The Guns of God and the Constitution:

The Guns of God and the Constitution:
A gun safety course on religion in the United States of America

A note from the Author: While this piece will deal with the concept of freedom to do with religion and ones freedom to believe and worship how they choose, a lot of the examples I cite will be directly taken from my own personal experiences within the realm of Christianity. The suggested principles I put forth are not meant to target any one religion or religious group.

This is a piece for everyone about everyone’s right to have their guns, but how they’re not allowed to use them according to the very law that gives them the right in the first place.

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In a world where everything about who you are and what you believe is so readily questioned and attacked, it becomes a bit easier to lose sight of just why your constitution, as an American, gave you things like the first amendment.  In a world where your faith is questioned by those who don’t share it with you, in a world where one’s faith can spread to be an all-encompassing bubble, in a world where religious wars are waged behind white picket fences as well as from either side of concrete walls, it becomes increasing more important to remember just why the constitution gave you these protections.

Everyone has a right to believe whatever they want. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Buddhist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Scientologist, – yeah, I said it – a practitioner of old world shamanistic magic, a Wiccan, or any cross pollinated amalgam of whatever religion you find out there. It is your right to follow as many or as few of these things as you want. It is your constitutional right to bring your guns down from on high and level them at anyone who tries to take it away from you – but there’s a catch.

Before you all start throwing stones and shouting at heathens, before you decide to strip away state benefits for the poor because of a stance on abortion and planned parenthood, before you petition with big signs with pictures of dead babies on them, before you stand outside a funeral home thanking God for IEDs, before you lock someone up in a hotel room and refuse to give them medical treatment because they have alien souls attached to them, before you tell the world that God is coming back to the oval office through you, you need to stop and really look at what you’re doing.

Religion is a personal belief, period. It’s what you feel to be right in your universe, what helps you make sense of the fucked up world around you, and provides you with a base guideline for how to live your life. It’s pretty clear that a lot of them are exclusive unto themselves in terms of telling you what’s right, but their basic purpose is all the same. It’s the faith that, so long as you live righteously in the eyes of whatever higher power you follow, be it a God or little green men, that you’re going to end up wherever it is you want to go when you die.

Not everyone is going to agree with you. Not everyone is going to believe what you believe, and that’s their choice. It’s how they feel about the world around them and that has to be okay. Anyone and everyone has a different life, sees different things, has different experiences, and it’s these things that make up the basis for faith. It’s what you see, what you feel, and what moves you that determine how you come to the conclusions of faith. No matter how simple it might seem to an outsider, it’s what you believe, and it’s your right not to have that taken away from you – again, so long as you don’t try and take it away from anyone else.

It’s the same basic principle as to why series killers are condemned and not granted some kind of freedom under the pretense of religious sacrifice. In a lot of cases they see something wrong with the world and, from their perspective, what they’re doing is often a way to clean that up and make the world better, the voices stop, and so on. Where they cross the line is when they force others into their system of belief by force or coercion. The same theory applies to any religion that adopts the ‘convert or die’ mentality. A choice of faith is not something I see as having any reason to get you killed.

This is why we have the freedom of religion in America. The freedom of religion is in place to protect your right to practice whatever the hell you want; so long as you’re the only person it impacts. You have every right to have the option of worship in whatever way you choose, so long as it doesn’t force anyone else to adhere to your tenets of faith, but you have to accept that not everyone out there will agree with you and if they don’t, that’s their constitutional right.

These guns are not there for the purpose of attack, the justification of law, or to demand the conversion of another to your faith under duress and threat. You do not have the right to tout you political agenda as being in line with God or make the laws that God would want you to make. God does not live in America, the people live in America and, if you’re going to follow the faith of God into the hellfire of politics, you’ve got to remember what your own faith teaches you: God made everyone and only he gets to judge what they do as being right and wrong.

As a Christian, you do not have the right to say that it is illegal to have an abortion. It is not a religious argument in terms of legality, but rather a debate on the tenets of your faith in terms of a social practice. It is perfectly okay to come to the conclusion that God would not want you to get an abortion so you can’t have one, but it is not okay to say “God doesn’t want me to have one, so nobody else should either.” It doesn’t matter how virtuously you whore it up, the bottom line is that you’re oppression people’s right to believe what they want with your pseudo-righteous savior practices.

As a government body, be it federal or state, you do not have the right to enact laws or decisions on the basis of faith alone. It’s this high-and-mighty; lord on high in mind, decision making that drove many of the original pilgrims and settlers away in the first place. People want the right to practice their faith, and they should have it, and that’s it. They shouldn’t have, and flat out do not have, the right to tell you that this law enforces or is in response to the will of any God. This is a fraudulent adaptation of the first and second amendments simultaneously, in every way shape and form.

