Christmas Eve Santa Who Committed Mass Carnage Was a Church Usher

The night that Bruce Pardo killed 9 people he was signed up to usher at his church. 

An ABC report  "Suspected 'Santa' Shooter Planned Escape to Canada " notes that

The night of the attack, Pardo had been scheduled to serve as an usher for the midnight mass at the Holy Redeemer Church on Christmas.

and has a good deal of information on the man, the incident, and the family problems (mostly of Mr. Pardo's own making).

Luckily, when a Christian kills, everyone who isn't one doesn't start looking at all Christians and deciding we're all killers, but who knows after this?

Will people see Catholics as similar to Mr. Pardo,  who could go off at any minute and start massacring people.

Or, gulp, will those who volunteer to usher at church services become the newest boogie monsters of the world?

 Just to put a brake on such a develpement, how about we Christians, all of us, call a truce on labeling other groups over the deeds of a few people.

Gays do not bring child molestation to neighborhoods.  That lie often passed by Christian groups, has been disproven many times over.   Just because a person is standing in the pulpit repeating something he heard by someone in a seminar, doesn't make it true.

Jesus said that people are like sheep.  I don't think he was insulting us.  People do rely on others to help them understand how the world works, and how the Lord works.

Lately though the Church is being used as a political football by those who can make millions, if they can prove they can subvert the truth as it's presented to the people of the Bible so that the parishioners start voting against their own interests and even against the love that the Bible would have us show.  Once they prove they can twist even our religious lives and beliefs, they can sell that power to those with huge amounts of money.

For example:

The Bible says that the most important thing to do is to love.

But some have convinced large numbers of Christians that the most important thing to do is to stop Gays and Lesbians that want a long term deeply committed relationship from marrying.  These people claim that marriage has always been about one man and one woman for 5000 years, ignoring the fact that actually it was mostly about one man and as many women as he could get for most of that time.

In one passage in the new testament the Bible describes a good Christian leader saying clearly that the leader should be a man of one wife only.

There are those who say that multiple concurrent wife marriages among the faithful stopped at the New Testament.  Well that begs the question of why then the writer had to say that a good Christian leader needed to constrain himself to one wife.  There are lots of Christian leaders out there who have been married more than once, in a type of serial monogamy our society allows through divorce.  Apparently it doesn't mean that a leader couldn't be divorced and remarried.  So it seems it was necessary to make a demand of the early church that they make sure their leaders weren't polygamous.  That would be necessary only if polygamy was practiced in the early church, as it was in the surrounding society of the time.

But one talking points creator made up a little story about 5000 years of 1 man and 1 woman, and the church just kept passing it around because someone in church said it. 

And how about our characterization of Muslims?

If a person is a devout follower of Islam they are tagged by neoconservatives, often Christians too, as Islamists and are blamed for supporting terrorists, but the real problem is mostly that they don't support American style capitalism throughout the world. 

Very few Muslims are terrorist material and most of those that actually take action do so because of our actions and our system of extreme interrogations and punishment.

What neocons are really trying to produce in the Middle East is 'shopping Muslims'.  While some lucky entrepreneurial nation grabs up the natural resources of weak Muslim nations, they turn the lucky smucks whom they've stolen from into willing shoppers for whatever junk we want to sell them.  Anyway, that was the purpose behind the Bush Doctrine, and though that's in disrepute now, I'm guessing that it will be revived in the years to come by true believers under many different guises.

Because they want 'shopping Muslims' they don't like devout Muslims who tend to not consume less and be less willing to give up natural resources.

As Christians though, we need to show God's love by not being fooled by the names and characterizations of other groups.

Please, because I often usher at our church.  I wouldn't want to be tarred with Bruce Pardo's brush and have men women and children scared to be around me.  Neither would I like preemptive strikes launched at me because some nutcase full of self pity for the mess he himself created decided to make his ex and her inlaws pay for his problems.

Okay? So lets call it quits on tagging groups with characteristics based on a small subgroup, or even on lies that spread like wind driven fire.

Church ushers around the world are begging you. 

tags: christians  muslims  bush doctrine  bruce pardochurch usher  

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