Something to think about...
One of the quickest ways to get everybody on this forum all bunched up is to promote the idea that "guns are intrinsically evil and should be banned so that no one can misuse one to harm someone else".
Such an utterance would precipitate an immediate firestorm of "blame the criminal, not the tool he uses!" And the responses would be correct.
Blame the criminal, not the tool he uses.
Guns, knives, baseball bats, cars, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Wicca. All of these are tools. Guns are tools we shoot with, knives are tools we cut with, baseball bats are tools we play a game with[0], cars are tools we use to get from place to place and carry stuff in. Religions are tools, too. They're the frameworks with which we relate to the world and our own spirituality. Sin is something that falls outside of acceptable behavior, and the religion of the believer is the tool her (or she) uses to make the judgement of what is acceptable and what is not.
So. If we revisit the talking point from my first sentence, but talk about other tools instead of guns:
- Islam is intrinsically evil and should be exterminated so that no one can misinterpret it and harm someone else!
- Christianity is intrinsically evil and should be exterminated so that no one can misinterpret it and harm someone else!
- Buddhism is intrinsically evil and should be exterminated so that no one can misinterpret it and harm someone else!
The first of these sounds an awful lot like what some people have been saying. The second might have been applicable during the Inquisition. And who has ever met a militant buddhist?
So, on the one hand, it's bad to blame a tool (a gun) for the action of the criminal who wields it. But on the other hand, some people seem to feel that it's all right to blame a tool (religion) for the action of the terrorist who uses it to justify their heinous acts. That's what we call hypocrisy.
The terrorists who flew the planes into the Towers and the Pentagon were muslim. But would the people in the towers be any less dead, if the terrorists had been Catholics, or Jews, or Atheists? Or if they'd been just plain-old psychopaths with no philosophical motivation at all, who were simply living out an insane fantasy? Ok, yes, a single psycho would not have been able to coordinate all four planes, but one plane would still have taken down one tower, and that would have been horrible enough.
We gritch and complain about "Hate Crime" legislation, because it makes thoughts themselves illegal. Yet them we turn around and blame a religion for the acts some of its followers commit.
I've seen horrible things done by people who said they were Muslims. I've seen some pretty awful things done by people who said they were Christians, and people who said they were Atheists, too. The acts themselves were no more or less horrible because of the belief system of the perpetrator. How many Christians would wish for their religion and all of its adherents to be held responsible for a terrorist act such as an abortion clinic bombing? How many Jews feared reprisals against them when "The Passion of the Christ" was released, because people might blame modern Jews for what was done those many years ago?
If you do not wish to be associated with the worst things that have been done in the name of your personal religion, do not be quick to condemn all of the believers of a different religion, based upon the depraved acts of a few of its followers.
This post is not intended as an attack on any religion or system of belief. It's intended to remind people that everyone has a right to believe as they choose, unmolested, and that it is
individuals who are responsible for criminal acts, not the tools they used.
-BP, who was once a hypocritical follower of a particular faith, but grew up.
[0] Or in the case of a particularly enthusiastic E3 I knew in Saudi, "tools we hit scorpions with"
