Thursday, January 17, 2013

Guns & God - Less Goofiness

[Editorial Note: Anonymous D claims this still needs some editing. I think it's quite good so he's going to let me go ahead and post it]
From Anonymous D:

Part of the problem in the debate about guns is that not all of arguments on the right are completely loony, and not all of the arguments on the left are sane. Dare I say I support a more moderate approach?  Culturally speaking Americans love violence. I don’t doubt at all that there is a
connection to the cesspool we live in culturally and the violence we see generally.  There sometimes is a need to defend  yourself, the scriptures, both the D&C and Book of Mormon allow for that, but under very strict rules, certainly nothing like “Stand Your Ground”, and also monitoring very strictly our motivations and attitude and circumstances.  It seems clear that the general rule of the scriptures, indeed the first commandment given to the Nephites was to stop all the contention, fighting and bickering.  We are going to have disagreements but they can always be resolved if we observer the teachings of the Savior. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind….Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”  God first, everyone else next, yourself last.

Charity, the pure love of Christ, is something we find almost impossible, and is the one thing you can’t do without in the Kingdom.  The Kingdom of God (Zion) is charity manifested in a manner of living and thinking and treating others.  So your Facebook antagonist is correct in the broad sense, "it is the corruption of society ". . . . there shall be great pollutions upon the face of the earth; there shall be murders, and robbing, and lying, and deceiving, and whoredoms and all manner of abominations.” Then the kicker after Moroni has informed us that he has seen our day, (Probably in vision but it must be remembered that he just lived it as well, so he really understood us) he tells us…”And I know that ye do walk in the pride of your hearts; and there are non save a few who do not life themselves up in the pride of their hearts.”  With the normal wearing of costly clothes and the envy that comes with that pride. “For ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted.”  "O ye pollutions”   We are the very pollutants he is warning about.

While we recognize the wickedness of the society in which we live, Mormon and Moroni give us a very different solution than taking up your guns, “Know ye that ye must come unto repentance, or ye cannot be saved. Know ye that ye must lay down your weapons of war, and delight no more in the shedding of blood, and take them not again, save it be that God shall command you.” 

I see the current gun culture as a manifestation of what Mormon warned us about, a people who delight in the shedding of blood. You don’t have to be personally involved in the shooting to delight in it. We delight in it almost every night in the continual scene of wickedness and abomination  on television, In our sporting events, what would football be without the hitting? We delight when the bad guy gets justice, even if he is a really bad guy should we delight that in addition to their victims and their victims families their lives and the lives of their families are shattered? Most of all, some, certainly not all, gun advocates delight in shedding that blood themselves, in imagining themselves meeting out justice to the bad guy personally.

3 comments:

  1. Hold on just a second....do you really hunk it is all about violence? No no no....it is about government control plain and simple....did you forget king George already?did you forget about why we fought the revolution in the first place...government control is not the answer...any time the government begins legislation on its own against amendment rights we need to be concerned...that is why so many are against this....it is the government dictating what we should do...it is the government deciding amendment issues....THIS IS THE CONCERN...wake up America...what will they decide for us next?....oh maybe health care....oh they've done that already too...hmmmm?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dear Anonymous-
      Yes. I really hunk so.

      By the way, this is still the People's government with a lot more work to do. Read some more posts from this blog.

      Delete
  2. I found an interesting reference to violence in recent movies (well, since Viet Nam) also tied to the philosophy of the anti-hero acting alone against a disintegrating society and corrupt government. The odd thing is, I haven't seen most of these because by nature, I'm not a big violent-hero type. But it seems that these types of violent, and philosophically violent, films may have led to some of the extreme Second Amendment sentiments. Here's the quote:

    "since the end of the Vietnam War. The new hero is a paramilitary warrior who is hostile to the police or the government because he realizes that 'the official power structure is unwilling to fight even though the enemy threatens to destroy America and the values it represents.' This archetype was first portrayed by Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, Charles Bronson in Death Wish, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando. The new hero fought in a new frontier: a borderland of decadence and chaos on the perimeter of a decaying society. Society is decaying because of the incompetence or corruption of governmental officials as well as plots by 'evil ones'- drug lords, terrorists, malevolent space aliens, or shadowy dark forces who 'can only be satisfied by the collapse of social stability and all moral values.' Increasingly, film portrays chaos as overwhelming society, as illustrated by Dirty Harry, Waterworld,Twelve Monkeys, and the Terminator, Alien, and Road Warrior series."

    http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Bogus2.htm [internal cites ommitted]

    ReplyDelete

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