A Reminder of What Some Christian Leaders Said After the Tragedy at Sandy Hook

How do people become this deluded?

Well, it usually starts with parents teaching their children religious ideas as truth. It starts with kids being told it’s okay to believe things without basis. Most of these kids grow up to be good people, even if their ability to reason is broken. But some turn their religion into business (which includes all of those listed above). Their greed and their egos collide with their crazy beliefs, and we see the result.

What happened to your out-of-this-world avatar? Miss that thing.

These people are vultures, seeking and feeding on death.

My sincere apologies to real vultures. You’re good guys.

I have no idea. I think it’s Disqus acting up again. Maybe it doesn’t fetch Gravatar icons anymore? Annoying. I could try creating a Disqus account, but that gave me no end of problems in the past, with lots of comments just disappearing.

I am especially confused when we are told that God has saved and blessed the survivors of these tragedies. In these situations, does God have to fight His way into secular spaces and salvage what He can? Does the inevitable time delay explain the problem of God’s seeming preference of survivors over victims?

Paraphrase of all the commentary cited above: “How DARE any American refuse to believe what I believe!? Why, anything bad that ever happens, MUST be the result of their hateful insolence!! Wha wha whaa!”

That is what I was thinking, you beat me to it!! 🙂

So you think your god allowed dozens of children to die just to make a point…and you still think this is a loving god?

Maybe they should do a little thing called research! But, most of them only read one fictional book and that explains their worldview.

Thank you for this. Let such zealots hang themselves by exposing their obscenities.

Tim Wildman: I think satan possessed this 20 year old and walked into the school and murdered these children. But doesn’t exonerate that person. So if I am taken over by a demon and kill someone, the demon made me do it. I am still responsible. Great logic.

If I want to be honest this is really getting petty on your part. For the John Piper and Franklin Graham its more like they are blaming corruption they perceive that is going on in people’s hearts. I also think this is really kind of low for you because this is just a way to bash Christians in general. In fact there were other Christians who commented on the event last year. Or maybe its not brought up because its not enough to make atheists to get angry for Christians. Or you are misinterpreting some of what they said for your own agenda which makes you a bit of a hypocrite. But I guess its not wrong unless you do it. Some of the testimonies said like James Dobson and Bryan Fischer was out of line. While others are just widely big misinterpretations of what they are saying.

So maybe you could interpret it for us lucky 21?

Might it be (I’m just throwing this out there) rather that you are misinterpreting the intent of the posting in the first place, that your operating premise (namely that the poster is out to “bash Christians in general”) is in fact completely in error?

To be fair, I don’t blame them for “pushing their agenda”, so to speak. When people blame school shootings on the current state of gun control/mental illness/etc., I view people to be pushing those specific agendas. I see nothing inherently wrong with that.

What I have a problem with is when said agenda is delusional and demonstrably wrong. If anything, the vast amounts of misery in the world’s most religiously devout countries relative to the world’s most (freely chosen) atheistic countries highlights that level of religiosity likely has either nothing to do with such social ills, or worse, actually exacerbates the problem.

The evidence suggests their agenda is either useless or actively harmful. It is not the pushing of an agenda in and of itself, but the results of said agenda that I detest.

We need people — other Christians, especially — dismissing and
denouncing them the next time they open their mouths to explain away a
disaster.

Done.

So, Dobson, Fischer, Huckabee, Piper, LeClaire, et al, you say a bunch of kids dying is indicative of God’s judment.

Yes, it is. God is judging this country because we say gays are destroying marriage, but say nothing when some priest is abusing yet another young boy. We get angry because they take the 10 commandments off the courhouses, but say not a Goddamn thing when a young Hispanic boy gets 15 years for carrying a bag of dope, but a rich white guy uses Monopoly math to bankrupt a hundred thousand home owners.

We tell gays they can’t adopt, but then Christian parents kick out their children by the dozens.

We care about how hip-hop is destroying the community, but we don’t care that we continue so many of the antebellum South’s policies that leave blacks in a state of perpetual poverty.

God is judging us because we’re a bunch of degenerate assholes who think a bunch of dead children is not the opportunity to promote understanding and healing, but rather to badmouth others.

God truly is merciful, because if it was me, I’d smite every last one of you and leave your bodies as an example of what NOT to do as a Christian.

Err, so you think it makes sense for your deity to arrange for school kids to be killed because his followers are supporting racist, homophobic, and otherwise unjust policies? And that deity is worthy of being worshiped? The deity you believe in is evil.

the only one who died in Newtown on 12/14 who ever prayed in school was Adam Lanza. (Catholic school when he was around 9 or 10.)

Hello lucky, please consider:

It’s easy to dismiss those people as crackpots, but millions of people take them seriously. We need people — other Christians, especially — dismissing and denouncing them the next time they open their mouths to explain away a disaster.

Merry Christmas!

People might think of me as being delusional or being callous but where does all those things you are mad about stem from. Everything stems from our own corrupt hearts. Some Christian leaders are not saying this is an act of God’s will but are saying its at our own hands we have become that way. Yes, others will say it is God’s doing but they are wrong because this is not something from God but something that lies deep within people’s hearts which is they ability to do wicked deeds because they can.