Religious freedoms is like gun safety, everyone should be taught it and follow certain principles of respect about how to wield religion in a way that keeps it safe and sound for everyone. It’s your obligation to understand that religion is a powerful thing and, if you use it, you have to be very respectful with how you choose to bring it into your world. You can’t bring your guns to bear on anyone who doesn’t agree with you. You can’t put your finger on the trigger in an attempt to prove you’re right or force anyone to think the way you do. That, again, isn’t why you’re allowed to carry the gun.

What these guns are here for is, is for you to defend your right of religion against the encroachment of government, the people, or other religions. It is your right to believe whatever you want to believe so long as you do not enforce that belief on anyone else. Nobody has the right to tell you what you can and can’t believe or can and can’t follow – so long as you understand that you’re not allowed to do the same to anyone else either.

So, when presented with charlatanic practices like the denial of welfare based on a decision about planned parenthood, you’ve got every damned right to pick up your Guns for God and say “I don’t fucking think so. I don’t agree with this and you can’t tell me I have to because that goes against everything this country was founded.” It’s these fundamentalist rights rapists that really do a good number on how the country looks as a whole. We’re supposed to be the land of the free, where people can come to live and believe as they will, and here we are, forcing people to chew on the sandals of God and crank out children from the product of rape because ‘it’s a miracle from God’.

Last I checked, no religion was a democratic society unto itself, nobody voted for God, and nobody should be forced to live under the rule that they did. You did not have to be a person of faith to live anywhere in America and it was not a requirement of anyone to go to church and thank Jesus for taking the dive for the rest of our sins.

To turn it around, if religion was a political debate – and keep in mind the constitution strictly states that that should never be the case – you’d have all manner of extremist degenerates screaming about how Jesus was a Marxist bastard who only cured the poor so he could better control them down the line, and Rabbi’s would be the Anti-Christ and the undoing of all things right and good in the world. We’re lucky it’s not that way all the time, but when you start imposing those same kind of ideas on the political level, about the welfare of your people and the state in which you live, it’s a slippery slope.

Being a person of faith is personal. It’s not legal, should have no bearing on law, and should not be a requirement of life. If you are one of those followers, for instance who is genuinely concerned for those around you who don’t follow because they’re staring down the face of eternal damnation? I feel for you in a lot of ways. You want to do right by the world and try and show people something you believe so strongly that it could fix everything that’s wrong with them and, you know what? That’s okay, as long as you let them say that they’re not interested.

It’s an option presented to everyone, even people like me who just like to give a tip of the hat in thanks because we know, if it’s true, we get our money’s worth out of a sacrifice like that. Still, no matter why anyone chooses to accept it, it’s their choice, plain and simple. Nobody has to take it and you can’t make them and, when someone aims their God-cannon at you in attempt to get you to submit to what they want in the world, you have the right to say no.

You have the right to stand your own ground of faith and conviction and do whatever you have to do. That’s your obligation as a practitioner of faith – stand by what you believe or it all counts for shit anyway. You have the right to stand up and say “I will not be forced to live this way because my constitution says I don’t have to."

You were given the right to be free from religious oppression, no matter how socially acceptable that religion is; you were given the right to have whatever relationship with God you want, you were given the right to believe or not believe based on what you saw. Anyone who tries to slap a law down around those foundations of your religion, who tries to tell you that this religion is better than that religion and this law should reflect that, is a snake oil salesman. Make the choices that are right for you and stand up for anyone’s right to choose whatever the hell they want.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Catholic who attends mass six times a week at midnight, A Sunday Christian Soccer Mom, a Jewish person who never says a word, an Agnostic who doesn’t know what to believe but doesn’t want to discount anything, an atheist who thinks it’s all bullshit – at the end of the day, what you follow doesn’t matter. You’re a citizen of America first and whatever duty you may think you have to God comes second to the notion that you are not allowed to force that on anyone by any means.

If you decide that doesn’t work for you? You can go elsewhere. I want my leaders to get off the pulpit, to stop shaking hands with Jesus and throwing stones at who they perceive to be sinners like it’s their duty to this country. It’s not. As a politician it’s your job to leave your religious biases at the door and do what’s right for the people as a whole. If you can’t do that I imagine you and God aren’t on the best of terms anyway and remember this:

It doesn’t matter what faith you follow, your higher power – even if it’s science – made everything, even the people you think are misguided and wrong. It is okay to debate them, to try and understand, but if you try and demand they convert? Well, they’ve got every right to tell you, and quite plainly, to fuck off and I hope that some of them will take full use of their American liberty and do just that.

Faith may be the rock of the world, but the constitution is written on paper and everybody knows that paper beats rock.