Jim Morin for February 25, 2018

Great portrayal.

I have a feeling were “God” would really shove it, Wayne would never need Preparation H again.

Oddly enough, I don’t recall any references to “guns” in the Bible. I DO recall a few lines about “Thou shalt not kill,” and “love your neighbor,” and even “love your enemy.”

I read that one of the Parkland students Tweeted that we should rename the AR-15 the “Marco Rubio” since they’re both so easy to buy!

Wow. Just goes to show you that just because you’re not anti-gun doesn’t mean you can’t say phenomenally – one might even say biblically! – stupid things.

What’s REALLY frightening to ANYONE with an I.Q. higher then their shoe size is the FACT that this UTTER IMBECILE actually BELIEVES THAT!!

And if they did something, the republicans would be screaming, “He has rights, you jackbooted thugs!”

I like the original “pull my finger” version of the painting better.

I like the original “pull my finger” version of the painting better.

✔@realDonaldTrumpMy son Donald openly gave his e-mails to the media & authorities whereas Crooked Hillary Clinton deleted (& acid washed) her 33,000 e-mails!4:00 AM – Jul 22, 2017107K62.9K people are talking about this

Guns and laws are made by men. Stop voting for republicans if you are tired of their murderous ultra liberal gun laws.

Ban the AR-15, the weapon of choice for school mass murderers.

Coming up with ideas that benefit everyone takes time and effort, while using division, blame, suspicion, and fear -- without solving a single problem -- can generate a market for “protection” against all sorts of imaginary horribles. It doesn’t seem like a gift from god to me.

The meaning and intent of that second amendment has been grossly perverted by the NRA.

If guns were a god-given right, we’d all have been born with a gun.

Normally, God given rights do not need approval of the several states.

This is in response to Lyman Elliott’s terrific post, but I can’t seem to reply to him. I wrote in a psych paper that as an atheist I feel the need to be more altruistic because there’s just us to take care of each other.

“Jungle,” eh? No wonder all the dogs in the neighborhood are barking, after a loud whistle like that.

Sounds like somebody’s not exactly blaming the Swedes, if you know what I mean.

The sad thing is this psychotic actually does believe this

jlocke asks, “Where does the atheist get his empathy? Who gave him his empathy. Where does this empathetic right and wrong come from?” Just for fun, why don’t you look up what the REAL John Locke had to say about that, along with all the other Enlightenment thinkers who put Reason and Natural Law in the place of mindless superstition?

@JLocke – wow, now you are blaming society for mass murder. But Europeans are even further down the path you describe, are they not? Why, then, do they have nothing like our number of gun deaths?

Furthermore, even if you were correct (and you are not), all the more reason to enforce law and order as regards gun ownership, right?

Watching the wrong characters naked, I feel like throwing up!!!

Bullets From Heaven.

@jlocke…once again you get it so terribly wrong. Magical thinking is the backbone of all religions. The order you ascribe to God is only discernible to humans using the fact-based observation. The most effective use of observed facts to test null hypotheses is the empirical method, I.e. science.

Instead, you have to rely on blind faith because the tall tales you believe in have no connection to anything but a shared set of beliefs among the faithful. A priori, there is no reason your religion came to be. As for morality, ethics and the like…well, your solutions need to contend with the facts of religion, not the delusions of revelations thousands of years old (or, in the case of the Mormons, hundreds of years old).

We are not fully human without other humans, and the structure of our relationships and societies are far more non-linearly constructed from accidents having to do with the drive to reproduce, than any revelatory texts or magical thinking. But that’s way too obvious for the faithful to come to grips with.

Take Christianity, for example. Jesus’ big message was empathy and love. The whole zombie thing (rising from the dead) and “cleansing the sins of the world” is just made up nonsense. There’s not a shred of evidence supporting such an odd series of claims. It is as improbable as the entire truth of the universe being revealed IN ARABIC to an itinerant merchant-warrior Arab raised by desert tribes.

The Buddha probably got the closest, but then his followers strayed from the philosophy and veered into dogma. Buddhist philosophy remains the closest to describing the human condition, but the Buddhist religion is for the faithful and easily led.

Sure. Right. Uh huh. Religion is the answer to the gun violence problem in the US. Makes a lot of sense. ISIS and the Taliban are pretty good thought leaders in this. Although baby Bush was pretty Christian, too, when he lied and cheated his way into war.

My religious education as I was growing up in the South in the middle of the last century consisted of listening to a series of ‘preachers’ rail against papists, homosexuals, “negroes”, divorce (for women), and various, assorted and sundry ‘perversions’ as might occur to them from time to time! Though “professing” to be abject followers of ’Christ", most of their sermons were based on the Old Testament, the “Jewish” part of the “christian bible”!

Needless to say, I learned far more about intolerance, racism, bigotry, mysgnation and blatant “tribalism” than I learned about ‘tolerance’ and ‘forgiveness’ in the church, but the ministers were only playing to their audiences in the Southern Baptist world. It was “politics” made real; if the preacher “pleased” the congregation, more was placed in the ‘offerings’ basket, and, to a large extent, that’s what small-town preachers lived on, from week to week!

And, to make a point, the idea of seeing Wayne LaPierre naked is actually scarier than what he espouses – intellectually, I can dismiss his verbiage as simply that – the idea of him as the prototypical “Adam” is much more difficult to dismiss!

Boy, NotJohnLocke should have a talk with Thomas Jefferson.

It is not religion that enables us to live longer than 200 years ago. It is not prayer that means fewer women die in childbirth than 200 years ago. No prayers have ever restored an amputated limb.

Relying on “Hopes and Prayers” for a different future does not seem to be working out.

BTW, I belong to no political party. I merely think that humanity should try to progress from “nasty, brutish and short” lives to lives dominated by reason and intellect, lives where poverty is a choice and not a sentence imposed by the uncaring. Lives where opportunity is not the exception but the rule. Lives where sickness is always treated.

Our culture has too long blindly done the opposite. That’s what must be discarded.

After thousands of years of various religions and philosophers, we do have a heritage of ideas useful for conduct of individuals and societies. We should keep the wheat, and not the chaff, of which there is far too much. And the chaff is full of arbitrary restrictions, especially as regards women. We cannot be all that we could be when more than half the race is supposed to be no better than chattel.

Oh, and here are the facts. Not so extreme as NotJohnLocke claims:

http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-affiliation/

“The Democrat Party has … turned away from many of your own countrymen and discarded much of your culture.” — JLOCKE

I don’t know about the rest of my Party-mates but I have found Christianity to be superfluous. While it may have been necessary in the past, before we understood social sciences, I find common humanity with my fellow humans. Modern Christianity has lost its humanity.

Are other primates, elephants and orcas empathetic because some god told them to be so? For that matter, rats have shown behavior that looks suspiciously like empathy. What we call morality looks to be a biologically determined behavioral pattern. Read “Beyond Words” by Carl Safina for a good discussion of what we usually think of as “human” but what is seen in many other life forms. Or spend some time with Frans van der Waals’ primate studies. “The Bonobo and the Atheist” would be a good start.

The Second Amendment does not bestow a right, but a responsibility. It was passed not so that people could enjoy guns as sport, but solely in the interest of maintaining the security of our free state, through maintenance of a well-regulated militia. What is going on today is not in the interest of maintaining our security or any well regulated peace-keeping body. It is the pursuit of profit by the arms industry by putting arms in the hands of those who would disrupt both.