So you don’t have to, I try to stay abreast of the latest silliness on Daily Kos, Salon, Balloon Juice and Mother Jones. But it’s all so dreary, droll, boring and awful. Seriously, the writers over these web sites at one time at least spoke honestly about their real intentions concerning guns. But they don’t even do that any more. It’s all prevarication, misdirects and smoke and mirrors – and it’s awful writing to top it all off.
The best model to understand their ilk is that the washed up hippie movement was never really about free love, peace, letting people do their own thing and libertarianism. They were always statists, and they wanted guns and revolution right up to the point where they were in charge, and then to remove the liberty everyone else enjoyed. They are control freaks, every one of them. When they talk about gun control, they don’t mean gun control concerning the police – they want the police to be armed because the police preserve their state. Hippies were only against cops when they were on different sides.
They’re hypocrites too, but this most recent instance is stunning. Charles Kinnaird writing at Ameriblog preens moralistic about Americans sacrificing our children to Moloch.
And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of Ben Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Moloch; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination. – Jeremiah 32:35
Moloch was the ancient Phoenician and Canaanite god known in Deuteronomy for the practice of propitiatory child sacrifice. Apparently, the Hebrew prophets of old had a hard time convincing people that they should stop the practice. There are few images more horrifying to us modern folk than that of fearful people offering up their own children to be burned on the altar of a domineering death-making god. Yet we are seeing the fires of Moloch burning in 21st Century America.
This week we have seen yet another disturbing incident of promising lives brought to a sudden end by gun violence — in keeping with our pattern of one school shooting per week. Once again there is talk of stronger gun control laws, yet we are impotent to make any changes. Even when we see students gunned down, and we know that there are steps we can take to make such incidents less likely in the future, we feel powerless to do anything. Our failure to act even in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in which 20 young children were killed, all of them 6 and 7 years old, demonstrated that we would rather sacrifice our beautiful preschoolers than do anything that might be perceived as a sleight against the Bill of Rights — they’re the price of our “freedom,” just ask Bill O’Reilly. Our words say that we honor American freedom, while our actions say that we live in fear and have so little regard for our children that we will willingly feed them to our modern day fires of Moloch.
In a country whose politicians love to shout “God Bless America!” at the end of their speeches, and whose people speak of faith in the public square and argue about putting the Ten Commandments on display, it is the ancient and brutal god Moloch who holds sway over so much of our public discourse. Indeed the fires of Moloch continue to consume our children while nothing is done to extinguish those flames.
That children can be and are killed with bombs, knives, clubs and fists is irrelevant to Charles. And it’s also irrelevant to Charles that one the very reasons we have and carry weapons is to protect the children. As I’ve explained before:
I am afraid there have been too many centuries of bad teaching endured by the church, but it makes sense to keep trying. As I’ve explained before, the simplest and most compelling case for self defense lies in the decalogue. Thou shall not murder means thou shall protect life.
God’s law requires [us] to be able to defend the children and helpless. “Relying on Matthew Henry, John Calvin and the Westminster standards, we’ve observed that all Biblical law forbids the contrary of what it enjoins, and enjoins the contrary of what it forbids.” I’ve tried to put this in the most visceral terms I can find.
God has laid the expectations at the feet of heads of families that they protect, provide for and defend their families and protect and defend their countries. Little ones cannot do so, and rely solely on those who bore them. God no more loves the willing neglect of their safety than He loves child abuse. He no more appreciates the willingness to ignore the sanctity of our own lives than He approves of the abuse of our own bodies and souls. God hasn’t called us to save the society by sacrificing our children or ourselves to robbers, home invaders, rapists or murderers. Self defense – and defense of the little ones – goes well beyond a right. It is a duty based on the idea that man is made in God’s image. It is His expectation that we do the utmost to preserve and defend ourselves when in danger, for it is He who is sovereign and who gives life, and He doesn’t expect us to be dismissive or cavalier about its loss.
And concerning John Calvin’s comments on this subject:
We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden. There is no one who doesn’t concede this. That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment. Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned. But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify. For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice. We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds. Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so. Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).
The real child abusers are Charles and his kind, who prefer to see them gunned down around him, or a bloody civil war trying to confiscate guns people intend to use to protect themselves and their children. Either way, Charles wants to see blood and wants to project his blood-lust onto us.
And although he doesn’t mention it, one can bet how he and his kind see abortion – and here is the real hypocrisy. As for children being sacrificed to Moloch, how many millions of babies have been killed inside and outside the womb as a sacrifice to Baal? Have Charles or his co-writers said anything about that? Of course not, because Charles is a hypocrite like all of his friends, concerning both abortion and guns.
We’re all bored with Charles now. And so ends his stupid little sermon until he deals honestly with consistency. It isn’t the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s the stuff of life, and this sorry attempt by Charles to turn the tables on us only serves to highlight his own sins. Come back when you have something, Charles.
