Unsettling Questions #1
If someone gives a weapon of war to someone else knowing that they will use it only to kill others, is this person an accessory to such an act when it happens? It is not like they are giving or loaning someone an illegal weapon.
If someone votes for a politician who makes it legal to give or sell someone a weapon of war, knowing that these weapons are only used to kill people, are they an accessory to such an act when it happens?
Would Jesus or any other major prophet support property taxes as the means to finance schools knowing that this will provide good schools to affluent communities and poor schools to poor communities?
If welfare is living off the earnings of others, and we think it best that people earn their own income, why do we allow vast amounts of wealth to be inherited by others?
If we live on welfare during our formative years and during our retired years, isn’t it best to expect everyone without disabilities to earn their income during their productive years and leave wealth on death to be wealth used to help cover the costs of welfare for citizens during the formative and retired years?
Why would we think any of the advantages or disadvantages we possess at birth, like our genetic traits, our nation of birth, our historical age of birth, our parents, the schools we attend as children, the neighborhood we live in as children, our physical traits, our basic personality, our emotional traits, our learning abilities, etc. are earned gifts from God? We certainly hadn’t earned anything at the time.
If only God decides when we die, all these good people who died horrible and painful or long drawn out deaths—God was behind all of this? Did God really cause a brutal rape which ended in death? Doesn’t that put God on par with the rapist or at least an accessory to the crime?
If we think God loves all ‘his’ creations via the laws which govern the evolutionary process, or even if we think God handcrafts all his creations, why do we think God is behind modern day ‘family values’, which puts our own children as our only personal responsibility? That must leave God to care for the less fortunate children. God must not be a very good parent then.
Don’t societies work best when everyone looks out for everyone else? Don’t we have collective responsibility to help all those in need in our society?
Why do we think God depends on our prayers to do something good for ourselves, or any others for whom we might pray? Suppose every athlete in a contest prays that he/she wins the contest? If God is choosing the winner, why are we wasting our side rooting for anyone or any team?
Why would God ever use inheritance as the means for distributing his word via inherited scripture?
If God desires to have a personal relationship with us as individuals, why would it ever be so secretive and be a feeling instead of a clear cut conversation? And why don’t people who are ‘saved’ and communicate with God constantly share with others their conversations with God? If someone says to us, “Yesterday God told me a better way to study, or to train, or to get the job I wanted, or not to abort a baby etc”, we would most likely think this a delusion, especially if we already believe something different via our own inherited scripture.
If God tells us something specific as to how to behave or solve a problem why won’t God, if we ask, tell our friends the same thing. “Please God, tell my son the girl he is dating is not good for him.”“Thanks, mom, God also told me the same thing last night”. Why are God’s messages always for certain ears only?”
Most people who get cancer pray hard that God will spare them and they not die from the cancer. And many of their friends are going to pray for them too. If it is a beloved leader, then the prayers might be in the millions. Where is any statistical evidence that certain religious groups are less likely to die from cancer, or any other kind of tragedies for whom all these prayers are made? Every New Year the Pope prays for peace. If he is really an emissary from God to us, why would God let the Pope waste his time, year after year praying for peace. Which war ended via prayers from the Pope? Now of course we can pray our team wins and sometimes it does but that hardly proves anything. Every team wins some of the time.
Why, considering the length of time our universe has existed with varied forms of life at different times, do we make our own minuscule time of life so important—so important that we actually claim God made us in his image, and gave us dominion over all other species and the natural resources, and I guess immune from any consequences of human overpopulation. What is the basis for all these assumptions? If the earth is round why didn’t God tell us that from the git-go, and why did this have to be scientifically proved, and certainly why would the scientist who established this be thrown out of the church for heresy and remain a heretic for hundreds of years?
Why would crazy stuff be in scripture like stoning children who misbehave or stoning both the person and animal with whom a person had sex? Clergy never give sermons on these scriptural passages. Do we really need to proof read and bring scripture up to ethical standards? Why would God allow his ‘holy word’ to be so sloppy? If God says via His scripture that we should stone children who misbehave, then all of us who want to get to Heaven, better shape up and start collecting stones. There’s a lot of misbehaving kids out there.
We have international laws which purport to legalize warfare. So why isn’t the nation which kills the most people declared the winner? We haven’t won a war since World War II and yet in every case where we invade, we kill like ten times as many of them as our own get killed. Do we need to kill everyone to win?
Why do so many insist we continue to send young people to be slaughtered in the kind of wars we can never win, nor the country we invaded win either since they are left with thugs running their country and other countries left with millions of refugees?
We no longer use a draft to come up with soldiers for invading other countries. So if it is our personal decision not to go to war and shoot people, why are we permitted to own weapons of war when the only people we have access to kill are our own people? Haven’t we killed enough people in other nations, do we need to generate the means to kill hundreds of thousands of our own people? And if guns don’t kill people, why do we send armed soldiers into foreign lands with guns to kill them? If bad people kill people then why don’t we just send bad people to invade other countries?
