Harry’s Place

According to a neighbour “He apparently had a problem with what the Bible said and the contradicting…He was angry with his parents because they had made him go to church all his life.”

Another fine moment brought to you by monotheism.

Another fine moment brought to you by bigotry and intolerance, Morgoth. And as Richard Dawkins has so ably shown, intolerance for the beliefs of others is something even atheists can manage, if they choose.

We godless ones are starting from behind, but would you care to place a bet on how long it is before someone kills someone else in the name of atheism?

Paul M

Already accomplished.

Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao killed plenty in their pursuit of non-religion.

Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao killed plenty in their pursuit of non-religion.

No, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao killed plenty in their pursuit of their own monotheism.

And as Richard Dawkins has so ably shown, intolerance for the beliefs of others is something even atheists can manage, if they choose.

Intolerance of mass-murdering genocide and hatred? Yep, count me in on that intolerance.

Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao killed plenty in their pursuit of non-religion.

Yes, Toady - that’s why Stalin killed all those people. Because they belived in God.

No other reason.

Those are all atheists who killed an obscene number of people, but I’m not familiar enough with the history to be aware that they did it with the declared goal of eradicating benighted believers. Was that the case?

Paul M, Mark

Mao destroyed most of the monastaries in Tibet, killing many of the monks. Stalin killed and tortured priests.

With respect, I think you are missing the point.

Unitarianism is a liberal religious movement which has long championed equality for all minorities. This was why it was targeted.

Unitarians can range from atheists to pagans, with monotheists in-between. What characterises them is their lack of dogma and love of tolerance. It’s got little to do with the existence or not of God: it’s simply an attack on the progressive values most of us at HP share.

The talk here is often of Islamists, but welcome to the US brand. They may not yet as actively violent as their Muslim equivalents but they are just opposed to our values, and their imams are the right wing radio hosts and televangelists.

Stalin killed and tortured priests.

Yes, but that wasn’t because they believed in God, was it? It was because they presented a (potential) obstacle to his grasp on power.

They weren’t killed in the cause of atheism, any more than Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev et cetera were killed in the cause of ‘communism’.

Obviously a hate crime, but is it a Hate Crime?

There are many things to be said in favour of Americans and the United States, but a lack of violence is not among them. The USA is the only prosperous democracy where more people are shot dead than killed on the roads.

In many countries this kind of thing is more rare, because it is more difficult for people like this to get weapons.

What did the killer mean by “Liberal movement” ? The activities listed sound like those at any church I know of.

In 2005, about 15,000 Americans were killed by gun violence. A slightly higher number commited suicide by firearms

45,520 dies in transportaion accidents, 50 percent more than all gun seaths (homicides, suicides, accidents.)

Source CDC

2005 was a typical year.

Alan Ji; as noted, wrong on the guns/traffic death stats. But true that the US has long had more gun violence than other places. I mean, since the beginning. Euros don’t seem to grasp that our refugee/frontier mentality has deep roots, and that armed self-defense is a much bigger part of the culture than recognised, and that violent minorities have long been a part of the mix.

But, woops, I finally noticed it was a Unitarian church. That’s a democrat party organ with churchy wrappings. That shooting probably had exactly nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politics. I’ve been to a few services, and they have Obama with a robe and halo behind the lectern.

Mesquito beat me to it. Blast! :D

“They weren’t killed in the cause of atheism, any more than Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev et cetera were killed in the cause of ‘communism’.”

Depends what you mean, just finished reading “Young Stalin”, and it seems pretty likely that Stalin belived that he had them killed in the cause of communism. which is what counts in the comparison.

Gene

A wonderful thought provoking post.

I don’t have anything clever to say, I have just been drifting along the Knoxville community threads you linked to while I was trying to get a last minute flight to LA.

The radically different nature of American (specifically southern bible belt) culture to Western European society on such issues as faith, individual responsibility and accountability, violence, and liberty etc is thrown into sharp relief.

As Bloo sharply observes, the debate, over a shooting in a church takes place within a US cultural Christian discourse, that may pass over the heads of the more secular Europeans (even when they have a strong faith) who try to contain even religious issues within a secular social and political lexicon.

In the US Unitarianism, is seen as Christianity’ light’ and is often ‘code’ for social and political, liberal, progressivism, just one short step from atheism and heresy.

So the community site you link to immediately diverges into questions of liberallness’ (how appropriate was it to perform ‘Annie’ during what should be a Christian service, ‘race’ ’sexuality’ (how Gay was the church?) and gun control.

