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Category: guns

Why does god allow evil? Sandy Hook edition

5 January 2013 / / 2 Comments

There’s no point in bringing up the gun massacre at Sandy Hook again, since any meaningful action on gun control was forgotten just in time for Christmas.

Mentions of “gun control” on Twitter. Click the graphic for source.

But it wouldn’t be a tragedy without theists trying to explain where their god was during the tragedy. Don’t know why they bother; the Christian god was responsible for plenty of tragedy on his own. But anyway, here’s John Hawkins from ClownHall.com to explain the mysterious ways of the Lord to us.

1) He gives us free will: God didn’t make robots who were designed to execute His will. Instead He gave us the freedom to make our own decisions.

Okay, so the shooter had free will. But what about the free will of those kids not to be killed? Doesn’t their free will count? Why is the shooter the only one whose free will is respected?

2) It’s a necessity for faith: If God wanted to remove all doubt about his existence, He could do so — but, He doesn’t because the cornerstone of Christianity is faith.

Translation: God could provide good evidence for his existence, but won’t. Instead, he expects us to believe in him based on bad evidence… and will judge the ones who sensibly refuse. Doesn’t sound quite just, does it?

And why is faith the one thing that this god wants? That’s simple. God requires everyone’s belief because without belief, gods die.

The next one isn’t very coherent, so I’ll just paste it all.

3) He has a different perspective: Our God gave “His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Imagine being in his place as Jesus was jeered, whipped and had to suffer and die in agony on the cross. What would run through your mind as your Son was crucified and uttered the words, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” when you had the power to free Him, heal His wounds and strike down His tormentors at will. Our God made that sacrifice for each and every one of us so that we could be saved.

So… human suffering doesn’t matter because Jesus had to suffer for a weekend, which made everything all right in the long run. Clear?

4) We often turn to God in times of tragedy: One of the sad truths of human nature is that when we’re happy, healthy, loved, secure and our pockets are full, most of us think we already have all the answers and don’t turn to God.

Translation: God just wants us to love him and turn to him. And if he doesn’t get the love, then things might start going wrong, see?

5) Ultimately it’s about Heaven, not earth

Right now, those murdered kids are having ice cream in heaven. (Unless they’re not.) It just puts the multiple bullet wounds and final fearful moments into perspective, doesn’t it?

This list is not so much an explanation of why God lets evil happen. It’s more like a list of unbelievably callous justifications for an omnipotent god’s seeming indifference to human suffering. It would be much kinder to this god to allow that he can’t act to prevent suffering because he doesn’t exist.

The problem of evil and the incompetence of supernaturalism

27 December 2012 / / 2 Comments

Two articles crossed my screen today, and they’re a great example of the divide between rational thought and superstition.

They’re both about the gun tragedy at Sandy Hook, and the first one is written by a Catholic priest.

Now, believers in the Christian god have a bit of explaining to do when horrible things happen. That’s because they claim there’s a god who’s good, loving, and all-powerful, but who somehow fails to prevent evil things from happening. So after a tragedy, a reasonable question is: where was he? Is he really all that good if he has the power to prevent grade-school massacres, yet chooses not to? Here’s the theologian’s answer:

The truest answer is: I don’t know. I have theological training to help me to offer some way to account for the unexplainable. But the questions linger.

Well, that’s a bit pathetic. He doesn’t know? All that theological training, and he can’t answer a question that belongs in his discipline?

Seriously, read it; it doesn’t give any more than a shrug. And it’s not just this writer. This is literally the best they’ve got. (Oh, there are other religion guys out there who do claim to know, but their answers are so morally callous as to be not worth repeating.)

I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.

Great, so if you help others, it’s actually god’s love; not yours. (Hat tip to Stephanie for this thought.) And why would ‘soothing’ be a consolation? I’d exchange buckets of after-the-fact soothing in order to not have had that tragedy happen. Who wouldn’t? What’s wrong with this guy? But all we’re left with is: I don’t know.

It’s good to admit when you don’t know something, but if you have no way of finding out, and no way of telling whether your answers are good ones, you have a bit of a fucking methodological problem. And this is a sad sign of the inadequacy of supernatural thinking. See, I do science because science is good at scientific questions. People may say that science isn’t good at moral questions or spiritual questions, and we can argue that. (My answer is that it does just as well as anything else.) But by gum, science is good for doing science.

Spiritual reasoning, on the other hand, isn’t good at answering scientific questions, but it’s also terrible at answering spiritual questions. It’s incompetent within its own domain. It is a shitty way of reasoning. Pardon my language, but spirituality/religion/supernaturalism has one job, and it sucks at it, and this incompetence makes me angry, especially when we have people telling us that it has the answers to life’s great questions, and then when it comes down to it, all that its professionals can tell us is “We don’t know.”

