We Had Better Hope That Religion Can Get Guns Under Control Because Secularism Has Failed To Do That For Five Decades

If I had the time I'd go collect comment threads from right wing and allegedly left wing blogs to compare the chatter over the two incidents, the attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and yesterday's horrific attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino.   From my fast, cursory look this morning, it might provide an interesting comparison of the hates of the two groups, the hatred of Christians and the hatred of Muslims.   Though last night, before any of the murderers were identified, I did see some Christian bashing by those eager to restart the weekend's group hate session on some of the supposed left wing blogs.  I think the comparatively subdued tone in the chatter as compared to the weekends' frenzy betrayed some disappointment on their part when the killers were identified. 

There is a post up at Religion Dispatches that asks Can Faith-Based Organizing for Gun Control Work?   To which I say, considering that it took religious involvement to move every major reform which became fact in our society, we'd better hope it works on this issue or it will destroy democracy and turn the massively armed United States into one great big Afghanistan.   

The secular gun control movement has failed and I think it failed because it started up just as the pressure to suppress religious expression on the left was gaining hold.   There is a reason that the high water mark of liberal effectiveness came with the passage of the civil rights laws in the mid-1960s.  When the man who, in so many ways, embodied or symbolized that time,  The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was murdered, it was with a gun, when Robert Kennedy was gunned down a little over a month later, the secularized left couldn't mount an effective response and it hasn't been able to do it at all despite the staggering body count which has been the result of going on fifty years of failure.   

The experiment of the secular left has been run in the period since then, it has failed, utterly.  And a good reason that it failed is that its replacements for religious morality, media libertarianism, foremost, the license to lie, massively, for pay instead of insisting on holding the media responsible when it lies, has been the foremost venue used by the gun industry to lead us into the terrible situation we are in today.  It leads to conditions in which all rights are at risk.  That is what I've come to conclude in the past fifteen years of reading the secularists and reviewing the history of their influence in politics and society.  When morality is considered an ephemeral manifestation of physical causation and one set of morals or no morals at all is as good as any other, it's no wonder everything goes to hell.