Originally posted by Metal_Man88

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That said, I feel anyone who puts targeting crosshairs and mentions to guns is asking to be hit whenever something like this happens, regardless of whether their stuff was involved. This is the risk they take when they do that, plain and simple.

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I think it's a very, very bad metaphor to use, especially in light of this tragedy, but this is really stretching it. There are so many details in the guy's life, the digging that's being done on this guy is getting weird. People want a scapegoat for the shootings and do their "due diligence" to figure out who/what's responsible.

They grab random tidbits about the guy and cluster them together (ohh it's because he was a marxist-nazi-pro-negro rights supporter (seriously people are speculating that because he liked some books that it made him murderous; come on, man!) that made him do it!!), saying they've found the cause, boiling it down to a single thing. In doing so, they aren't stopping to think that it's the sum total of what has gone on in his life, specific emotional circumstances he was under at the time, etc. that led him to his decision.

It's practically a 100% chance that what anyone will think of is spurious, because they just don't know, and likely can't know. They aren't him.

Hell, it's possible that even he doesn't really know. A lot of people do dumb, drastic, desperate things in times of disarray and look back in their life with regret and no understanding of what they were thinking. I'm not saying this absolves him at all, I'm just saying that no one really knows why some people do some things, even the person doing them.

For example, why did I make this post? I don't know, I felt like it? Hell yeah.

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I'm starting to think that Christians and fundies should be classified as 2 separate religions that just happened to branch from the same place years ago.

And yeah, the ban on homosexuality comes from the days when almost all the Hebrews were dead and they wanted the existing Hebrews to reproduce more. Now, with over a billion Christians and a world population so huge that it's straining the Earth, it seems incredibly silly even if you ignore the fact that today's society should not contain discrimination of that sort.

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TKB Super Mario Bros. • TKB Super Mario Bros., Volume II

Originally posted by Terra

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I'm starting to think that Christians and fundies should be classified as 2 separate religions that just happened to branch from the same place years ago.

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They're both very generic names to refer to people who derive beliefs from the bible/family. "Fundies" if anything would just be another sect of the religion, like Catholic, Calvinist, etc. It's kind of pointless to bother applying a less generalized title to a group because it's such a personal thing, even narrowing it down isn't accurate; you have to go step by step across a person's beliefs and morals, and even then, those evolve as time goes by.

In the case of the WBC folks, I don't really know if most of them even believe what they say they do. They seem to attach themselves to a news story just to get press from it. There's a niche to fill and maybe they're trying to fill it? Hell if I know!

Law passed to ban picketing at Tucson funerals
I don't like that it's being made illegal for them to picket funerals now. What courts and lawmakers decide on them is a huge challenge to the first amendment, and maybe some of the most important challenges it's ever had. I don't like hate speech, but I don't like the idea of censorship of ANY speech. Freedom of speech is OK until it becomes speech that some people don't want to hear? Seems like a dangerous precedent.
~Let the invisible hand of the free market... uhhh, punch out assholes who say the stupid shit.~

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Keitaro... did you read the article I linked? That's what they did.

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Originally posted by Viola

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Originally posted by Terra

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I'm not religious (though I was raised in an Episcopalian family), but I do think Jesus was a pretty cool guy, all things considered. And I think he'd definitely frown upon hateful actions like this.

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Um, that was Auxiliatrix who said that, not me

My family is Catholic, and there are still a few fundies around, especially my dad's sister's family.

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TKB Super Mario Bros. • TKB Super Mario Bros., Volume II

Originally posted by Viola

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But he'd still love them with all of his heart too. Can anyone here do that?

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I don't support anything the WBC stands for but I don't have any feelings about any of the people in it, honestly. They're no different than any other people born into a religion; it's all they know. Just the same, I'm sure they're just like any other wacky bigoted neighbors I've had in my life. The only difference is they're in the news.

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