Yeah, that'll work.

Being from Bristol, they could always stomp evildoers.
/mildly obscure

Guns in England? You can't be serious.

/naive

Tonite on the 11 O'Clock news:
The Prayer Patrol was gunned down by the Hells Angels in a revenge attack. There were no survivors.

/One ticket please, aisle seat

'We have had our successes. One time I saw a man dealing blatantly, so I decided to start praying for him and be equally blatant. When I opened my eyes, all I could see were tears streaming down his face. A few days later, someone tried to shoot him in a club but the bullet missed and struck someone else. The next time I saw him he had changed his appearance, given up dealing and enrolled in college.'

So the fact that an innocent person caught a bullet intended for him made him renew his faith and walk the straight and narrow? Err....wonder what the person who got shot thinks of that?

Worked in Brighton.

GIS for "jeebus":

Gun crime doesn't worry me, even though I live only a few hundered yards from the edge of St Pauls. Its the kind of trouble that you have to be looking for (or at least too stoopid to avoid)

As for barIII being a student hang out they must be hanging out with different students to me.

Gun-related crime in Bristol has fallen by 55 per cent in the past year, bucking a national trend.

Why don't they just outlaw guns? That way there will be no gun crimes.
It's not like the NRA is over there too.

"His guilt speaks volumes: he is a drug dealer and the only thing he fears more than arrest is holy retribution."

This deserves an asinine tag. If anyone wants to fear holy retribution it's the police, and those damned prayer groups.

I'd rather have gangs of armed thugs roaming the streets.

Are you being facetious, McGovern? Guns are outlawed.

Guns are banned in the UK, therefore there are no guns.

Because guns are oulawed it makes it hell of a lot easier to find criminals. And people are less likely to randomly shoot one another.

Oh.



Nevermind!

...and people who have their homes broken into are less likely to be able to defend themselves.

Rillion: ...and people who have their homes broken into are less likely to be able to defend themselves.

People who have their homes broken into are generally not home when it happens. Therefore they won't be able to use their gun to defend themselves, but the criminals can steal it instead.

Rillion

Gun crime with burgalry is very low over here.

You own a gun and you vastly increase your chances of being shot. Everybody knows that. The last things we need are America's gun laws.

I don't want to turn the thread into a conversation about gun ownership, but I will say that when I moved here I was particularly struck by how complacent people seem to be about crime. People's bikes and cars are stolen all of the time and they don't seem to care. People get mugged on a regular basis. People break into the homes of old ladies and beat them up. Day after day, not too far away from me-- and I don't live in a bad neighborhood. One friend has had her car stolen twice. Another friend had his house broken into, and at one point was attacked on his bike.

It's sad. I'm not saying the solution in this cases is to just shoot the guy. But I am concerned that criminals don't seem to have the slightest fear whatsoever about what they're doing. They don't worry about repercussions at the hands of the cops or the people they're attacking.

Bad Religion "Come Join Us"

so you say you gotta know why the world goes 'round
and you can't find the truth in the things you've found
and you're scared shiatless 'cuz evil abounds
come and join us

well I heard you were looking for a place to fit in
full of adherent people with the same objective
a family to cling to and call brethren
come and join us

all we want to do is change your mind
all you need to do is close your eyes

so come and join us
come and join us
come and join us

don't you see the trouble that most people are in
and that they just want you for their own advantage
but I swear to you we're different from all of them
come and join us
I can tell you are lookin' for a way to live
where truth is determined by consensus
full of codified arbitrary directives
come and join us
all we want to have is your small mind
turn it into one of our own kind
you can go through life adrift and alone
desperate, desolate, on your own
but we're lookin' for a few more stalwart clones
so come and join us
come and join us
come and join us

we've got spite and dedication as a vehement brew
the world hates us, well we hate them too
but you're exempted of course if you
come and join us
independent, self-contented, revolutionary
intellectual, brave, strong and scholarly
if you're not one of them, you're us already so
come and join us

Touchyournose

Great song - but it's not just a dig at organised religion and such, ya realise?

