What about all the killing done in the name of God? I am sure those statistics far outweigh those done by non-believers.
Lest we forget the religious right's view of today's tragedy....
by EntirelyPossible 49 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
-
-
brinjen
Not to mention when someone opens fire in a church.
-
breakfast of champions
We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools
He makes it sound as if God is some kind of crime deterrent or better yet, metal detector, that was too costly for school budgets.
-
Terry
We humans are romantically involved with a slippery notion that IF we can assign "cause" we can control "effect."
So, when frightening things occur the race is on. Whatever a person dislikes the most is dropped into the Cause slot.
Racists always try to slip in race. Religionists make it religion. Anti-gun people make it guns. And so on.
Statistically, however, in raw numbers we can catch a rather interesting glimpse at how innumerate we are as a species.
There are roughly 350 million people in America.
That means 1 person out of 350 million was at fault in yesterday's shooting carnage.
So, the odds for it happening where one in 350 million. Pretty slim chance.
But, innumerate alarmists don't see it like that in plain numbers. Why? Because the emotional reaction to the slaughter of the
innocents is too great to wrap the mind around rationally.
Statistically it is safer to fly in an airplane than to go on the freeway in your car. But, that is rational. We are more afraid of flying
because a plane crash takes out a couple of hundred people at one time---which is a much tougher emotional pill to swallow.
So, FLYING becomes the terror and not freeway driving.
If we can rush to judgement and insert something as "cause" IT ALL MAKES SENSE....especially if it fits the views we already have.
They even have a name for it: CONFIRMATION BIAS.
Wiki:
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. [ Note 1 ] [ 1 ] People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. For example, in reading about current political issues, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in military, political, and organizational contexts.
-
Sulla
I suspect that you will find most people, when faced with a rage they cannot understand, are prone to fall back to familiar tropes: we are a Godless nation, we are a gun-loving nation, etc., as if these are either solutions or explanations. I think I am not particularly surprised by Huckabee and do not really expect much more from a politician with a TV show. Neither am I surprised by the dialogue level I see here on this board. Not sure why we single jolly ol' Huckabee out for bad treatment: looks to be par for the course.
-
fresh prince of ohio
Huckabee and his ilk are similar to the JW types who constantly bemoan this "old system" we're living in, how bad things have gotten, how people have no morals anymore, etc.
I think that it takes an unsophisticated mind, one that romanticizes a too-fondly remembered past that really wasn't how they remember it, to conclude that to prevent tragedies such as this most recent one we need to Get Back to How Things Used To Be.
Huckabee would have grown up in the 1950s I think? A time when blacks were still being lynched in the very deep south? A time of racism, sexism, and mindless conformity? No thanks - for all it's problems and unspeakable tragedies, our current culture is better in so many ways than it was then. And even if you don't agree, there's still no way to graft a 1950s mindset onto modern society.
People harkening for an idealized past: one of the roots of totalitarianism.
-
designs
Think how different the annoucement would have been from the White House had Huckabee, Perry or Bachmann been elected President.
-
Fernando
I have been wondering if the majority want religion rather than God removed from schools, a view I would strongly agree with.
(LifeWay research study: 72% of U.S. 18–29-year-olds say they're "really more spiritual than religious.")
-
Cagefighter
Look, I think this tragedy pretty much solidified my suspicon that there is no God. BUT, let's not forget the average IQ of this board is much higher than that of most prisons. People that do this kind of thing are not like anyone you know on this board or hopefully in your life. I have wrestled with the same thoughts that Huckabee articulated since yesterday. I wonder as well if our society is missing some sort of way to weed out these type of people that are so disconnected from other people psychologically that they can do this. That is Huckabee's point in my opinion, that the threat of eternal damnation was a detterent to these idiots that does not exist anymore. It's a point worth considering.
-
designs
Did any of these Fundamentalists discuss mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and the adults in that household leaving a firearm accessible to a person with mental illness.