Red Herring

You've probably all seen it by now in some form or another.  Our President yesterday gave an emotional speech about the gun control measures he is introducing by executive order.  Over the past  year or so I have been impressed with Barack Obama, if not as a politician, as a human being.  The tears he shed yesterday seemed to me not to be a sign of weakness but a sign of the utter frustration the most powerful man in the world must feel at having to resort to these admittedly under-powered gestures in response to the absurdity of our nation's idolatry of firearms.
I don't know what the solution to our violence problem is, but I am learning to recognize idols when I see them, and Moloch be at his terrible work here.  The responses from those who generally, and sometimes with venom, oppose our current democratically elected chief executive, are mostly rhetorical and logical fallacies.  Here are a few:

1. False equivalence one: Obama is upset about the children killed at Sandy Hook, what about the children killed in drone strikes and as a result of our wars.  First, the two things are different, and should be prevented in different ways.  Second, who says he's not upset about those things? That is just not what he was talking about yesterday.
2. False equivalence two: Obama is upset about children killed at Sandy Hook, what about all the abortions?  Again, not the same thing a complicated and often heartbreaking reality of our culture, but not the same thing, not caused by the same problem, not soluble by the same sort of solution, not what was being addressed yesterday.
3. False equivalence/Red Herring: Obama wants better background checks on gun purchases but not on Syrian refugees.  The refugee application process takes nearly two years.  I would be fully in favor of making people who want to buy certain types of firearms go through the same sort of vetting.
4. Ad hominem one: Obama is a wuss for crying.  About dead children and students and people in movie theaters?  I guess I'm a wuss too, because I cry about that stuff... a lot.
5. Ad hominem two: Obama faked that display of emotion, no actually that's a thing that I saw posted, that's about where we are with the dialogue.

Are you proud of these illogical and frankly detestable arguments?  I'm not, and the fact of the matter is, I could have listed worse things if I wanted to dive deeper into the right-wing psychosis about our President.  I've talked about guns and violence and such here before, and you may have noticed that I do not think there is a magic bullet solution to this problem.  I'm not really an expert in the legal or legislative remedies to this problem, but I do know a little something about idols.  As a preacher it is one of my jobs to unmask idolatry when I find it and here is a big one for us right here, right now: we think violence solves problems, we think power makes us safe.  That is an idol, a false god, a premise that does not stand the test of empirical or spiritual evaluation.  It's certainly not our only one, but it's the one I'm talking about, so the rest will have to wait for another day.

There is a global test of our ability to transcend the tribalism and fear that looms on the horizon.  You may have missed it, what with all the stuff about cowboy terrorists and tearful gun control, but earlier this week Saudi Arabia, one our biggest buds in the Middle East, for some reason chose now to execute a Shiite Cleric by the name of Nimr Baquir al Nimr.

In case you're not down with the Islamic religious-political situation, you need to know that there are two major sects of Islam, the majority are Sunni, they trace their allegiance to following the Sunnah, the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.  You probably know our good buddies in Daesh are Sunni, as is Al Quaeda and the Taliban, but they follow a particular mutation of Sunni Islam that we call Wahabism, which emphasizes the sort of manifest destiny of Islam (their kind of Islam) to rule the world in the name of Allah.

The Shia, or Shiites, emphasize their Islamic tradition through a succession of rulers called Ayatollahs, the first of which was Ali, a cousin and son in law of Mohammed himself.  These Ayatollahs have been the source of further interpretations of the Sunnah, some of which Sunni consider to be heretical.  Of all the Middle Eastern nations Iran is the most dominantly Shia, and their influence spreads through the crescent of area to the east that terminates in Syria and Lebanon.

In Saudi Arabia the Shia are a small minority (10-15%) and as you might imagine are sometimes not tolerated well by their Sunni neighbors, particularly in cases like that of Sheikh Nimr who was speaking out against the oppression of the Shia in Saudi Arabia.

Going back to my High School Comparative World Cultures class, we Americans tend to like to harbor the fallacy of a false dilemma when it comes to Islam, we like to name "good guys" and "bad guys, and try to figure this mess out in nice neat black and white terms.  When Ayatollah Khomeni was running the Shia sect, the Shia were the "bad" guys and Saddam Hussein (Sunni) in Iraq was our boy.  It was confusing when that relationship went south, but we never did really trust Iran in the whole deal.  Recently, in response to Daesh, and in the nuclear agreement, Iran has moderated it's approach to relations with the US and the West in general.

This is good news to everyone, except the Sunni, primarily seated in the wealthy and powerful Saudi empire. Tension has been building, and one way to see the execution of a prominent Shia cleric in Saudi Arabia is as a poke in the eye to their old antagonists in Iran.

It is unlikely,  given the history between these two nations and between these two sects, that there is going to be an all out war, but Middle Eastern culture and Islamic thinking are not above some bloody proxy wars. They're also no stranger to manipulating the jingoistic character of the west.  It would not be the first time that we played attack dog for the Saudi Sheikhs.

My feeling is that the Saudis have been pretty happy to have us buying their oil and hating on Iran for the past 40 years. Terrorists and wealthy sultans alike have seen our idol and they know how to goad us into a fight, but we don't have to let them.

Here's an equivalence that I do not think is false: our military and the Glock in your nightstand. Both make you feel safer, but both are actually very dangerous, and quite vulnerable to falling into the wrong hands.  The person who buys a gun for self defense imagines that when "bad guys" attack they will be ready to spring into Chuck Norris mode and pop a cap in whatever ne'er do well has decided to invade their space.  Real life data shows that is false.  We think that we can use our highly advanced, well trained and generally just super awesome military to ride into complicated scenarios like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and regulate all the nasty bogeymen.  Real life history shows that that is false. Daesh is basically a four year old who just got a hold of the handgun, everyone now agrees that he should not have it, but there are a few people who are rather more content to sit back and let us be the ones that try to take it away from him.

Questionable logic, given how we handle our guns, sorry couldn't resist one last fallacy, they are kind of fun.