Lucky21, yes, there are people who live to find any fault at all with Christianity. This site was designed to highlight all the ills of Christianity and ignore the vast good done under our banner.

It can be grating, but there’s no need for hair pulling. A bunch of biased atheists affirming their own biases does not harm us.

However…….when prominent and visible members of the Church use tragedy as an excuse for bashing others, there’s a problem. And it SHOULD be called out.

I get angry when atheists talk about how religion causes all the evil in the world, and then when you point out plenty of evil is done in non-religious causes, they respond with “Well, whatever, but Christianity is still evil.”

So to, it’s wrong when Christians fail to own their evildoing. It doesn’t matter we do a lot of good. It doesn’t matter that atheists are sometimes snobbish.

When children die it is NEVER the time to start apprortioning blame.

Do Christians forget about all the families and children that have been harmed and neglected and abused in the name of god within residential schools (for example Canadian Indian residential schools) ? The affects of the atrocities that occurs at these segregated schools for blacks, Asians, aboriginals just to name a few, are still effecting families of the kidnapped and abused. All in the name of god and cultural genocide

All I can say is these shootings are happening more and more. It seems to be a common thing in the news. No one knows what the solution is and I wish myself could find an answer. It makes one want to sit down and cry for a moment how such things are happening. Or how children are getting involved in these actions of violence just because they were there.

Violent Gun crime is actually down from ten years ago. School Shootings aren’t going up, the media just gives them more attention now.

As usual 3, you make a fantastic point. But, much like Bible, Lucky’s gripe makes more sense when taken in context.

People habitually make blanket statements. This is not limited to atheists, liberals, Republicans, Muslims, whatever. Most people just don’t bother to differentiate between subsets of the group they oppose.

Particularly, on this website, you have people who will create a Christian correlation where there isn’t one. Terry Firma’s retrospective on the UpStairs Lounge massacre made no suggestion of the religious belief of the arsonist or lack thereof. The closest clue was that the person who burned down the lounge was himself possibly gay.

Cue 900 posts raging at the evil Christians. And when several posters said “How did this become about Christianity when there’s no indication it’s involved?” many people got even more offended and belligerent.

Coming from a website full of people who pride themselves on rational thinking and honesty, it gets galling to see such ad hominem attacks and hypocrisy.

And this is one of the better places on the interwebs.

All of this though is irrelevant next to the fact that as you said, “if people are using Christianity for fucked up purposes”, our duty is to neutralize and exterminate the perpetrators first. We can talk about the people who badmouth us later.

Applies to both conservatives and leftists, doesn’t it?

Bringing up worst school massacre doesn’t exactly help the leftist position, either, seeing as how it wasn’t performed with guns.

Things like this happen because for an assortment of reasons people with mental health problems do not get sufficient help in time, while at the same time having access to guns.

Destigmatize the mentally ill, cover their treatment, follow-up on them regularly, forbid them and anyone living with them from having guns, reduce the number of guns in total, that sort of thing.

Real vultures, unlike these guys, perform a valuable service for the environment.

Uh, no. These religious “leaders” are engaging in victim blaming of the most egregious sort (i.e. these kids died because they didn’t pray hard enough), and they deserve to be called out for their vile words. Nowhere did the author “bash Christians in general”. Nowhere. Learn to read.

Nobody disagrees. But you can’t deny that while the majority of gun control advocates are sensible, many take the opportunity to make it look like guns and gun owners are just evil white guys.

It certainly can. The potential is definitely there. The difference is, Leftists aren’t acting out in such ways, anywhere near as often as Rightists are.

True. I think it’s important, though, not to confuse social tendencies with overt intentions. Atheists in the US are, generally speaking, former Christians. (I am a rare exception in this regard, and there are a few other regulars similarly situated.) The formerly-Christian atheists have familiarity with the cultural tropes and dog-whistles of the several Christian sub-communities and were, as likely as not, participants themselves in the things they later have come to reject and criticize. Anger is to be expected; as the saying goes, there is no zealot like a convert. Commentators come from the full spectrum of orientations toward religion, and so it is a problem to assign any particular tendency to blame or excuse religious groups as a dominant tendency.

On the other hand, this site’s curators in particular go well out of their way to not make broad generalizations; when a particular prominent Christian says something whackadoodle, the reasonable question to ask of the religious community in general is whether the wacky sentiment so expressed has a receptive home in the wider community or not. I think, contrary to your sincere protestations, the answer to that question is a lot less comfortable than you’d like most of the time. A criticism that hits too close to home can certainly seem more like an attack than it actually is.

I feel sorry for your country, where you appear to have raving lunatics in charge and mindless sheep listening to them :(.

You’re muddying the issue and conflating two separate issues. Troll better.

No, I’m not. But seeing as how you substitute personal attacks for actual arguments, there’s no point in trying to have a discussion with you.

“Conflating an anti-gun “leftist” position and a separation of church and state position is, in fact, muddying the issue.”

I have done no such thing. Not that there’s any point to discussing it, seeing as how you consider people to be “trolls” just for disagreeing with you.

I didn’t deny it was my post, lying asshole.

There’s nothing to grasp. You’ve presented no argument, just insults and lies. You’re a troll.