On the other hand, here’s the same issue handled by someone who’s intellectually honest: the scientist, Laurence Krauss. He doesn’t have the same problem as the priest because he doesn’t have to tap-dance around demonstrably untrue theological claims. That means he can deal with things more directly, including the superfluity of gods in times of tragedy.

Why must it be a natural expectation that any such national tragedy will be accompanied by prayers, including from the president, to at least one version of the very God, who apparently in his infinite wisdom, decided to call 20 children between the age of 6 and 7 home by having them slaughtered by a deranged gunman in a school that one hopes should have been a place or nourishment, warmth and growth?

We are told the Lord works in mysterious ways but, for many people, to suggest there might be an intelligent deity who could rationally act in such a fashion and that that deity is worth praying to and thanking for “calling them home” seems beyond the pale.
…
We don’t need faith to empathize with the grieving in Newtown. We can feel real connections, whether we are parents, or neighbors of families, or simply caring men and women. And we can want to help simply because of our common humanity.

Note that he identifies ‘common humanity’ at its origin: with humans. The difference in approach is striking. So is the relative capability of the authors. It helps if you’re not burdened by outmoded dogma and superstition.

Crossbow control

8 April 2011 / / 13 Comments

A horrible story about a gun massacre at a school in Brazil. Sort of like the ones that come out with grim regularity in countries where guns are readily available. I don’t know much about gun control in Brazil, but I do see that voters rejected more controls on guns and ammunition in 2005.

I don’t really want to focus on the religious leanings of the killer. Nor do I want to argue that greater gun availability tends to lead to more gun violence. I guess people do still get killed with guns in Australia, despite the heavy restrictions. (Australia is that tiny sliver down the bottom — it’s kind of hard to see.)

No, I really just want to brag that my state, Western Australia, has implemented a crossbow ban.

WA Police Minister Rob Johnson said the new laws followed an agreement by the Australasian Police Ministers’ Council that crossbows should be banned across Australia.

“The changes will limit the circumstances under which crossbows can be lawfully purchased,” he said.

“We want to reduce the likelihood that a crossbow falls into the wrong hands and is used to injure or kill a person or animal.”

The only exceptions will be genuine crossbow collectors, people engaged in crossbow events who belong to an Archery Australia club, and film producers.

Not only is it hard to get a gun, it’s also hard to get a crossbow. And that’s fine with me.

I used to live in America, so the lack of reaction is puzzling to me. Where’s all the hand-wringing about our right to grab a whole bunch of guns to protect ourselves from people with a whole bunch of guns? Why isn’t anyone saying, “See, if you ban guns, people will pick up crossbows. What’s next, a knife ban?”

Strangely, it doesn’t come up. I guess we’re busy with other issues besides fearing for our lives.

UPDATE: Stephanie from comments informs me that some crossbow fans are indeed chafing under the yoke of oppression. All I can say is, I’m sure glad we’re having this discussion at this level, instead of further on down the track. Aren’t you?

Dear America: The gun thing

19 January 2011 / / 1 Comment

Hi, America. Just wondering how you’re doing. I know things have been a bit crazy lately — well, just like always, eh? Or maybe a little crazier.

Look, I noticed that you haven’t really changed your mind about guns, even with all the recent unpleasantness.

Americans’ overall attitudes toward gun laws have not budged an inch in the wake of the shootings in Arizona, according to a new national poll.
…
“Those numbers are identical to the results of a poll taken in the summer of 2009, indicating that the tragic events in Tucson have not changed how the public feels about gun laws,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “This is a familiar pattern in polling – surveys taken after previous incidents like the Columbine shooting have shown little or no change in Americans’ attitudes toward guns.”

I guess it was inevitable that nothing would change after the shootings — if Columbine didn’t do it, or Fort Hood, or Virginia Tech, — or the 80-something Americans that get killed every day — then I don’t suppose anything will. Just the cost of doing business.

But I also noticed that you think some restrictions are good.

The poll indicates that the two sides of the gun debate are evenly balanced, with one in seven Americans opposing any restrictions on guns at all and one in seven saying that all guns should be illegal except for police and other authorized personnel. Roughly a third support minor restrictions and roughly a third support major restrictions.

Wow, two-thirds of you want restrictions on guns. And yet there’s no plans to make it happen. It’s a dead issue. That must be frustrating. Is the gun lobby thwarting it? Would a bill ever get off the ground?

