Turning the other cheek?

An advert on Wingnut Daily leads to “The ultimate biblical exploration of self-defence”, a book with the title Shooting Back also available as “an exciting DVD.”

What would you do if armed terrorists broke into your church and starting attacking your friends with automatic weapons in the middle of a worship service?

Well, that is one form of terrorist attack that is never going to affect us non-believers….. You might therefore think a common-sense solution to that imaginary scenario for phobic believers might be to maybe stop going to church, but this book doesn’t go down that route….

It’s advice for his fellow worldnutters from a South African who was in a church that was attacked in 1993. (Don’t ask me if it was one of those extremist Terre-Blanche-style-white-hate-“churches” because they don’t actually mention that small detail. )

….But van Wyk was not defenseless that day. Had he been unarmed like the other congregants, the slaughter would have been much worse.
“Instinctively, I knelt down behind the bench in front of me and pulled out my .38 special snub-nosed revolver, which I always carried with me,” he writes in “Shooting Back,” a book being published for the first time in America next month by WND Books. “I would have felt undressed without it. Many people could not understand why I would carry a firearm into a church service, but I argued that this was a particularly dangerous time in South Africa.”

Many people indeed might not understand why someone would carry a firearm into a church service.

(I am a mite distracted by the odd physical conformation of someone who is naked without a gun. How much human flesh can a gun cover? Is he a really odd shaped human? Is it a pretty large gun like an anti-aircraft weapon. That might cover enough flesh to constitute an article of clothing. However, it would be hard for it to pass unnoticed by even the dumbest church-attackers.

If he put the gun behind a bench, was he was therefore conceptually naked in his church? No, my misunderstanding. The gun wasn’t behind the bench. To cover his conceptual nakedness effectively, it must have been stashed somewhere about his person that he couldn’t get at without having to do the modest thing and get behind a bench. )

Now, maybe I am being a bit too biblically literal here but from my school Religious Knowledge lessons, I don’t remember much in the New Testament about fighting back with maximum firepower? I thought it was all about loving thine enemies and turning the other cheek. My misunderstanding. That was another New Testament altogether.

But, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. In fact I’ll see his paranoid advice and raise it.

I myself feel in a state of mortal terror unless I’m armed with at least a couple of dozen inter-continental ballistic weapons. I mean, you never know when you might come under attack and have to protect innocents around you. So I always feel that a few medium-to-long range nuclear weapons gives you all the security you need. Why stop at carrying mere hand-guns into church?

And indeed, what utopian fool would go anywhere without wearing at least an NBC suit over a set of Kevlar underwear? And carrying a light submachine gun. We live in a dangerous world.

More on Alice Shannon

I have mentioned this in the past, but reading the excellent Planet Atheism feed today highlighted a new take on it.

A post titled “Not all news is bad” Sacred Slut revists some of the issues and points out the Clarion was “tricked” by who ever posted the hate screed letter – obviously “Alice” doesn’t live in the Clarion’s catchment area…

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