The American Patriarchy Association has all the answers! The list of causes for the recent theater shooting is long and predictable.
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We aren’t sufficiently afraid of god
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We aren’t afraid enough of hell
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The ACLU
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Godless public schools
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Liberals
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Movies
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The Internet
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Gays
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Lesbians
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Professors
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Liberal churches
Mankind is shaking its fist at the authority of God! And God will not be silent when he’s mocked!
So he’ll scramble the brains of a random person and have him go out and murder something less than a hundred entirely random people who are only united in a common interest in Batman movies. He doesn’t seem to have a very coherent or comprehensible way of enforcing his desires.
Hey! They left one out! Maybe god just hates Batman.
When God unleashes His wrath, you don’t want to be standing nearby. His aim isn’t very good.
How stupid!
The hate-side’s blaming everything bad that happens on evul liberulism is getting more than a little tiresome. This one is, for example, nothing more than a shopping list of people and institutions the writer hates. Project much?
By “nearby” I guess that means anywhere at all! ;) The midwest gets punished with tornadoes, the coasts with hurricanes/typhoons, there are monsoons, tidal waves, earthquakes, mass and serial murders, wars, “friendly fire”, and all kinds of fires and freak lightning strikes, just for a start. Really, best not to even be alive.
So, by this logic he was a pawn of God and part of God’s plan. That should make God an accessory to mass-murder…again.
I thought we got this cleared up.
Rebecca Watson.
Rick Warren took a swipe at evolution in response to the tragedy. I took him to task for it on my blog: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2012/07/blaming-evolution-for-tragedy.html
Pyra:
When the asteroid hit Jupiter a few years back, that was Gawd trying to smite Dallas for doing such a piss poor job with America’s Team. But hey, this time it was, at least, the right solar system, right?
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They forgot to add spaying and neutering animals, vegetarianism, energy conservation, gun control, Obamacare, the Honda Prius, the Voting Rights Act, desegregation, antidisestablishmentarianism, Star Trek, Three’s Company, Harry Potter, the Rolling Stones and Devo. Like RFW wrote, just a shopping list of “I don’t like this, so Gawd doesn’t like this” idiocy.
I don’t get it. Doesn’t God have the power to stop all of this shit by himself?
Your god’s not very powerful, is he, Christers?
Why not? Those cause every other problem known to humanity…
Glen Davidson
I personally, blame the gun nuts for both brainwashing and lobbying the Murrican arms fetishism culture into existence.
Many of them are also of the Christian Right. Makes you wonder…
It’s just the xian ghouls again.
They show up after every disaster, natural or human caused.
As predictable as earthworms in the lawn after a heavy rain. And as intelligent and significant.
PS Notably missing from the fundie list is…Obama. If you can’t blame a Kenyan, Moslem terrorist, who can you blame? I’m sure it was an oversight and they will correct it. Also missing; abortion, contraception, and uppity women.
Sure it is.
God ia all powerful. He is in charge. Everything happens for a reason.
Standard fundie theology. Which means god let this happen for his own reasons which we are too dumb to understand. Which I suppose makes Holmes a saint for doing god’s will.
Can’t people at least wait a day or two before assigning blame? As far as I’m aware, we don’t yet know what the killer has to say for himself. People are far too quick to exploit tragedy to further their own agendas. Please, let’s wait for the facts to emerge, and then blame Rebecca Watson.
Ogvorbis, I can’t even imagine the sort of thing that’s got gawd so upset that whole, huge stars explode, and destroy everything around for parsecs! Let’s just hope the aim remains terrible for a few more billion years.
Y’know, sometimes I have a thought that goes something like this:
“Maybe there is a god, not one like the pathetic inventions of humans, but an actual entity that is far beyond what we can comprehend. And xe is a very decent being. And xe watches us (among the rest of the universe, kinda like a daily soap). And at some point xe thinks ‘Okay, that’s the straw to break the camel’s back.’ And then some people get what they deserve for being unrespectable.”
Then I realize that I’m an atheist, and most people never get what they deserve.
raven:
Exactly.
*barf!*
*Unless there’s iron chariots involved.