I’ll level with you, America. This issue makes you look… well, let’s just say other countries are starting to talk. That you can’t seem to get a hold on this issue even though it kills a lot of you seems suicidally masochistic. And it does kill a lot of you. Right now, gun deaths account for 78 percent of all your homicides — that’s the highest in the world except for Colombia.

Yeah, I know you like your guns. At least, those of you who are still alive. Let’s ask the rest of you how they feel. Oh, wait, we can’t. (Maybe that’s part of the problem — the dead can’t vote.) But some of you who are still alive say that you can’t take guns away because then only outlaws would have guns, or something like that. I guess that’s true; I wouldn’t like to be gun-less in a country already awash in guns. You can’t put the genie back in Pandora’s box, if you will.

Maybe gun control can’t work in America anymore, and if you want less gun violence, you just have to go somewhere else. I did go somewhere else, but even so, I still find this profoundly depressing. I like you a lot, America, and I hate thinking that this drama is going to play out again and again, and everyone will act just as shocked and outraged as ever, but it’ll never get better.

Rhetoric, Palin, and the Arizona shooting

14 January 2011 / / 2 Comments

A friend asked me what I thought about Sarah Palin’s responsibility with regard to the Arizona shooting. Here’s what I wrote back.

People have seized upon Palin as a very visible example of unacceptably over-heated rhetoric. This is not entirely unfair — Palin has done much to poison the dialogue, and there are many examples that people have unearthed. But the problem is much bigger than Palin. Advocacy of violence has been SOP for the GOP for a long time now, and there are many who have done it much more consistently than Palin. I’m thinking of Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage — at times, the most popular commentators on the Right. Check this link for many more examples of violent eliminationist rhetoric.

Does this send some people over the edge? Well, direct causation is hard to determine. I tend to view this a bit probabilistically. Let me use the example of health. In any population, there will be robust, healthy individuals, and some people on the margins. And there are always some nasty germs around in the population, and there’s a chance you might get sick from them, but you might not if you’re otherwise healthy. But if we now inject other factors into the population, it changes the odds. Say there’s an earthquake where services get knocked out. Now we’ll see the entire population moving toward poor health. Many people will remain healthy, but the probability of getting sick rises, and it’s going to send a certain percentage of least healthy individuals over the edge.

Similarly, if you have a population of individuals ranging from nice to crazy, and you change the environment so that formerly unacceptable kinds of discourse become commonplace, and in fact so common as to be barely noticeable, you are raising the chances that someone on the edge will take action (though they may not). This time someone did.

I also think our toxic discourse has the effect of hiding people with real problems: “I didn’t think anything when he said that; people on the radio say things like that all the time.” How do we know that someone wearing this shirt isn’t a potential shooter?

How about this guy?

They’re just normal guys, right? Or they could be crazies. They seem crazy to me. But if these people aren’t crazy, they’re making the real crazies that much harder to spot.

I don’t want to put limits on what people can say just because a mentally ill person might take them seriously, but I think it’s time for people to draw the line and vote with their feet and their money when media personalities engage in this kind of talk.

Finally, what I find most objectionable is the attempt of right-wing apologists to disclaim any responsibility by saying the shooter was a crazy guy. Well, yes, he was a crazy guy. Who else would do that if they weren’t? But he was also someone who used a gun for its intended purpose, acting on cues from the most significant and well-paid voices on the right. The GOP claims to stand for personal responsibility, but this incident has shown me that, once again, they don’t believe their own story. Everyone is responsible but them.

Apparently, it did.

23 June 2010 / / 1 Comment

Great moments in blokeness:

Aussie men shoot each other in buttocks ‘to see if it hurts’

Two Australian men needed surgery after shooting each other in the buttocks during a drinking session to see if it would hurt, police said on Wednesday.

The men, both aged 34, used an air rifle to fire at each other on Sunday. By Tuesday, both were in hospital to have pellets removed from their buttocks and legs.

Criticise them if you wish for mixing guns and alcohol, but you have to admire their commitment to empiricism.

And there’s something else we can learn from this. You notice how one guy shot his friend (doubtless hurting him), but then it was his turn to get shot? This just shows that an experiment isn’t really valid unless it’s replicable.

Everyone wins

24 April 2010 / / 1 Comment

God uses omnipotence to kill child

5 January 2010 / / Comments Off on God uses omnipotence to kill child

I think this story is horrible, but then I’m just a normal compassionate human being, and not the god of the Bible.

A four-year-old boy has been killed by a falling bullet that was fired into the air during New Year’s Eve celebrations in the US.

Marquel Peters was playing a video game inside a church in the state of Georgia when the bullet pierced the roof and hit him in the head, local media reported.

