Losing Sight of the Message you Preach

There aren’t a whole lot of things that can render my big mouth speechless. Usually it takes the intersection of hypocrisy and abject stupidity to leave me with my mouth agape and the ability to only sputter sentence fragments.

If you want an example of something so ludicrous that it renders me unable to form words and sentences, here it is. A church in Troy, NY is giving away an AR-15 as part of a celebration of guns and gun owners. I may not be religious now, but I suffered through 12 years of CCD after every Sunday Mass. I can say with a fair degree of certainly that Jesus didn’t teach us “an armed society is a polite society” or “peace is achieved through superior firepower.” The man from whom Christianity takes it’s very name spent his time preaching about peace and love and was the shining example of nonviolent action before the time of Gandhi. Somehow the leap has been made from “What Would Jesus Do” to “What Caliber Would Jesus Shoot.”

To add insult to injury, this isn’t merely some little .22 that you’d use to plink at targets at Boy Scout camp. They’re handing out a civilian model of an assault rifle, the same model of which Adam Lanza used to massacre 6 and 7 year olds in Newtown, CT. Talk about redefining “suffer the little children unto me.”

According to Pastor John Koletas, “Our country was built with the King James Bible and the gun.” Exactly what does that have to do with his mission of spreading the word of Christ? I know I shouldn’t expect better from the millions upon millions of “Christians” who do their best to shit all over the actual message of Christ, but somehow this feels like a lowering of the bar.