The Gun Gavotte

It's that time again.  It's become something of a routine, though it may be more accurate to describe it as a dance.  I refer, of course, to what takes place in our Great Republic when several people are shot at more or less the same time by the same person or persons.  This is what is referred to as a "mass shooting."  I leave it to others--probably to right-wing pundits--to ponder what a "mass shooting" is and when a shooting may properly be called one.  I won't argue that particular point, which seems an insignificant one.

I ponder instead the reaction to the shooter's work.  I think we may call it a dance, as it seems to be a series of similar, if not identical, movements performed after the deaths take place which have no real effect beyond exercising and perhaps in some way pleasing those who perform them.  Shock.  Thoughts and prayers.  Calls for gun reform.  Calls for gun rights.  Posturing by politicians (one might call that part a Promenade).  Dance ends.  Dance begins again after next shooting.

I think we must resign ourselves to the recurrence of these events (the shootings and the danse macabre that follows).  There's no reasonable basis for the belief that what has taken and is taking place, and the reaction to it, will cease.  There are many, many guns here, and many people have them, and many more guns are being made and sold and otherwise are transferred from person to person.  People get or can get guns, and people for one reason or another use them, sometimes on other people.  Some guns are particularly effective in shooting more than one person at one time, and those who purport to represent us in government are not inclined to discontinue their sale or limit their availability.  As we become more densely populated, and treatment for mental illness becomes less available; as stress rises and misinformation increases and the means by which to transmit it grow; as people become less well-off and more contentious, guns will be used.

There may be ways of limiting gun violence.  If so, however, they won't be explored, not in this country.  Our nation lives by the gun.  It may die by the gun.  It will in any case, however, have the gun. 

So, my brothers and sisters, I think we must do our best to dodge the bullets.  We may still watch the dance, if we like such things, but I suspect that even the dancers will grow tired eventually.  If not, perhaps they'll be shot during some future event.  

The Vatican Just Says No

There once was a species called human,

Who thought God cared what they were doin',

But the truth is He said that "For me, they've been dead,

Since the Garden of Eden stopped bloomin'."

That's just a limerick of my creation which I thought up not long ago in a different context, but it seems appropriate in light of the Vatican's announcement that it can't "bless" homosexual unions.  I was going to write that it seems appropriate so near to St. Patrick's day, but a gnawing sense of doubt combined with a quick search of the Internet reveals that the limerick didn't necessarily have its origins in Ireland, though there is an Irish city which bears the name. 

I've noted before that our religions are not unnaturally, but still unreasonably, based on the assumption that if there is a God, that God is fascinated, perhaps even obsessed, with humanity.  Given the vastness of the universe, this seems unlikely.  To maintain that we're God's sole or greatest concern is preposterous, as we're mere specks on a speck among an unimaginably large host of specks which make up what God is said to have created.

Even more unreasonable (I think) is the belief that God is particularly concerned with our sexual conduct.  Any God which lays down rules governing who we have sex with and how we have sex is a very small, petty, and peculiar God indeed.  It follows that those of us who believe there are such rules and seek to enforce them are even smaller, more petty and peculiar.

And so we come to this latest declaration by the Vatican, endorsed, we're told, by the Pontifex Maximus himself.  The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church welcomes those who are gay ("homosexually inclined" is the wording used, I think) in a kind of grudging fashion, according to the declaration, but no union of gays may be blessed because only the sacramental may be blessed.  The most relevant sacrament is marriage and marriage, as we know, may only be between a male and a female.  Thus, no blessed gay unions and as sex is inappropriate outside of marriage, all gay sex is inappropriate as well, and may never be appropriate.  

This comes from having a Busybody God, a name I've used in the past in this blog.  But as you may guess from the limerick at the top of this post, I find myself curious regarding why such a God--the kind that is worshipped by the Abrahamic religions--would care what we do, if we accept the doctrine of Original Sin.

Under that doctrine, we're at the least tainted by the sin committed by eating of the Tree of Knowledge by our ancestors, the first humans, which caused them to be expelled from the Garden of Eden.  There are several versions of the doctrine of Original Sin.  The most draconian of them has us damned from birth.  We may nonetheless be saved if God chooses through the medium of Grace, but that's in God's sole discretion.  Then there is the version that proposes that we're cleansed of the sin by baptism.  Another version is that Jesus saved us from Original Sin through his sacrifice.  There may be more versions, I just don't know.  But even the kinder, gentler versions I know of provide that all of us are born with the proclivity to sin as a result of the first (notably heterosexual) humans.

So, we're either damned or damnable from the moment we are born.  If that's the case, though, why does God even bother to peer at us suspiciously, and why did he bother to dream up and impose the many regulations it's claimed he imposed on us after the Garden of Eden was shut down?  He would have written us off after the Original Sin was committed, I would think, as we all would be sinners of necessity thereafter.  Can it be the case that he decided in the first century C.E. that we may in one manner or another avoid the curse of Original Sin, and so appeared among us and induced us to create the sacrament of baptism sometime later?  What changed his mind?  Why are those who lived before then damned without recourse?  Why would he be so interested in what we do given that it's more likely than not that were going to sin anyway, being inherently inclined to sin?

The problems which arise from belief in such a personal God so fascinated with us aren't merely limited to those that result from the fact such a view is incredible, therefore.  They include those that arise when the doctrine which is inferred from that view is made and applied.