Hate Mail - Where And By Whom You Would Expect To Be Attacked?

Yeah, I really did mean that it is far more likely that Robert Dear got the feeling that he was entitled to attack people from listening to rock music than from reading the Bible.  Where would you expect to be more at risk from being attacked, at a rock concert or at a religious service?    Even his ex-wife who claimed that he was a devout Bible reader doesn't claim him as a church goer.   And I'll make the same challenge that I made in comments the other night, show me anywhere in the Bible that anything would have authorized him to make the kind of attack that he did.   I am pretty confident that you would have to stretch your evidence past the point where it made you look ridiculous to any rational witness to provide such an instance.  As with the supposed Islamic terrorists who the Republican candidates are using to pander to anti-Muslim bigots, I don't think you can make an honest case that those who have killed and injured people in opposition to abortion could find their motives in the Bible.

On the other hand the genre of rock music glorifies willful, irrational violence, especially when women are the target of it.  It promotes the domination and subjugation of women in ever so many more instances than it speaks of their empowerment.   I gave an example in the music of the Rolling Stones, "Gunface" that would have given a Robert Dear all of the reasons he could possibly need to do what he did, some of the words to the song are rather creepily in line with what he did.  And that is only one song.  The glorification of male violence against women always was and, it's my impression, is ever more a feature of pop music.   If male supremacy had a national anthem, it would be a rock song.

The political tool of those who want to pillage public education, blaming teachers for the ignorance of their students in the face of the barrage of distraction from TV and other electronic entertainment is one of the greatest and most hypocritical of logical disconnects.  Most of that accusation is made on the media that is the reason for America's intellectual deficits.   The time that the average student spends watching TV or engaged in similar commercial entertainments is time they are not spending in effective study.    The schools are at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to those fun and, especially, easy things that compete with them for the time and, therefore, minds of students.    If students aren't learning from schools it is because they're learning from TV, from the media they get online, from movies, pop songs, etc.  Those are what inform more of the understanding of more Americans than even the best efforts of teachers and schools can hope to compete with.   They have far more of an influence in the culture than what they get in a classroom does.

And what you can say of schools being at a disadvantage is ever so much more so for the churches, which a minority of Americans even attend for an hour a week.   And one of the favorite canards of atheists, that Christians don't know much about Christianity would have to go out the window if you are to posit that the level of violence against women in the United States is based in a through indoctrination in what they imagine the Bible contains in that regard.  

I have mentioned before that, as a gay man, I have been several times the victim of anti-gay violence and have been menaced with it more times than I could honestly estimate.  Now, in popular anti-religious imagination, the motive for that is supposed to be religion, Christianity.   I was never attacked, not even verbally harassed by someone I knew who was a faithful church goer, they're far more likely to try to persuade me through friendly engagement to agree with their belief than to attack, though, living in New England, we tend to be rather reticent about doing even that.

When I was attacked and threatened, it was never by a person who was anything but irreligious.  The first proof of  that fact that in every case the attacker broke the commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain, along with a stream of language that you wouldn't generally associate with a person of religious piety.  And certainly the actions of being punched and kicked was nothing you'd associate with such folk.   I can tell you that it was far more likely that the boys and young men who did that spent a lot more time listening to heavy metal or some other form of what used to be known as hard rock than they did listening to hymns.   Since I knew several of them, I can say they'd fit in a lot better among the trash talkers of the atheist blogs than they would at a Bible Study.

While there are people who use religion as an excuse to attack people, to oppress people, to kill people, unless their religion specifically permits or encourages that, they aren't being honest about that being the real motivation of their violence.   Not unless they're one of those massively ignorant Christians who the atheists always claim are so abundant.   And if the person giving religion as an excuse is ignorant of the commandment to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, the teaching that only those who are without sin have a right to cast a stone, and a host of other such prohibitions against what they are doing, it is hardly the fault of religion which has spent an enormous amount of time making that information available.

If there is something which would make any serious religious person happy it would be to have all people professing their religion to abide by its teachings in their lives.  The idiots who croon John Lennon's dopey atheist dirge love to intone his idiotic panacea, "Imagine no religion".   Such a world would be a world with no effective commandments of the kind I just listed, no effective means of convincing people to not kill, to not bear false witness, to not oppress, to treat people as they would like to be treated EVEN WHEN THEY REALLY WANT TO TREAT THEM ENTIRELY WORSE THAN THEY WOULD LIKE TO BE TREATED, THEMSELVES.   And I'm afraid that is the world taught by so many pop songs, so many movies, so many of the most popular ones are all about imposing a man's will on women, on the world instead of that.   If you want to start looking for where such men get their license to kill, look at what encourages that idea instead of the idea that they are violating the will of God to do it.

Update:  Well, you ask for an example, Charles Manson got his inspiration from Helter Skelter, not How Firm a Foundation or Abide With Me.

Update 2:  Imagine that, I, a person who avoids Mick and his old Stones whenever I can avoid them knows one of their songs which The All Knowing Oracle of all Rock doesn't.   Uhgh!  Don't tell me that that means I'm more hip than you!   If it's any comfort to you, I wish I didn't know it.