He collapsed on the floor alongside his parents, bleeding, and was taken to hospital where he died.

…

Marquel’s family planned to return to the church – where they were regulars – for his funeral, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“I’m a faith believer, but it’s just hard,” his uncle Garry Peters said. “Why at church?”

Why indeed? Anybody help him out?

Silly man. He’s trying to fathom the will of a supernatural being, which you just can’t do. “My ways are not your ways,” saith the Lord, which is true: I wouldn’t let a child be killed in church. Preventing this wouldn’t have counter-acted anyone’s agency — the shooter likely didn’t intend to kill anyone. But it happened, and a loving god did jack to stop it. Poor little one.

Anyway, since one of the functions of religion is to try to explain things without actually learning anything, I thought I’d try coming up with some reasons that the faithful will inevitably settle on.

1) The boy was playing video games in church, when he clearly should have been listening to the sermon or reading Leviticus. An unchanging god has dealt with him just as he did with the children who mocked Elisha.

Plus he was probably playing Pokémon, which is evil.

2) God did it to show us that it really is possible to be killed by a falling bullet, ending years of speculation from Mythbusters and Cecil Adams. Hallelujah! The Lord is advancing our knowledge! Who says faith and science aren’t compatible? Of course, this god doesn’t seem to have cleared the ethics committee, but a fact’s a fact.

3) Firing bullets into the air is a stupid thing to do, and given enough bullets, one’s going to come down on someone.

There’s one more… what is it… oh, yes.

4) God is imaginary.

I don’t suppose they’ll hit on those last two reasons. They’re a sign of an insufficiently strong testimony, which apparently is considered a bad thing in some parts of the galaxy.

USA: 90 guns for every 100 people

29 August 2007 / / 5 Comments

Since this story has come out, it seems like a good time to revisit the issue of guns and safety.

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

I hate guns, but that’s a personal preference. I’d change my mind about having them if it were clear that they made a community or a nation safer.

Alas, it doesn’t seem to be so. It turns out that the USA ranks eighth worldwide in handgun deaths per capita, and twelfth in rifles, shotguns, and other large firearms. And there’s this heartbreaking statistic that places the U.S. second in the world in handgun-related suicide.

I know this is an old horse, the Left has abandoned this issue, and that most Americans classify a certain percentage of deaths as ‘acceptable’. But every once in a while I get little reminders of how glad I am to be in Australia, where gun availability is low, and if someone gets stabbed in Melbourne, we hear about it in Perth.

The gun suicides here are still a bit high though, apparently.

God: Did I miss anything?

18 April 2007 / / 3 Comments

Though I’m not really following the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy, bits of it are leaking into the Australian news. I’m sort of absorbing it from an Australian perspective. I’m guessing that this event will not reignite the gun debate in America in any long term way — the power of the NRA and the reluctance of the American left has ensured the gun debate’s been canned for the next twenty years, no matter how many people get shot. I watch and wonder if America will ever learn to stop this.

I don’t know what to do about gun violence. Crazy people get guns. It even happened in Australia once. Once. But contrast that to the grim regularity with which these stories come out in the USA. The theme of ‘gun rampage/closed-room slaughter/suicide’ has become a script, an American story that grows with each retelling.

As a believer, I used to respond to the problem of evil by explaining that God refused to curtail our agency. If we decided to kill a hundred people, it was allowed so that we’d be justly judged by our actions in the hereafter. It didn’t occur to me that God was a being that could see the future and already knew what we were going to do.

Now that explanation seems unsatisfactory. I imagine what kinds of events would take place if there were no supreme intervening being, and it looks like… well, pretty much like what’s going on right now.

Still, this doesn’t stop a dissembling ferret like Dinesh D’Souza, whose blog features the most invitingly punchable face in all conservativedom, from wondering how athiests deal with the problem of evil.

Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen?

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing.

Notice something interesting about horrible tragedies in progress? God is nowhere to be found. Sure, people talk about God afterwards. Talk and talk and talk.

What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.

Fine. What has he got to offer? A magical man who finds car keys and parking spots, but is eternally late for real emergencies. An absent father. A failed superhero.

So D’Souza finds science less comforting than stories about heaven. Fair enough. It probably is in some ways. But an idea is not true in proportion to its comfortingness. Part of becoming an adult is learning to deal with some pretty bleak truths, and Christianity (and theism) forestalls that part of our development by offering baseless fluffy stories.

D’Souza thinks atheists have a problem that they need to explain. I think theists do. The real issue is bigger than ‘where is God during shootings’. It’s this: Why does the universe consistently fail to show the kinds of things that we should be seeing if theism were true?

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