If you said this about any other terrorist attack people would probably punch you.
Hans Fiene, a Lutheran pastor who is also a regular contributor to the right-wing website The Federalist, has written a new column in which he explains that allowing 26 people to die at the hands of a crazed gunman at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, this weekend was actually God’s way of answering their prayers. [...]
He then explains to liberals that it was part of God’s plan that over two dozen people would get shot up while in their own house of worship. [...]
“So when a madman with a rifle sought to persecute the faithful at First Baptist Church on Sunday morning, he failed,” Fiene says. “Just like those who put Christ to death, and just like those who have brought violence to believers in every generation, this man only succeeded in being the means through which God delivered his children from this evil world into an eternity of righteousness and peace.”
And if you put it like that, well golly: mass murderers might be holier than the rest of us put together. Mass murderers are doin' God's work. We should be putting statues of serial killers in the town squares. We should be making them saints. How dare "liberals" attempt to keep good Christians from being brutally murdered by rifle-toting maniacs pissed off at their ex-wives or neighbors or country music lovers in general; how dare we thwart God's will by wanting fewer people murdered.
It turns out that the nation's latest top-ten mass murderer—for now—was in fact doing the people of Sutherland Springs more good than we know.
Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt asserted on Monday that the dozens of people killed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas had gone to the right place to be shot because they were close to Jesus at the time of their death. [...]
“Because I’m there asking for forgiveness,” she continued. “I feel very close to Christ when I’m there. So, I’m trying to look at some positives here and know that those people are with the Lord now and experiencing eternity and no more suffering, no more sadness anymore.”
This is true; after you are murdered by a gunman, you will no longer experience suffering or sadness. Again, evidence of the inherent nobility of murderers. And executing people inside a church is, apparently, doing them an extra favor, because God knows right where to find them. He doesn't have to go rummaging around in parking lots or movie theaters; nope, you're right there on heaven's front steps. How fortunate for you.
So that's where we're at now. We're no longer even entertaining the argument that there perhaps ought to be fewer mass murders by furious American gunmen toting the machinery of warfare; now we're looking at the bright side of each individual mass murder, and publicly explaining on our television channels that well at least this one was in a church. That's the best possible place to be murdered by a gunman, after all. The gunman was just “delivering” Americans to their waiting God without the muss of having them live long, full lives. We have to “put this in the context of history”: it’s not like he was Hitler.
What a novel argument for doing, once again, nothing.