Liberals use the opportunity of tragedy to mock people of faith, without seeing the irony in their own beliefs.
In a Weekly Standard article today, Shoshana Weissmann compiles a list of outlets mocking people who pray for victims of the recent tragedy in Californa. Shoshana writes: “If you were watching Twitter while the San Bernadino shooting was playing out, you might have seen people, including politicians, condemning those who said they were praying for the victims.”
The ironic thing is that people who find it ridiculous to believe gun violence can be stopped by petitioning God, think it can be stopped by petitioning your Congressman. If you’re going to mock people who maintain a childish faith in a higher power, start looking in the mirrors of your own glass house, Potsie Kettleblack.
Prayer isn’t magic, but neither is legislation. And some people who think they’re above religion, still believe Congress can write magical words on a piece of parchment, and all these tragedies will just vanish.
If you believe in evidence based science, California is your petri dish. It has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. They’ve passed background checks, bans on high capacity magazines and assault weapons, and most of the other things people want to see extended nationally, including closure of the Gun Show Loophole. From the Washington Post:
If you’re a gun owner in California, you must:
- Pass a universal background check, no matter where you buy your gun
- Wait at least 10 days to receive that gun (the idea here is to give law enforcement enough time to conduct the background check)
- Get your handgun microstamped, which means the make, model and serial number of the gun is transferred to each cartridge case every time the gun is fired (the idea is to allow police at a crime scene to trace a gun back to its owner)
- Take and pass a written safety test
You can’t:
- Own most assault weapons or buy and sell large-capacity ammunition magazines or .50 caliber rifles
- Buy your gun through a private sale, like online or via a friend, without first going through a licensed dealer (and thus getting a background check)
- Buy more than one handgun a month
And yet, tragedy still occurred. The hypothesis has been proven false. Gun laws will not stop madmen. Perhaps we should work on our literacy programs, because these people cannot read the Gun Free Zone signs that are clearly posted. How many more incantations must be chanted in the halls of legislatures, before we realize that none of these things will have any affect on the determination of evil people?
Much of the reason why people think prayer is worthless, is they don’t fully understand what prayer actually does. It isn’t a magical incantation, it’s a reflection on inner strengths. The best example is summed up in the Serenity Prayer:
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- God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
- The courage to change the things I can,
- And the wisdom to know the difference.
To me, that seems a lot more rational than thinking that someone can actually change humanity by writing magical words in the Congressional Record.
Prayer makes more sense than Statism.