Is it really the case that two separate threads have merged into this thread on religion and are BOTH repeating themselves?
On religion, what kind of a god would give us faculties of reason and ethic and go on to have us contradict those gifts? I feel that limits the possibilities of the type of god we might have.
And as for protecting the great gift of life some god may or may not have given us:
so here's a related question, speaking of the culture wars -- the 2nd amendment. Right to bear arms. The right wing likes to read this as an absolute without any context or limits. Louisiana's guv'ner just signed a bill on this basis allowing guns in church. SO -- if you read the second amendment literally in that way -- by what right can we prevent people from boarding planes with guns strapped to their hips?
That's not really what 'the right wing' believes. Much of 'the right wing' wants us to be slaves just as much as the 'the left wing', and they will each take half of what needs to be done to make us slaves under the false dichotomy to make us slaves altogether. But as for people who do in fact believe in a 'absolute' right 'without any context or limit'...
It's true, there is really not much to limit. 'Reasonable regulation' of the right to keep and bear arms is a penal statute like murder. The 2A ought not be a defense to the malicious and unlawful taking of life simply because of the implement used. But what has occurred is that the courts have stretched what even 'reasonable regulation' first meant to basically mean that the government can do anything it wants to regulate our life, liberty, and property even when we haven't injured someone else's. I find it hard to find a moral authority for that.
Signing a bill repealing a law that made it illegal to carry a firearm in a church is not extending the 2A beyond it's actual purpose. It's instead RETURNING THE RIGHT TO PROPERTY to owners of churches! The bill does not force churches to accept firearms. What business does the government have making a ban like that in the first place?
So on having guns on airplanes, you do realize bullet holes aren't going to depressurize a plane and cause it to crash, right? The government has no right to ban arms from planes, and the Interstate Commerce Clause cannot be consulted because the right to keep and bear arms is not only preexisting but an
amendment which would stand to alter the operation of the ICC even if it could apply (and then there's the question of why we would throw off a mighty tyrant just to create a new all-powerful federal government which is made so by a single clause.) Plane companies might be able to regulate whether there are arms on their planes (I say 'might' because of the nature of regulation and monopoly already so intertwined with the government, which I would have to have a long discussion about to decide.)
The 2nd Amendment is something that is completely taken out of context by the pro-gun side in the US. IIRC, it's to do with letting a militia stockpile arms for use against a tyrannical government.
The 2nd Amendment is something that anyone who wants slaves is trying to completely neuter. The right to keep and bear arms is about being ready for and employing a self-defense, whether it is a personal defense, defense against a foreign enemy, or defense against a tyrant. If I as a singular individual cannot be allowed to have as many arms as my government, my government will see me dead or enslaved at a place and time of THEIR choosing.
There's all sorts of problems with this. On a very practical level, when the US constitution was drafted, wars were fought by a group of men with muskets at one end of the field, and another group men with muskets at the other.
Except for the guys with rifles in trees sniping people through irregular warfare. The colonists did not win because they lined up in lines across bridges.
Nowadays wars are fought with tanks, aircraft, helicopters, missiles and all sorts of fun things, and really, it doesn't matter whether federal law dictates that your AR-15 can only hold 5, 10, 30 or even 100 rounds without being reloaded - if you run into a tank you're ****ed either way.
So because a tyranny is already such a military might, for that reason alone we should be deprived of our right...that our right is only good so long as it seems within the realm of possibility that we could actually repel a tyrant?
How about local tyrannies?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
How about being underwhelming from foreign invaders?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_WarSo who would propose that by already being 'outmatched' that we deserve to be forced by our government to become even MORE underwhelming than we already seem?
If the second amendment was taken to its logical conclusion in today's terms, the government would subsidize the cost of buying a battle tank for private citizens. It would also allow private ownership of plastic explosives, anti-aircraft artillery and anti-tank missiles, and all the other things that are necessary for fighting a modern war. I think in reality that basic public safety overcomes this need to fight against this imaginary tyrant.
A government is a greater threat than any private criminal.
Which leads onto the deeper philosophical problem of the amendment - it was written by a group of revolutionaries who had usurped British power - of course they were going to say that it was right for the people to overthrow the government with revolutionary means. It also must be contextualized with the relative immaturity of democracy, and the fact that revolutions and general instability were all the rage back then in western nations. Fast forward hundreds of years, is it really right that people living in a democracy should be afforded the right to lead violent revolution against their government if they feel they are being tyrannized? Who decides if the government is a tyranny? Obviously it isn't going to be the government in question, so is it up to the people on the ground to decide? Should Timothy McVeigh have been acquitted under his 2nd amendment rights? The idea is comical as it dangerous.
We already have a train of usurpations and abuses that surely entitle us to revolution at every level of our governments. It's reported that the revolution might have only been run by some small number, or at least initiated by so, say 3%, and that apathy existed largely just as it does now. The threshold may be when that angry minority is enough to cash in their lives for liberty. The difference between revolution and rebellion is who is hung at the end, and those who find the revolters criminal or tyrannous themselves will be risen against in revolution, until the cost of a life is no longer with cashing in for liberty.
That all said, I don't think America's strange obsession with guns, and its huge gun crime problem is a product of the ubiquity of weapons.
America's crime problem has very much to do with 1) the government's rampant violations of the supreme laws of the land and 2) what the People learn from that ("if the
government can violate the law, why can't I?") Guns are just a convenient tool. To take them away would be to injure someone else. And to say your can't have them would be to say that your life, liberty, or property is worth less than someone who wants to take yours from you. That seems to simply promote survival of the fittest, where the only reason for humans to reluctantly take on government in the first place was to protect the rights of all.
The point is that to say that humanity is made up only of life is sickening. Humanity is the full experience of life, liberty, and property, and to insist on life over all other things is to insist upon slavery.