Whether the church was pro or anti gun, with comments of pastors proud of how many of their parishoners are ‘packing’, and whether armed and skilled (’range heavy’) churchgoers may have taken the man out immediately, are issues that Europeans would find so bizarre that they would be likley to slip into knee-jerk stereotyped views of Americans.

In fact I was moved by the majority of kind and caring comments.

The extremely immediate, real, highly localised and ‘plain ole ornery’ nature of most of the comments delighted me.

I felt as though I was a priviliged observer of a real participatory and deliberative democracy, an experience quite unlike that of reading English blogs, most particularly those who claim to be concerned about such things.

The extreme and petty self absorbtion of some commenters was always underscored by the gentler, wiser critics of such inappropriatness.

A wonderful comment reads;

……Posted by abuliam on July 27, 2008 at 4:50 p.m.

I have been a member of TVUUC for 9 years.

All of my children have been welcomed into the congregation at their births.

Though we moved from Knoxville 2 years ago, this hits us hard. Where the shooting occured today, we normally sat.

The quiet room is where our daughter and my wife would have been had we been there today.

I have seen many posts today rationalizing what happend on religious or political grounds.

While I was deployed with the Tennessee Army National Guard fighting the War on Terror, members of TVUUC supported my family.

As a veteran and member of TVUUC, I can not express my dissappointment enough for the manner in which many have approached this.

Indeed, many of the comments I have seen online today remind me of the rationalizations used by the very terrorists we fight abroad to justify what happend.

I can also not express enough gratitude for those gracious souls who have expressed their support for the people of TVUUC today. What happend today is not about politics or religion. It happend to all of us.’
……..

God bless America, somedays I just have to love it and today is one of them.

PS had to post pone trip to US I am feeling homesick for that damned foreign country already.

A reminder, if anyone needs one, that extreme political hatred (of the kind found all too frequently on the Internet and occasionally in the comments on this blog) can have deadly consequences– even in a place like Knoxville, Tennessee.

A truly hilarious a statement. Talk about over egging the pudding. Nutter goes on shooting spree in Tennessee, and a blooger compares this to ribald comments on blogs? Eh? Can we have a little more hyperbole please?

of the kind found all too frequently on the Internet and occasionally in the comments on this blog

No, I don’t think there is any comparison between pointless slanging on the net matches by geeks in their underpants, and a deranged shooting in Tennessee.

Have lie down in darkened room for a while, Gene.

I’ve been to that church, though I wasn’t a regular attender or anything. It’s a lovely building in a lovely setting. With a lovely, friendly, welcoming congregation.

I was born in Knoxville - and have lived in that city longer than any other place (London is second in those stakes). And Knoxville is the kind of place that does have those extremes of views that Gene describes - that political hatred that we seen writ large on the Internet. I don’t think making the link is ridiculous at all. I think it’s directly related. Local and syndicated talk radio and regular banter is full of librul-hatin’. Though clearly most of those folks aren’t going to open fire on a congregation during a children’s program. But it only takes one unhinged man to combine his personal hatred of church-going and a cultural hatred of particular points of view to end up with a tragedy.

But Knoxville is also a town of the idiosyncratic, the artistic and the soulful - soulful in a hard-edged Scots-Irish kind of way. It’s a town of writers and scholars. It’s a beautiful place and a great place in many ways, and I would live there again.

By the way - here’s the real community thread for Knoxville’s left leaning and liberals. And here’s someone else who makes the link between big talk of hate and real actions.

A reminder, if anyone needs one, that extreme political hatred (of the kind found all too frequently on the Internet and occasionally in the comments on this blog) can have deadly consequences

All too frequently found on the Internet?

Well, yes, that and just about any other idea that’s ever been thought of has free reign on the Internet but this guy seems to have been downloading his thoughts from Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Mark Savage. They can see that kind of crap on Fox News and borrow their worthless scribblings from the public library so stop making out that the Internet bears full responsibility.

Give us a link the the sources of those stats, mesquito and Sam S. That point is too important to be left to you squashing me with one line.

I agree that Europeans often don’t understand the depth of the USA frontier mentality. I don’t think I did until the first of my three trips there.

The same is true of the willingness of Americans to deploy Laws in support of personal responsiblity. Obvious, once you see the difference, are the fine-tuning of road speed limits in the USA and requirment for fire-stopping sprinklers in Scottsdale, Arizona, where they have a rather large road named after Barry Goldwater. British right-wing figures would probably describe both of those as excessive regulation.

Alan Ji,

See here:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/injury99-05/injury99-05.htm

Alan Ji:

Everything you’d ever want to know about dying in America is right here:

http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html

It’s not stuff I made up. What you wrote struck me as received (bogus) knowledge.