SOOO to recap:
when natural disasters kill everyone it is because god is mad
when diseases (especially AIDS) kill it is because god is mad
when people kill it is because god is mad
you would think someone with so much “wisdom” would get their ass into some anger management by now, yeesh
I suppose if we didn’t have movies, there would be no movie theatre shootings, but that doesn’t mean one caused the other.
I told several people that I thought the Rush Limbaugh statements about Bain Capital/Bane villain triggered the selection of the Batman premiere as the site for the attack. Now that I see that Holmes dyed his hair red so he could be the Joker, I have to retract that.
Anyway, I still blame the NRA for allowing it to be possible for him to accumulate all the firepower. I’m also going to blame his family members. When someone drops off the radar, you really do need to do a bit of creative meddling and snooping to find out if they are in an abusive relationship, stockpiling medication for a suicide, giving all their money to a cult, etc.
Will Rick Warren be invited to pray at Obama’s SECOND inauguration, again?
If a decent god actually existed, there would be no American Patriarchy Association. And if anything could put me into a murderous rage, it would be those shitstains.
Where’s your evidence that he “dropped off the radar”?
There isn’t any evidence that any actions by the NRA gave this specific person access to guns that would otherwise not exist. They didn’t write the second amendment, and there may have been a complete lack of warning signs to prevent selling this guy guns.
I also wonder if lack of guns would have deterred him much considering that he set off explosive devices and apparently spent a lot of time making them in his own apartment.
I get pretty fucking sick of people blaming the family, especially when theres no information that suggests that they knew about him being dangerous. I’ve been worried about people who were family/friends, it doesn’t mean I should assume they are dangerous and planning to become terrorists. You can’t force anyone to check in with you, either. We would have to lock up everyone who seemed a bit “off” by that logic, and there isn’t enough room (not to mention its a huge violation of the rights of others and a waste of space for people who actually need it).
You could blame the dude who actually shot a bunch of people instead. Maybe you could wake up to the fact that there isn’t a lot any of us can do when someone decides to kill other people in the absense of obvious signs or plans. Until there is information that says it was preventable its pretty assy to blame anyone except the shooter.
No, no, no. Just don’t.
First of all, you have no idea if he actually dropped off the radar or called his mum every evening. Second, even if they weren’t in contact, you have no idea about their family situation. People can have very good reasons to want to drop off the face of the Earth as far as their family members are concerned. And even if they were a close knit family, he could have been a loving son and still gone and done shit like this.
Unless there’s some evidence to the contrary, don’t put blame on innocent people.
OK, let’s cut to the chase.
America is fucked in the head.
Fucked gun culture. Fucked sense of liberty and freedom.
But hey, keep killing each other. It is your constitutional right to do so…
Missing the obvious one.
The xian ghouls were hungry and needed to feed.
It’s just god providing for his chosen creatures of the night.
ianash is a bit of a ghoul too eh
Some people have families that aren’t very much like 50’s TV sitcoms.
I’ll admit straight off that this is a bit of a stretch, but given that he was heavily involved in church and apparently never had a girlfriend, I wonder if this was partly the result of trying to pray away the gay and then blaming himself when it didn’t work.
Left field, I know, but it has to be more likely than “God’s mad that people are going to get health care instead of dying avoidably.”
ianash @#26
Do some reading before you spew forth nonsense. I’m certainly no friend of freely available firearms. But your line of reasoning is (unfortunately) wrong.
Er, could we not start coming up with half-arsed theories? At this point, it’s just making shit up, since we know next to nothing about this guy.
Blaming the family without the slightest bit of evidence is just mean and senseless.
The guy lived a thousand miles away and was an adult for many years and apparently a high achieving one.
How would they know what was going on in his head and what could they do about it? Even people who saw him everyday at the med school would have a far better idea and apparently, they didn’t see anything either, far as we know now.
This is all part of the human process of trying to make sense out of things that really just don’t make much sense.
What do you mean? Theists understand exactly what the meaning of every disaster and every mass murder is. Sure, sometimes they give mutually exclusive explanations, but that’s just these mysterious ways they mention. There’s nothing incomprehensible or incoherent about mysteries. Theology’s got it all figured out, down to the awareness that if they don’t understand, they still know exactly what they’re talking about. Gotta admire these folks.
skeptifem @ 24:
Basically agree with you and others that say we can’t be hasty and blame family/friends before more knowledge about the situation. Also agree that merely because someone doesn’t exhibit a mainstream outgoing, always-connected type of personality that it inherently makes them suspect of being sociopathic.
