Jesus Christ, another one!
Prayer is needed, not gun control I do think that the Erie Times-News must have a sense of humor to print some of the letters they get. Either that or they really are dedicated to being fair and balanced.
Either way, yeah, what a sorry suggestion. Instead of actually having an intelligent conversation about the real problem of gun violence in this country, let's just ask the magic man in my head what to do! In other words, instead of actually facing the real problem and tackling it in some reality based way, lets do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and hope the problem goes away on it's own, and if it does, we will say that it is because we did nothing at all!
Nevermind that
according to this guy[1] between 1999 and 2012, there were 334 people killed and 437 people injured on church property due to violent attacks, which in 58% of those cases, a GUN was the weapon of choice! I guess if only prayer was allowed in church this never would have happened....
And according to the same guy, the highest number of church murders in that time period was... last year, 2012. The same year all of these idiots decided to say that we needed more God to protect us from gun violence. Please excuse me, I might need to throw up now.
I just don't understand how people can be so confident about being
so wrong. Christians being fed to lions in the Coliseum probably prayed a lot, (Please Lord Jesus don't allow these lions to eat me! Cut their throats with that sword that is supposed to be coming out of your mouth! Lift up a mountain and squish the evil kitties with it!) yet the lions always had a feast at the Old Christian Buffet. Their prayers made no difference. No amount of prayer could spare 6 million Jewish people from being exterminated. It took the secular armies of Russia, the US, and Britain (and Canada, and France, and Australia, and many others) to put an end to the Catholic madman Hitler and free the Jews from their bondage. In fact about half of the concentration/death camps were liberated by Russia, which was officially a godless country. Please don't try to tell me prayer makes a difference. It's absolute rubbish.
And never mind that countries that are largely secular and have a significant atheist population, like Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands, have a murder rate 1/5 of that here in America. The Anders Breivik incident in Norway was such big news because big shooting incidents just never happen there. It was an outrage, a complete fluke. It's EVERY DAY here in America! Even in Erie, which has a population in the city of `~100k and countywide about 250k, there is a shooting, a stabbing, armed robbery, rape, assault, child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, and sometimes ALL OF THE ABOVE, every day! In a city where you can't stand at an intersection and not have a church in sight.
Having worked in OCY (Child Protective Services) I can tell you from experience that a very small number of parents who are abusive or neglectful identify as non religious. Maybe 3 out of all of people I had seen. In fact the ones who were the most overtly religious were often the ones most inclined to be abusive and neglectful, in other words to have more serious problems, more lasting and continuous abuse and neglect, and the most likely to leave it all "in God's hands". It's really sorry seeing a crackhead prostitute thinking that the Lord will help guide her, and refuse help from me, who can offer her a lot of services and connections to help her get back on her feet. Or a father whose every other word is Praise the Lord and God is Great and Have a Blessed Day, whose utter stupidity led his son to getting severe second/borderline third degree burns on his torso, arms and hands, and then does such a poor job keeping the wounds clean (the fact that he scared off the home health care nurse with threats didn't help) that it was necessary to remove the child from the home just so that he could properly heal! Where the hell was God in all of that?
And of course, it wouldn't be at all appropriate for me to say to them that maybe they should rely on REALITY instead of God to help them prevent harm to their children. No, you HAVE to respect their religious beliefs, even when it's offered as an excuse for things like this. It's disgusting. Religion poisons everything!
