this past Sunday, a gunman opened fire during a children's performance at a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee, near Knoxville. he killed 2 people and wounded at least 6 others.
that's about where my train of thought stops and goes, "this is not ok," and then gets stuck.
i'm having a hard time coping with this, so of course i need to write about it. when i'm at my parents' house, i go to a Unitarian Universalist church, and when i'm not being obnoxious and identifying my religion as "lapsed Catholic," i identify as a UU. it's a religion i came to when i was 16 and needed something, but Catholicism was quite clearly no longer working. (maybe more about that some other time.) for more on Unitarian Universalism, check out the Unitarian Universalist Association. cool people, really. there's no fixed creed for UUs; it has been described as "one religion, many faiths." and instead of something like the 10 Commandments, we have 7 principles, like a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. it is one of the most liberal religions, which is why the shooter targeted this congregation.
the shooter, Jim Adkisson, reportedly told police that he believed "all liberals should be killed because they are ruining the country." he targeted the UU church because of its support for gay rights, among other progressive issues.
my knee-jerk reaction is that this is the logical progression of all conservative attacks on the liberal movement. and i hesitate to use the phrase "movement" for either side, especially where a church is concerned. these people were not out protesting the war in Iraq or a ban on gay marriage--they were sitting in their church watching a children's play. liberal, conservative, moderate; Christian, Muslim, or atheist--it doesn't matter in this setting.
i do not understand how anyone could walk into a church with the intention of killing people.
i do not understand how anyone can hate anyone that much.
i think what i'm having a hard time coping with is the fact that this could have been my church. this could have been people i know, people i marched with in the DC Pride parade as part of that church, people i have delivered lay sermons to on my own liberal beliefs, religious or otherwise. people whose children i have volunteered to teach in religious education classes. the children i've taught, who i've watched grow and move from grade school to middle school to high school in some cases, at whose changes i'm always surprised when i go "home" (which i feel i can use in this context because that church is more my spiritual home than my parents' house is home in any sense at this point), could have been the kids in that play, who saw their parents and grandparents spattered with blood as this crazed man full of hatred destroyed something they'd worked so hard to prepare.
it's bad enough when hatred manifests itself so egregiously, but it's even worse when it hits so close to home. would i be writing about it if it had happened in a Metropolitan Community Church? probably not, and i'll admit that. as Sara Whitman wrote in her Huffington Post article on the shooting, "this just got really personal."
and as one other blogger i read in the past few days noted, if this man was trying to harm Unitarian Universalism as a religion, he thwarted his own goal, because a lot of people who have never heard about our liberal faith are hearing about it now.
i could go on for pages about this, but what i really want to get at is the physical realism of the culture wars. verbal attacks are no longer enough, and in some arenas (race relations, gay rights, etc) have not been for a long time. something has to change. people cannot keep killing each other over ideological differences. religion is never an excuse for killing anyone, because if you take away all the trivial differences between religions, they all teach the same thing: Be Good to Each Other. it doesn't matter how many gods you believe in, or if you believe in any at all, or whether you think women should be subservient or whether it's ok to eat pork. contrary to the adage, God/god/g-d is not in the details, at least not in this sense. and if you look for her/him/it there, you're going to miss the bigger picture and the really important things.
i will not be surprised by a few tl;dr's here, but i had to get it out.
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