I’m an atheist, but if I just saw a friend gunned down, who knows what nonsense I would say to a reporter. It seems kind of dickish to nit-pick the quote of the bereaved.
Oh indeed, but I doubt the dickishness has touched bottom yet. There’s still scope for bursting into people’s bedrooms and yelling at them for praying at dying Granny’s bedside.
No, the Christian thing to do is to get everyone to safety, tend to the injured, assist the authorities, comfort the distraught, and THEN offer FORMAL prayers. Informal prayer can happen anywhere along that timeline, muttered out loud or just in your own head.
Again, I say, it seems to have happened very quickly. It’s not easy for elderly people to get out of a pew in the best of times. I don’t understand the scorn. You weren’t there. You don’t know how quickly it happened. You don’t know how you would react. You don’t know what had been happening right before…if, as some say, there had been a skit, there may have been lots of movement of people during the interval, and the congregants may not have been paying attention…I often get lost in thought, or in reading, during services and miss major things!
That being said, it it was just after 8 am and they’d already started church and had a skit, what freaking time did the service start? I can never drag myself to an early service that starts at 8:30, much less before 8!
And as a lifelong Methodist, I must say that, despite my trying to explain why Mr. Adams worded his statement the way he did, I find that kind of statement creepy and over-the-top, religion-wise. I’m always offended when people go straight to “faith-speak”, or when they pull out the “forgiveness card” too early. We don’t have to check our brains at the door! We can say things that aren’t written in Scripture! I could get snarky and say it’s just the Baptist way of doing things, but that would be wrong on several levels. And since I have to work with a devout Baptist tonight who is a good friend (though she is appalled we have a female minister, and that we once watched “Calendar Girls” at a Ladies’ Night party at the church) I need to try to be good today!
Now you’re just being silly. As no beer tastes good, you clearly misspelled “scotch” somehow.
Not that I disagree with the basics of your argument, but I thought you were a moral absolutist, based on your comments in (I think) my thread on pacifism. Am i misremembering?
All the more so for daylight savings time taking effect that morning. I know if anybody tried to get me to do anything before 8:00 AM on a Sunday, I’d be extremely cranky and they’d have to drag me out of bed… and if that 8:00 felt like 7:00, all bets would be off.
Not all religions - religions with powerful but not very benevolent gods don’t have this problem. Christians in particular believe in omnibenevolence in face of all the evidence, and this is a perfect example.
Remember - we must Pray in accordance with his will - which means that prayer has absolutely no bearing on the outcome - whatever will be, will be.
That depends on what he’s talking about trusting God for.
If you interpret it to mean that we can trust God never to allow bad things to happen or people to get hurt/killed, then yeah, there’s a whopping contradiction there. But I doubt he meant that, and it’s certainly not the standard Christian understanding. (After all, Christianity has had its share of martyrs to disprove that idea.)
I would have liked to ask him what we can trust God for–what we can trust Him to do. But that might have required a sermon rather than a sound bite.
The way I see it . . . Someone committed an irrational act, and the people are responding by falling back on their own irrationality. Lots of people are dumb that way.
“All part of God’s plan…”
Maybe God’s planning to get the Second Amendment overturned, and is using incidents like this to fuel public outcry?
I heard the guy that shot the pastor was suffering the effects of Lyme disease or the medication. Supposedly, the chimp that viciously attacked that woman was also suffering side effects of the disease/medication. So if the guy hadn’t had any weapons available he would have just tried to rip the pastor’s face off with his teeth.
I had no idea Lyme disease made you homicidal.
I am a moral absolutist. There’s no contradiction here. My moral judgement may be subjective, but it is still absolute.
I always say morality is an aesthetic – what I mean by that is that it’s nothing but a descriptor for emotional responses to stimuli. It has no objective meaning and no ultmate “authority,” but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be internally “absolute” or “relative.” My moral aesthetic, for instance says that rape is always wrong, and there is no possible historical or cultural context which can justify it. When God told the Israelites to do it, God was wrong.
I also hate broccoli. I don’t care if God says broccoli is delicious, I still think broccoli sucks.
I was saying (quite) that you were being self-contradictory; rather, I was simply asking for an expansion. Thanks for providing it. I tend to the morality-as-mathematics model myself, but that’s no bid deal.
Obligatory demythologizing note: I’ll bet anyone other than Diogenes that the story of the Hebrews conquest of Canaan is no more historical than the Labors of Herales.
That’s as insane as your praise of beer, dude. 
Broccoli is the 4th greatest green.