Rillion

If criminals feared reprecussions from the gun-toting general public then they'd just carry guns themselves, and become less averse to using them. If I get my car nicked, I'd rather just claim the insurance. Not so easy with a bullet in the head.

I say again, we don't want American gun laws, thanks!

(By the way - I'm from Manchester!)

Rillion, that is a pretty accurate description of what the UK is like nowadays. Sadly, our total tool of a PM has absolutely no interest in getting serious with these scumbags. I don't think US style gun laws would really help over here though. We already have enough problems with self-proclaimed 'vigilantes' without arming them.

shutuppaul:It's targeted at any consensus reality. If we agree on something and we think that makes it true, that makes us stupid.

I am not saying you should have "American gun laws," shutuppaul (though you should be aware that gun laws in America vary wildly from state to state). I am saying that if you're going to restrict people's freedom in the name of giving them greater protection, that greater protection should be real and obvious. The is no real and obvious greater protection that citizens of Manchester receive in exchange for not being allowed to keep guns. Instead, they get restrictions on what kind of car they're allowed to have based on where they live. If you live on the wrong street and want a certain type of car, they can refuse to insure you for it which effectively means you're not allowed to have it. Property rights are apparently dictated by thieves and insurance companies, and people don't seem to care. Maybe they're just used to paying out the nose for everything they own.

One time I saw a man dealing blatantly, so I decided to start praying for him and be equally blatant. When I opened my eyes, all I could see were tears streaming down his face. A few days later, someone tried to shoot him in a club but the bullet missed and struck someone else.

Must have been one of those filthy athiests.

Tonite on the 11 O'Clock news:
The Prayer Patrol was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.

/stupid

Bristol is our sister city. Any guesses on where I am (hint: another country). First to guess correctly gets to kick me in the nads....

Some people just don't appreciate the export of American 'culture'.

Ingrates.

Why do they hate freedom?

What about the Vicious Chicken of Bristol?

ChillibowFark -

Chilliwack?

I lived in England for a year, and I was also shocked at the levels of crime. When I was there, I think some stastic came out that 2 out of every 3 Britons had been affected by violent crime. That's crazy!

I mean, always felt safe and everything, but I did get the impression that the locals thought laws were more suggestions than rules.

I had a friend that worked at a pub that kept getting robbed at "knife point." When I suggested he keep a bat behind the counter he was horrified. I guess the owner was more content with being robbed.

this is nothing new. I hear they do stuff like this in Saudi Arabia all the time.

sf:


ohhh.....nice try. Wrong side of the continent though. Hint #2: provincial capital

I'm an agnostic, and bible thumpers annoy me... But at the same time I have a certain respect for what these people are throwing themselves into. I don't necesarily agree with them, but they are putting themselves in danger to help people. Irregardless of religion, if they could get even one person to give up being a street thug and go to college, I'd say they have done some good.

2004-10-10 10:40:43 AM Darkhop
Guns in England? You can't be serious.

-----------------------------------------------

A ban on guns means no guns for law abiding citizens. Only the criminals have guns.

Remember this is Fark.

Islamic beheaders = Good

Christians = Evil

I'd like to believe otherwise in this case, but I've seen groups like that, and they are fundies of the most vicious kind, despite the friendly image. What separates a cult from a religion is that a religion does not actively seek new recruits.

Would someone explain something about these peoples mindset to me? On one hand they believe God has this huge unimaginably complex plan for the world. Where each and every person's life is a part of something greater. How can they also maintain a belief that their God will scrap the entire thing just because they ask him for a favor? Especially given the evidence that their God doesn't really mind the suffering of the innocent.

@Emerson999: There is an even more ironic contridiction, one that you usually learn in basic philosophy:

1) Assume, as many religions do, that God is all-knowing.
2) Assume, as many religions do, that God is just.
3) Assume, as many religions do, that God punishes the wicked.
4) Now you arrive at a contridiction. If God is all-knowing, then he must know whether you will be saved or punished, and you cannot possibly have any choice in the matter. Yet, if it ends up that God punishes you for being wicked, even though you could not be otherwise, he cannot possibly be just!

