless of the answer given. The media took “he ask if they were christian” and ran with that angle, albeit briefly.
But I agree Christians love feeling persecuted. The story at my sister’s rural community continues to play out … The school recently agreed to stop saying prayers at graduation, which some took as “a humanist shoving their beliefs down the throats in gods country”. Yeah that’s what has happened.
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{citation needed}
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Maybe that’s why there’s so few of them left.
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I’ve always been fond of Luke 20:30 myself.
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Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
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You couldn’t be more wrong, Lisa. If I didn’t have this gun, the King of England could just walk in here any time he wants and start shoving you around. Do you want that? Huh? Do you?
It must be a compelling fantasy for an armed citizen that they might be the one who returns fire and takes down a spree shooter, but there’s also the chance that they might be the one who leaves their gun lying around so their child can shoot another child.
People being encouraged to own and carry guns on the grounds of faith - especially in the same breath as talk about ‘defenders of the West’ - doesn’t sound like a route to success. In a country where kindergarteners have to be put through lockdown drills, it kind of sounds like a intentional step further into madness.
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It’s the path to becoming the same as the ones you despise the most.
They are supposed to be the violent ones. They are supposed to be the killers. We are supposed to be the better than that.
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Beat me to it! That’ll teach me not to read the thread before posting.
I hope heaven is real so when they get denied access they can have a long hard think about the whole “thou shalt not kill” lesson they forgot about.
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Hmm, he wrote that the perpetrators are motivated by aggressive secularism and their targets are defenders of the West.
It’s probably my communistic antichristian secular European liberal un-American basic education, but I thought the separation of church and state is one of the defining properties of the “The West” [the term is fuzzy, but I’m not aware of any definition without secularism].
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God I hate people like you and @steverb who quote tiny bible passages out of context to warp passages to mean exactly the opposite in order to pervert the message to match their own twisted beliefs. Have you ever read the next fucking line of that passage?
He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors’; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.” The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are two swords.” “That’s enough!” he replied.
— Gospel of Luke 22:36-38, NIV
Note the “That’s enough!” part. Because Jesus fucking hated weapons and was only doing it to fulfill prophecy.
I’m an atheist and I know the bible better than you.
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I don’t know the intention of SheiffFatman, but selectively quoting without context is a proven and tested discourse method used everywhere on all sides of the argument. [not fair , but working…]
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I’m just tired of bible thumpers whose favorite quotes from the bible are one sentence long and using it to justify their horrific behavior. The gun nuts who use that particular passage (it is a favorite of theirs) are some of the worst offenders.
I mean, I might as well just selectively pull words at from different pages and make Jesus say whatever I want him to say.
Ah, I see you have studied theology.
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“Aggressive Secularism”? Really?
How many mass shootings have been committed in the name of secularism?
Just curious.
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And what twisted beliefs would those be, pray?
Well, that’s assuming he ever existed at all, which frankly I’ve yet to see a convincing argument for.
As @Thebarton_Gamer points out, people have been doing exactly this for centuries. The Jesus of the Gospels is essentially a cypher, on to which Christians (and Atheists for JesusTM) can project their favoured interpretation:
- a would-be leader of a Jewish Reformation (“not one jot nor tittle of the Law shall pass away”)
- a social reformer (the woman taken in adultery)
- a militant social reformer (the money-changers in the Temple)
- a live-in-the-world pragmatist (“Render unto Caesar …”)
- a teacher of fatalism, passivity and acquiescence (“Blessed are the meek …”)
- an armed revolutionary (the buying a sword bit that’s got you so het up)
- a millenarian cultist nutbag (“If any man … hate not his mother, and father, and wife, and children …”)
Now, doubtless I’m taking all of those out of context and perverting their meaning. But which meaning? There are so many to choose from. If the guy ever lived at all, then what he truly thought about anything is almost certainly irrecoverably lost.
Despite what you apparently think of me, I am not pro gun. But saying “Jesus would’ve hated guns!” is as inane, pointless and unfalsifiable an argument against gun ownership as saying “Jesus loves guns!” is for it.
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