Tag: Murder

THE BIBLE, THE KORAN, AND CULTURE

“Did Rick Warren say that Christians and Muslims worship the same god?”

My friend’s question over breakfast last week caught me off guard. “I doubt it,” I said, “but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that someone had misinterpreted something Rick said.”

I was right and you can read more about that at ChristianExaminer.com / did-Rick-Warren-convert-to-islam-no-no-and-no, by Gregory Tomlin. But the question reminded me how often people conflate the two religions.

This came home to me forcefully one day as I was explaining the differences between Christianity and Islam to two friends when one said, “Hey, one religion is as good as another. The Bible and the Koran are essentially the same kind of book.”

The truth is very different. Christianity and Islam are entirely different religions and the Bible and the Koran are completely different books. But imagine that you are sitting with a friend and the topic comes up. Would you be able to offer, in simple language, what distinguishes these two books and the two religions they represent?

No? Let me help you.

The Authorship is Different

The Koran was dictated by an illiterate man over the course of twenty-three years who claimed that he was hearing the voice of an angel.

The Bible was written by dozens of men over more than a thousand years who claimed to be moved by the Spirit of God to write. Some were scholars, some poets, some kings, some shepherds, some were priests, and some were prophets. Yet all had a uniform message: That God would save his people from their sins.

The Bible is thus connected to thousands of years of human history. The Koran is connected to three decades in the 7th Century. Muhammad believed that he was reciting a book that already existed in heaven. It is like an assortment of instructions and advice not specifically tied to any historical event. The Bible, through all of its authors, tells one story of God’s work over time through actual historical events, most of which have been validated by research.

But most importantly for us, the impact of the two books is different.

The Impact is Different

In 2006 England arrested 24 suspects in a plot to blow up ten U.S.-bound passenger jets with liquid explosives. In 2007 German authorities broke up a “massive” bombing plot against American interests in Germany. And of course, no one will forget the Fort Hood murderer, the would-be Times Square bomber, the Boston bombers, Charlie Hebdo, Paris, San Bernadino, or Orlando. All of these actions were perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam.

Not everyone who reads the Koran ends up being a terrorist. But that’s not the issue. Why would anyone – why do so many who read it – end up believing that Allah authorizes terrorism and murder?

I’m a conservative, evangelical Bible teacher. That means I believe the Bible is God’s word and that it is my authority for faith and practice. It also means that I’m very careful about interpreting it. I use the historical, grammatical, critical method of interpretation. I’m looking for historical context – who was the author? When did he write? To whom was he writing? What did he actually say (vocabulary, grammar, structure)? What did it mean to the original readers? How does that meaning apply in our cultural context?

Because of what the Bible teaches people from our church and many others participate in: Habitat for Humanity, Samaritan’s Purse, The Good Samaritan, disaster recovery, crisis pregnancy centers, GriefShare, and countless other acts of love and service.

That’s the impact of the Bible, properly interpreted and taught, in our culture. Why does the Koran not have the same affect? I’ll let my friend Samer, a former Sunni radical and now a Christian missionary to the Islamic world, conclude.

“As Christians we must be very emphatic that Christians have and continue to do many shameful things in the name of Christ, but the issue is this: Christians who use violence in the name of God to destroy their enemies have no justification for their actions from Jesus Christ, his life and teachings as found in the New Testament. Whereas, Muslims who are engaged in violence and destruction of anyone who opposes Islam, have ample justification for their actions from the Qur’an (using the Historical /Grammatical /Critical approach to interpretation) and the life and sayings of prophet Muhammad (the Hadith).”

“It is beyond doubt that the prophet of Islam did encourage the killing and intimidation of his enemies, not just in self defense as it is commonly reported by Muslims, but in the promotion of the cause of Allah and the spread of Islam.”

“Needless to say, the actions of the prophet were in direct contradiction to the teachings and actions of Jesus Christ and his disciples. So the point is not that Christians have never resorted to violence and other horrible atrocities. They have indeed committed many horrible acts, but when they have done this, they have betrayed the very person that they claim to follow. But when Muslims commit such acts, they can in fact claim that they are following the example of their prophet and thus fulfilling the will of God and promoting His cause. That, certainly, is a big difference!”

STOP THE SHOOTINGS

Trauma. Pain. Innocent and young lives lost, those left behind forever wounded, all because a psychopath with a gun decided he wanted to make a name for himself. Who among us does not feel the clawing grief? Who among us doesn’t want to end it? Other nations have managed it, or at least slowed it down. Why can’t we?

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Charleston, the Navy Yard, and now Roseburg—the list is too long. I wrote a theology of resisting evil in 2013 attempting to address the problem. Find it here: http://www.fccsobo.org/rwt-blog-39101. I stand by that theology, but it’s not enough. The mass shootings keep happening, showing no signs of slowing down. We need to stop them. Perhaps we need to reconsider? I decided to do that. I hope you find the results helpful.

Two Controlling Considerations
Because there’s a lot of noise about this, we need to boil it down to the essentials with two considerations.