There are other arguments along these lines. Consider:

1) Assume, as most religions do, that God is perfect.
2) Assume, as many religions do, that God desires for man to be virtuous.
3) Now you arrive at a contridiction. Desires are the result of lacking, and God cannot possibly lack anything, because he is perfect and thus complete. Indeed, God must be eternally unchanging, because if he is perfect, any change would move him away from perfection. He, therefore, cannot take any action, or have any thoughts at all.

With regards to my previous post, it should not be construed as saying that God is impossible. It merely states that it is a logical impossibility for God to be both supreme, and at the same time have the qualities ascribed to him by the Bible, Koran, Torah, etc. You can have a supreme, but inanimate God (like the Deists), or you can have an imperfect, but animate God (like the Greeks/Romans). Indeed, in its original formulation, the Judeo-Christian God was not an all-powerful all-knowing God.

BearToy, I agree with Penn and Teller about how nothing will convert a person to atheism faster than reading the Bible.

@Cornelius Flockhart: It really depends on the people in question. My experience has ranged from them being honestly good and decent people, concerned more with peoples' welfare than spreading their religion, to being mindless evangelicials.

About a month ago, I was walking near a mall in Atlanta, and a trio of people came up to me. They told me that they were taking a survey about religion in the city. I thought, okay, athiests, agnostics, etc, are usually underrepresented in these surveys (because they usually want to avoid the confrontation). So I decided to participate.

The questions that they asked were completely and utterly skewed towards the Judeo-Christian perspective. As a deist myself, there was no way for me to answer the questions without coming off as an athiest. At one point, they asked "If you died today, and God asked you at the gate of heaven why he should let you in, what would you say?" I thought to myself: "God is an abstract and inanimate concept. God can't talk!" At the end, they told me "after listening to your answers, we have some good news to share with you!" I realized at that point that it wasn't actually a survey, but thinly-disguised proselytization! What a cheap and disgusting tactic!

Make up your minds, people--is this a Jesus-bashing thread, or a gun-control thread? One flame war at a time, please.

heliosc

To be fair, your conceptualization of the "contradictions" of God are sophomoric, and even a first year apologist could counter them. Observe:

1) Assume, as many religions do, that God is all-knowing.
2) Assume, as many religions do, that God is just.
3) Assume, as many religions do, that God punishes the wicked.
4) Now you arrive at a contridiction. If God is all-knowing, then he must know whether you will be saved or punished, and you cannot possibly have any choice in the matter. Yet, if it ends up that God punishes you for being wicked, even though you could not be otherwise, he cannot possibly be just!

God's omniscience is best understood as knowing all things that can be known. What I will do in the future, given a robust sense of free will, is unknowable by any creature. Therefore, my punishment/salvation is in my own hands, and there's no contradiction with saying God's omniscient and doesn't know every fact about the future.

Another attempted theodicy is to make God atemporal, a la Aquinas et al., but I think that fails. The argument, however, gets a little long, so I'll spare the details. You can email me (in profile) if you want to discuss it further.

1) Assume, as most religions do, that God is perfect.
2) Assume, as many religions do, that God desires for man to be virtuous.
3) Now you arrive at a contridiction. Desires are the result of lacking, and God cannot possibly lack anything, because he is perfect and thus complete. Indeed, God must be eternally unchanging, because if he is perfect, any change would move him away from perfection. He, therefore, cannot take any action, or have any thoughts at all.

This is predicated on a questionable assumption, i.e. that God's perfection makes him complete in the sense that He cannot desire.

1) Saying God can't have desires is odd. Why would He have made the universe if not out of some desire to create, or maybe he just desired entertainment?

2) There's no independent reason to believe that perfection eliminates all desire. Buddha is perfect, but that doesn't mean he doesn't desire all creatures to attain enlightenment. Indeed, it's a cornerstone of his perfection (perfect compassion).

Anywho, I think my point is clear. If we're going to attack Christianity, let's at least show enough respect to be rigorous about it.