I, like many others have a flash temper. I don’t want to have a gun out in public. I can’t be trusted, on the spur of the moment, when some son-of-a-bitch of the moment is right there before me and I have a gun. But now I am told it’s ok to carry and gun and use when I feel real angry, fearful, and the object of all this is right before me. My emotional state will determine whether I can kill someone legally. I can actually stalk someone, and if there is no court order restraining me, then if the person I am stalking turns around and physically attacks me, I can whip out a gun and kill them. People need to learn that when being stalked, just mind your own business and let them stalk you to their hearts content. You may fear for your life, but you can’t attack them or they can legally kill you.
Well, I can also keep a gun in my house, but a responsible gun owner keeps it locked up so kids and intruders, etc. can’t get access to it. So the moment arrives, I come home and am surprised to find a burglar in my living room looking for goodies. Well, that son-of-a-bitch came to the wrong house. “Hold it buddy!!!! You came to the wrong house.” As I head for my safe and try to remember the combination I make sure this intruder understands the consequences of his situation. He is going to pay for this criminal act. The burglar probably doesn’t think you are opening the safe to give him all your money, so he may run, but then again he might wait until you get the safe open and then kill you in case there is lot’s of money. But that is maybe a bad example. Perhaps someone wants to kill me and I want some protection in my home. He/she could break in and we could have an old fashioned shootout—or they might not be the risky type so they will wait until I walk by a window or walk to the garage or take out the garbage etc. Even if I do all this and have my gun in hand looking every which way as I head to the garage, chances are from behind most any bush he is going to get the first shot. That seems a pretty good advantage. Same when I take walks in the city. I could carry a pistol, but the odds are great it will be some teenage thugs who decide to rob me. The likelihood of them shouting to me a block away of their intentions is slim. The overwhelming odds are that I will find my hands pinned to my side or a gun in my back before I am aware of the situation. If these teenagers don’t have a gun, they do now. Teenagers, their hormones, and their emotional state do not mix well with guns. The hyperactive thugs might just shoot me. Reasonableness doesn’t always prevail in those situations. So how many times is it advantageous for us to really be packing a gun? The guy in Minnesota was packing a gun legally, I assume to protect himself, but as soon as he told the officer in a faulty tail-light stop that he had a gun on him legally, the officer, now knowing the guy had a gun on him, felt free to shoot the guy point blank as he sat next to his girlfriend in a car. So it gets confusing—if a police officer sees a person during an arrest has a gun he can shoot out of self defense, but since people can get permits to legally carry a gun in public, how does a police officer know what the presence of a gun means?
These days, if we are going into a nightclub, either to enjoy a night out, or competing for sexual or romantic attention, we want everyone to pack a gun so if some mass murderer with an AK-40 starts shooting, someone will manage to get shot off that will kill him before the number of killings make him a success at this new sport. Or at least I want armed security guards all over the premises. Still, suppose this killer is not a real dimwit—this can happen albeit maybe not that often, and so he simply dresses up like he is one of us, simply puts a bomb under his seat or in the waste basket and leaves. I suppose if the killer is determined to get the thrill out of all his killing and then wait to be killed by the police, then his intention all along is to set the killing record before the police arrive and then die at the hands of the police or he will shoot himself for the climatic ending. This sport does not appeal to me at all.
So how are we going to win this war on terrorism? I doubt the eventual answer involves violence as the answer. In all of history violence begets violence.
If we decide to go someplace safe until this sport peters out, where would we go? Immigrants are becoming less and less tolerated most anywhere’. Living well amongst the natives who are dirt poor seems a tad risky. Not speaking the native language seems a tad risky or at least difficult. If we go live in the hills somewhere surrounded, again by a decent percentage of social misfits, sounds a tad risky too. And if there is economic and social implosion in major population centers, where will we find a source of food, gas, electricity, etc?. We could grow our own food maybe, if we had the seeds etc, but unless no one in the area knows we exist, it seems a tad optimistic that others will not help themselves. A global economy and global communications kind of ensures that when economic and social implosion happens it will hurt everyone everywhere.
I don’t like these questions, they are too global and too eerily stupefying and terror-some. Everything will be all right, Trump is waiting in the wings. I saw clips of the Donald and his supporters all screaming for action to teach this or that group a lesson or two. We have tried to teach other countries a lesson or two repeatedly the past decades, and have yet to succeed via military means. According to this energetic crowd, we just didn't kill enough of them. It puzzles me, since they want to teach all sorts of groups in this country a lesson they won't forget, like blacks, hispanics, immigrants, people of different religious beliefs, low wage workers, gays, and on and on it goes---well why then are they hell bent on making it legal for all members of these groups to carry weapons of war? Violence as a means to win modern day conflicts is obsolete. In fact almost all their political ideas are obsolete---like trickle down economics or a law could stop abortions. We would have as much luck banning pills which cause abortions as we did banning marijuana. For all Trump's bluster he probably has never been in a physical fight in his adult life. He is big and wealthy from inheritance and stiffing others legally, but he is soft from his lifestyle, so any lean and mean athletic guy, half his size, would probably take him down before the Donald could figure out how to coordinate his extremities in a physical fight. Feelings, not reasoning, seem behind everything they rage about.
