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Prayers for Charlie and his family, violence against people you disagree with is never the answer
by petabyt 1y ago
Prayers for Charlie and his family, violence against people you disagree with is never the answer
- quantified 1y ago[flagged]
- timeon 1y agoNot sure why is this down-voted? Seems reasonable.
- amradio1989 1y agoIts not reasonable at all. I wouldn't downvote it, but its devoid of facts and is loaded with false premises. I'm tempted to call it rage-bait, but I choose to assume the poster meant no harm.
- quantified 1y agoI intend motivation to choose actions that might make a difference. Can anyone make the case that prayer actually works? Consider the massacre of children actually praying at a Catholic school a couple weeks ago. Was that the result of someone praying for it to happen? Was any deity looking out for its flock? Whereas making guns a lot harder to obtain would definitely reduce gun usage.
- amradio1989 1y agoFirst, my bad. I owe you an apology. I'm sorry for treating you like that. There are millions of eyewitness accounts and personal testimonies about prayer. They are exceedingly well documented (esp. in books) and span nearly all of human history. Whether you believe them or not is a different matter. But at the very least, we can't easily dismiss prayer as something that "doesn't work". Second, even if we accept that "prayer" works, there's a ton of questions that raises. Does all prayer work? What if the prayers are contrary? And who are people praying to? And do all receivers of prayer actually have the power to answer prayer? For those that do, what happens when prayers are contrary to each other? What happens when the prayers are contrary to the will of the one being prayed to? I'm only bringing up these questions to illustrate that we can't say "prayer doesn't work" as a matter of fact, even in instances where it doesn't seem to work.
- catlover76 1y ago[dead]
- peder 1y agoBecause it's talking past each other. Very few people are literally asking for divine intervention, they're conveying wishes for a good outcome
- quantified 1y agoWhat leads you to that conclusion? It seems that referring to disbelief in prayer is controversial, and belief in prayer is not grounded in reality.
- logicchains 1y agoI'd wager you not a single right-winger saw that video and thought "we need to ban guns". They're thinking "I need more guns to protect me from this kind of leftist violence".
- treetalker 1y agoIs there evidence that the motive of this act was some clear "leftist" position?
- slater 1y agoNot yet, and might not be, but when has that ever stopped them?
- Whoppertime 1y agoWe rarely hear about motives. Paddock was responsible for the deadliest shooting in American history. We never got a motive. We got a bumpstock ban which was deemed unconstitutional
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoLoud voices on the right are already assuming and saying that, essentially making it the new truth whether that’s correct or not.
- TimorousBestie 1y agoThe second amendment fundamentalists are decidedly thawing. I expect at least some of them are thinking, “we need to ban guns from those people” for some value of “those people.” The response to the last high-profile public shooting was, if you’ll recall, noise in the DoJ about taking gun rights away from transgender people. So some kinds of gun control are apparently on the table.
- jeffbee 1y ago[flagged]
- lovich 1y ago[flagged]
- JacobThreeThree 1y agoSo your criticism of him is that "I assume that he called for violence even though I have no evidence that he did"?
- lovich 1y agoYea it was, and as multiple other people in this thread then followed up with links on, turns out I was correct.
- Sparkle-san 1y ago[flagged]
- noarchy 1y agoFrom the article: “ Kirk went on to say, “And by the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out … Bail him out, and then go ask him some questions.” "
- lynndotpy 1y agoI agree that Charlie Kirk was both responsible for fomenting political violence and was the victim of political violence, but I disagree with the causal suggestion. I think it's more likely to be the opposite. When he said gun deaths are an acceptable price to pay for gun rights, I think that must have come from a position of never imagining he'd be far less likely to be one of the deaths.
- xyzzzzzzz 1y ago[dead]
- treetalker 1y agoI agree that we should not try to resolve America's current problems with violence. (And to be clear, I am an ardent pacifist and urge change in the ways of King, Gandhi, etc.) Still, violence has been the answer in many (most?) political revolutions, including the American revolution and separation from Britain.
- jeffbee 1y agoAnd the American civil war.
- shadowgovt 1y agoDepending on how you turn the lens, the Civil War is an excellent example of violence not being the answer. The Confederacy tried to replace their Constitutional government and the policies instituted by the leaders elected by the people with a violence-enforced new state inside the territory of their existing one and got (justifiably) multi-generationally brutalized for their trouble. The town I grew up in and moved away from was still raising funds to rebuild some of the places that were burned to the ground in the war. That was fundraising in the 1980s. Every time someone points to the 1776 war as a success story I feel compelled to point out that half the descendants of that war's victors tried a very similar thing in 1861 to absolutely ruinous result. (On this topic: Fort Sumter is an interesting story. While it was never taken during the war, it basically became a target-practice and weapons field-test location for the Union navy: every time they had a new technique or a new cannon they wanted to try out, they'd try it on the fort. By the end of the war, the fort was "standing" only in the sense that the bulk of its above-ground works had been blasted flat and were shoved together into an earthworks bunker; the Confederates were basically sheltering in a hole that a lobbed shell could fall into at any time. And while the fort and its northways sister kept Union ships out of the harbor, it didn't stop them from firing past the fort into Charleston itself, since "war crimes" and "civilian populations" weren't really a concept yet. People very much went into that war thinking there wouldn't be consequences for ordinary folk. They were very much wrong.)
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
- harimau777 1y ago[flagged]
- briandw 1y ago[flagged]
- DrillShopper 1y agoNo, pointing out someone being odious does not equate to saying they deserve it. This incident additionally is darkly ironic because of his thoughts on gun violence: https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-it-2nd-amendment-1793113 https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-says-gun-deaths-worth-... To make it clear - I am pretty much politically diametrically opposed to Charlie Kirk, but I don't think he should have been shot.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago[flagged]
- briandw 1y agoIt's a simple matter of 2 wrongs not making it right. How can you in the same sentence say that Kirk is wrong for endorsing violence, while at the same time endorsing this shooting?
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago[flagged]
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoNo one here is “endorsing” the shooting. Simply pointing out that empathy is not a guarantee in life.
- myvoiceismypass 1y ago
- potsandpans 1y ago[flagged]
- animitronix 1y ago[flagged]
- mattstir 1y agoThat sentiment comes across a bit oddly... if the people in power in Germany hadn't started using terror and violence against those they didn't like, WWII wouldn't have happened.
- vlovich123 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lvl155 1y agoI agree with you. Violence is never the answer. Same goes for all the wars including the ones going on right now. And same for implicit and explicit violence and physical harm to make money.
- esarbe 1y agoWhile what you say is true; you don't know anything about the shooter or the motive.
- Cornbilly 1y ago"I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage" - Charlie Kirk
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- npteljes 1y agoThoughts and prayers with the victim, and his family, along with everyone at the Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.