Stop Teaching Hate!

After one of the pastors at my church called for gun control yesterday, I was tempted to write a hate-filled, satirical piece, suggesting that we ban everything from assault rifles to butter knives, that we take the weapons from our police and our military, and that we defend our nation with nothing but flowers and fairy dust.  I was going to make it satirical, because humor can be effective, and I was going to make it hate-filled, because I was angry.

I’m still angry, but not angry enough to write hate-filled satire.  I am angry enough however to leave my church and look for a new one.

There are two reasons I am leaving the United Methodist Church.  One is that the United Methodist Church is standing behind a bishop who openly calls Jesus a bigot (https://pjmedia.com/faith/2017/09/26/lesbian-bishop-calls-jesus-bigot/amp/), and the other is that, less than 24 hours after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, one of the pastors at my former church began calling for gun control, effectively dancing on the graves of the dead before those graves are even dug.

You cannot call yourself a Christian and not believe in the divinity of Christ, and the United Methodist Church has decided to make being a Christian optional, putting the spreading of a liberal political agenda ahead of Christ.  Being neither a liberal, nor an atheist, I have no interest in being a member of such an organization.

Using the pulpit to call for gun control, less than 24 hours after a mass shooting, is disgusting.  So far, the only thing we know for sure about the shooter’s motivations is that ISIS claimed him as a recent convert, who committed this horrific shooting as an act of Jihad (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-shooting-isis-claim-no-proof-stephen-paddock-linked-terror-group/).  ISIS has not offered any proof that Stephen Paddock (the shooter) converted to Islam, but they have only twice before been wrong when claiming responsibility for something.

Perhaps ISIS is lying in this case.  We will have to wait and see.  More information will become available over the next few days and weeks, and the smart thing to do is to wait for all of the information before drawing conclusions.

In the meantime, the only reason to call for legislation in the immediate aftermath of a horrific shooting, is to capitalize on the emotion of the moment.  Liberals know that there are no sound arguments that can be made to ban guns, so they wait like vultures for horrific shootings to occur, and then they trot out emotional appeals, implying that anyone who is in favor of the right to bear arms is also complicit in the shooting.  They lament between shootings that the American people, by and large, believe in the Second Amendment, and they almost revel in each new shooting, in the hope that the carnage may change our minds.  It is just as Rahm Emanuel put it: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

Generally speaking, mass shootings do not fit the liberal agenda.  Often the guns used are illegal, in which case a ban would have made no difference.  The fact that in Europe, guns are almost universally banned, and yet mass killings are more common than here, does not help the liberal agenda either (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/10/02/gun-control-in-europe-is-almost-total-it-hasnt-stopped-mass-shooting-attacks-like-las-vegas.html).  I don’t think liberals get how silly they sound when they infer that mass shooters would not kill if guns were illegal.  Why would someone who is willing to kill as many people as humanly possible respect a gun law?  Even if they could not find guns (they have no problem finding them in Europe), Timothy McVeigh used a bomb, and though the 2012 Aurora theatre shooter used guns, he also had the theater rigged with explosives.  Had the Aurora shooter used the explosives rather than a gun, more people – not fewer – would have died.  Fire is an effective weapon, cars can be weaponized (apparently ISIS now prefers minivans) – there are many ways to kill people.  It is the motivation to kill, and not the specific tool used, that must be confronted.

Horrific acts of violence have but two causes.  One is insanity.  The other is hatred, usually surrounding an ideology of hate.

I was asked once why I think people join Al Qaida.  The answer was simple: Osama Bin Laden would find people who felt oppressed, and tell them that their oppression was not their fault.  He would then tell them whose fault it was, and offer them a way to strike back at their oppressors.  That’s a very powerful message.  It starts with hate, but once one hates, this message resonates with a sense of justice, turning murder into self defense.

ISIS wants to create a world-wide caliphate dedicated to killing everyone else on Earth.  We are the strongest nation on Earth, so they want to kill us in particular.  They hate Europe, and hope to use the refugee crisis to spark an invasion.  Once in Europe (or in the United States), they tell the Muslims they find there that they are oppressed, and that their oppression is not their fault.  They tell them whose fault their oppression is (the host country), and they offer them a way to strike back at their oppressors.  The Koran saying ‘kill the infidel’ 100 times makes this an easy sell.

