Religious Right is Wrong When it Comes to Guns

I have written before about the large numbers of Bible-believing Christians who are advocating against any governmental control (link here) of guns. Anyone standing outside the walls of the fundamentalist community might find it strange that people who strongly profess to have a loving God (Jesus) would also strongly profess their governmental right to kill people with very powerful weapons.

I have watched this debate with some interest—scanning the talking heads out there for any evidence that SOMEONE in the Bible-believing community finds the whole gun rights argument to be outside the purview of religion. I have not yet found anyone, although I am sure that they exist. However, I did hear of a Christian pastor who gave a reason why the fundamentalist community is so strongly in favor of killing people with very strong weapons.

This pastor said, “The biblical basis for this is the Golden Rule.” He then continued; “Do unto other what you would have done unto you.”

I was momentarily taken aback. I do not want someone to murder me, how could I then go out and murder someone? Surely this was not what that pastor meant.

That pastor was talking about protecting other people. The fundamentalist Christian community uses The Golden Rule as their reason for being “The Great Protector.” They want the right to carry powerful weapons because they feel that no one else is going to protect them.

This may be a philosophy, but it’s not a good religious philosophy. In fact, using the Golden Rule as the basis for killing people with very powerful weapons is the ANTITHESIS of good religious philosophy. Let me state this more clearly.

One of the passages in the Hebrew Bible which gives Christians the foundation for their Golden Rule is Leviticus 19:18—“…thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Do unto others is related to loving other people as yourself. This makes sense. But there is nothing in Leviticus 19:18 about using powerful weapons to kill people. Nothing.

Leviticus 19:18 has a sentence before "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. This sentence is even more strongly against using powerful weapons to protect oneself. The first part of the verse in Leviticus 19:18 is as follows: “Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people.” The verse also has a stunning ending: “I am the L-RD.” Thus, Leviticus 19:18 isn’t just any verse for a Bible-believing Christian. Leviticus 19:18 is a verse in which we listen to the word of G-d. This makes Leviticus 19:18 a very important verse for the Bible-believing Christian community.

Here it is in its entirety:

Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the L-rd.

***

This brings us to a very big difference between The Golden Rule and Leviticus 19:18. One uses the word "other" while the latter uses the word "neighbor."

Is there a meaning of the word “other” which would lend credence to the Christian perspective of using powerful weapons to kill an “other?”

The word in Hebrew which is commonly translated as neighbor is "rei-acha." Not surprisingly, the meaning of the word "rei-acha" is not the word you would use to refer to your neighbors in Modern Hebrew. It is a word which you might use to refer to "the children of your people." 

In a society like ours, who are the children of our people? Who are the people about whom we should concern ourselves?

Do we consider all Americans to be “our people?”

or

Do we only consider people of similar religious backgrounds to be “our people?”

This is important because we must ask the Christian fundamentalist community exactly who they are protecting themselves from?

I have heard more than one gun enthusiast say they are protecting themselves against “the bad people.”

This to me seems to be the “NEW” meaning for the Golden Rule. In other words, the fundamentalist Christian community is protecting themselves from “OTHERS.”

Let’s read the Golden Rule one more time:

Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

And here's the Golden Rule as it is interpreted by the Fundamentalist Christian community:

Kill others as you would have wanted to be protected.

This doesn’t sound like good religious philosophy to me. It sounds like a bunch of really scared people who are taking the law into their own hands. It seems they are terrified that our violent culture will come for them next—that we will reap as we have sown.

But saying that G-d is on your side does not make it so.

And making our culture more violent doesn’t solve anything.

So we must work together to get rid of the guns and to search out the sources of violence in our society. We are all in this together.