But I think it’s fair to say, looking over the political direction of the past 20 to 30 years, that we as an American culture have become a bit obsessed with guns and firearms in general, especially in the light of the increasing ubiquity and support of people in carrying weapons on their person in public. Adding also, the relative lack of firearms crimes in other developed countries which have strict gun laws.
I don’t think anyone would blame the NRA directly in each case such as this, but rather that hammering away at the politicians and public about their ‘right’ to a gun toting society–especially when tragedies like this occur– tends to wear down the general sensibilities and sensitivities of citizen and politician alike.
julietdefarge:
We have no evidence that he “dropped off the radar.” He was a doctoral student and then withdrew from the program. We have not been given any information on what led up to that or what his behavior had been like. We don’t know what contact he had with his family, since he was a grown man and lived in another state.
Furthermore, his family cannot police his behavior. If he wasn’t behaving in a way that clearly presented a danger to himself and/or others, there is literally nothing they could do. Talk to him? Tell him shooting people is wrong? Gee. Why didn’t anyone ever think of that one before?
“Jim, are you maybe depressed after withdrawing from school? Is everything okay?”
“I’m just fine, Mom.”
“Okay, if there’s anything we can do, we’re here for you…”
What more would you expect? Dropping out of school isn’t a fucking crime. You can’t save someone from himself. If he’s not making it clear that he’s going to hurt himself or someone else what the fuck do you do?
One could also blame the voters of Colorado for voting in people who pass the ridiculous gun laws that allowed this man to get multiple weapons, even after a previous massacre in the same state. Or maybe the lawmakers. Or even Holmes.
Seconded. So much. That “creative snooping/meddling” bullshit doesn’t particularly need to be encouraged either.
oh Jeebus
and maybe he never got that bike he wanted for Christmas in 1994.
The empirical thing to say is “we just don’t know.”
Or maybe their god is just plain batty. After all, they created it in their own image, and all that.
They also left out White, Presbyterian, and suburbanite.
That still puts in squarely in the lap of the NRA, since, without their bullshit, FUD, obsession with making it easier to get them, and support of such politicians, how likely is it that enough of them would have been elected, if any, to *create* such stupid laws in the first place?
Blood on hands of Obama, Mitt and NRA!
Condolences are empty words – what actions are you gonna take?
(via JoeMyGod)
The Batman explanation would make more sense. After all, Batman Begins was a blasphemous retelling of Sodom and Gomorrah (with God as the villain.) Dark Knight was also a blaspheme against the story of Job. I have yet to figure out what this recent movie is about.
PZ, shame on you for Othering!
So many things to blame, but I’m with Cheryl Wheeler. If it were up to me, I’d take away the guns.
Oh,c’mon people. Don’t you all long for the good ol’ days, before we had:
The ACLU
Godless public schools
Liberals
Movies
The Internet
Gays
Lesbians
Professors
Liberal churches
And we were sufficiently afraid of god and of hell.
And nothing bad, like murders and rapes and brutal massacres, ever happened? (Well, except when god ordered them to happen, and they deserved it so that doesn’t count.)
Yes, that’s it. . . Gawd wanted to punish a bunch of randomly selected individuals, for daring to be out of doors after midnight on a week day. um, wait. . . God is some demented version of Ward Cleaver ?
You sound sarcastic, but yes, that is indeed what PZ has done here.
I’m a hypocrite, yes, but some of us just don’t find that it’s typically useful to argue with him.
He has after all, as your categorization says, damned him.
…Please do explain.
Susan –
Thanks for linking that.
Brand new video, of a 15-year-old song made relevant again by current events. Maybe if more of the DC politicians had listened to Cheryl Wheeler instead of Bush and the NRA, we wouldn’t have to be wondering who to blame for the Aurora massacre …
Of course god hates batman, he DID kill his parents. Then his girlfriend. There’s a pattern here :P