ANTIFA recruits by telling people we live in an oppressive state, and that oppression is not their fault.  They tell their members whose fault the oppression is (Nazis, conservatives, and the police), and then they offer opportunities to strike back at them.

Today’s left has a very similar message.  They slice society up into identity groups, and they tell each identity group they are oppressed.  They left tells them who they are oppressed by (cis gendered, straight, white men), and they offer a way to strike back at the oppressors.  This is an agenda of hate, driven by the same powerful message Al Qaida, ISIS, and ANTIFA use.  Al Qaida and ISIS use this message to get people to kill.  Leftists only want people to vote a certain way, but is the left really so naïve as to think that the same hate-based message terrorist groups use will not inspire more than just a desire to ‘feel the Bern?’  Are college professors openly calling for white-genocide not a predecessor of mass murder (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/26/drexel-professor-draws-ire-after-posting-white-genocide-tweet-on-christmas.html)?

The targets of the Las Vegas attack were country music fans.  We know that the shooter planned the shooting in detail.  Unless we believe that the choice of victim was random, we are faced with the likelihood that the shooter may have been targeting the most conservative group he could find.  It may well turn out that ISIS lied when they said he killed for them, but he almost certainly killed to strike out at what he considered an oppressive group, just as some college professors, and some others on the left, are asking people to do.

Will the left own the shooting?  Will they admit that the shooter was one of them, and that the killing was done to forward their cause?  Of course not.  Instead they’ll flip it into an anti-conservative message by railing against the right to bear arms.  How convenient it must be to teach people to hate, to watch them kill in your name, and then to blame the people who were targeted for the killing…  The whole thing turns my stomach.

I did not write a satirical piece filled with hatred.  I wrote an angry piece, but not a hate filled one.  I opted not to because, as I started to cool down, I realized that hate cannot defeat hate.  Hate causes more hatred, and hate is the only emotion that has no positive side.  Love on the other hand can defeat hate, and just as a parent can be angry at a child who does something wrong, so too I want to love my fellow mankind – including those on the political left – and want to use my anger to teach them a lesson.  The lesson is a simple one – guns may be a tool used to commit horrific acts, but hate is the motivation, so STOP TEACHING HATE!!!

Conservatives have a different message – we teach that the American Ideal of maximum liberty, in a free and open society, unifies us.  The American Ideal is exceptional even if America fails to live up to it.  The American Ideal is a message of unity, compassion, and, dare I say it: of love.

We stand for the American Anthem because we believe in our founding ideals, and when we are standing for it we are also standing for Colin Kaepernick’s right to be an idiot, who wears Fidel Castro tee shirts to press conferences.  Colin Kaepernick kneels for the anthem because he believes he is an oppressed person who knows who his oppressors are, and kneeling is a symbolic way to strike out at them.  Colin Kaepernick kneels because he has bought into an ideology of hate.

I do not hate Colin Kaepernick, nor any of the other football players who kneel for the anthem.  They have a right to kneel, the fans have the right to boycott, and once the NFL sees it’s ratings suffer enough, the NFL will have the right to tell players that standing for the anthem is a condition of employment.  I am speaking out against the ideology of hate, and I want the players of the NFL to know that every time one of them takes a knee, some Stephen Paddock somewhere sees their message, agrees with it, and puts another bullet in a gun.

I don’t know how the NFL became political – it seemed to happen about the same time my former church did.

It’s about time we start calling out hateful ideologies for what they are, and it is about time we start countering hate with an ideology of inclusiveness, liberty, and love.  It is about time we stand for American Exceptionalism – not a fake, nostalgic exceptionalism of the past, but a real American Exceptionalism, based on our founding principles, applied universally.  If we all stand for that, the ideologies of hate will fall.

The Second Amendment, incidentally, is one of our founding principles.

As for my former church, as long as the United Methodist Church allows pastors to preach that our country is an oppressive place, worthy of hate, and that Jesus was a bigot , I will not return.  There are better ideologies, and better places to worship Almighty God.