First, we need to compare apples to apples. These are mass shootings of four or more defenseless people, often children, in a confined space with few exits like a school room, a church, or a movie theater, often in so-called “gun-free” zones. Conservatives like to point out that Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, yet suffers one of the highest gun related murder rates (59 murders and 362 gunshot victims in September alone). I don’t disagree. But we’re not talking about armed robberies and drug deals gone bad, crimes of passion and the like. We’re talking about the unprovoked massacre of undefended innocents, “soft targets” in military jargon.

Second, we live in America, not Australia, not Canada, not the UK or any other place. We are the first nation on earth where the right to bear arms is specifically written into our founding document. America was born with a gun in its hand for good reason. We tasted tyranny early on and spat it out with the conviction that we would never knuckle under again. The Founders believed, and many of us still agree, that an armed citizenry is the first defense against violent oppression on a personal as well as civic level. Conservatives will point out that there are more violent crimes prevented by law-abiding gun owners each year than are ever reported in the press, and none of them receive the media attention given to mass shootings on soft targets. True enough, but were we candid we would also admit that this isn’t 1776. It isn’t even 1940. This is 2015 and if we think a few modern minute-men with AR 15’s and homemade mortars are going to stop a determined government with M-1 Abrams Tanks, F/A 18 Hornets, smart bombs and Reaper Drones, we aren’t just mistaken, we’re deluded.

Two Questions
That leaves us with two questions, one short-term and one long.

First, taking seriously the biblical worldview that we are fallen creatures prone to personal evil and political tyranny, what is the fastest way to stop the shootings, the most expedient method to halt the mass murder of soft targets without cashing in our constitutional rights?

Second, what long-term, systemic changes can we make that reasonable people on both sides of the debate would agree on?

Two answers are offered, one by the radical left, the other by the radical right. One calls for a total gun ban, the other for almost no changes at all. Neither is adequate for the short or the long term. Neither is politically realistic. We need to find something in the middle that will address the short-term reality as well as the long-term need that everyone can agree on.

Three Factors
Workable solutions must address the combination of three contributing factors that have emerged in the analyses of multiple mass shootings. (I’m leaving Islamic jihadists out of this discussion because their motivations are different, but some of the solutions will apply to them anyway).

First, these places are soft targets. They may have had defensive strategies in place: instant notification systems, lock-downs, gun-free zones and the like. But as we’ve repeatedly witnessed, these systems are inadequate.

Second, the shooters are almost always fatherless, mentally unstable, emotionally wretched, narcissistic, cowardly, suicidal-yet-vengeful young men. Some (all? we don’t know) of them have been on and off of psychiatric medicines that have known violent side effects, especially when discontinued cold-turkey. They have easy access to weapons, are almost always fascinated by the instant fame of previous shooters, commit their crimes at the end of a slow, bitter burn of self-justifying resentment, and often broadcast their intentions ahead of time on social media.

Third, America has a woefully inadequate mental health care system for such people coupled with equally deficient involuntary committal laws for those with serious mental illnesses. Many of us voted this state of affairs into existence when we voted for Ronald Reagan, who led the charge in the dismantling of state mental health hospital systems in the 1980’s.* We did it for humane reasons, as many of the things that happened in those institutions make the VA look like Mayo Clinic. Further, any law that makes it possible to commit people against their will is vulnerable to abuse. But the law of unintended consequences prevails and we are paying a steep price. Would that these young villains could have been institutionalized before they imploded.

Short and Long-Term Solutions
Boiling it down to the essentials makes the following solutions seem pretty obvious:

Short-term: Harden the targets. These shooters are cowards. The ones that haven’t killed themselves almost always run when confronted by armed defenders. Hire ex-military men or women who are trained in close quarter combat with civilians present. We have thousands of them available at this point, after the Iraq war. And take down the ineffective gun-free zones—they are like red flags to raging bulls. If we aren’t going to hire armed resource officers, we at least need to let the teachers who are willing to take the responsibility, be trained and armed. This is a solution that has a proven track record.**

Also, let’s take it on ourselves, and ask the media to cooperate, never to publish the name or face of one of these shooters. It only encourages copy-cats.***

Long-term: It’s time to raise the responsibility level for gun buying. The smartest thing yet among ideas from other countries is that anyone who purchases a gun needs to have a reference from at least one other responsible adult, preferably two, who has known the buyer for at least five years. Yes, the Newtown and Roseburg shooter’s mother’s helped them obtain weapons. But more family and community involvement is better than more government involvement. We do this with driver’s licenses. In Virginia, a family member can request that the state reclaim the license of a minor. An instructor has to sign off before a new driver can take the state driver’s test. A family member, doctor, EMT, or peace officer can also recommend reexamination for a driver’s license for anyone of any age. In many cases, family members know more than any background check can uncover. Those of us who demand our rights need to up our responsibility levels. This is the least we can do.

Also, we need to change involuntary committal laws and improve our state-run mental health systems. We need better laws and systems that family members can access in a mental health emergency. This will take time and money, but it needs to be done.

It’s time to stop mass shootings of innocents in soft targets now. We may find that if we take the short-term steps, we won’t feel the need for the long ones. But we should take them anyway. We owe it to the victims and to our country.

Notes:

1*. http://sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas_d.html
2**. William M. Landes, University of Chicago Law School, November 1, 1996, Latest Revision October 19, 2000.
3***. Guns, Mental Illness and Newtown, By DAVID KOPEL, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 17, 2012.