The internet and everywhere is going crazy in light of the horrible tragedy in Orlando this morning. People are angry, and sad, and depressed and horrified. I’m no different. I feel this deep, empty hollowness in the pit of my stomach.

My initial reaction was to want to write something about how deeply I despise religion, because that’s one of the lenses through which I view the world. I despise religion for precisely this reason, for the power and weight it gives humans to carry out despicable acts. I’m going to talk about despising religion in this post, but I want to talk more about ideologies.

Given its timing, this event will be politicized. That’s a bad thing. It’s not bad to want change, wanting change is a good thing. When someone calls 911, announces his allegiance with the Islamic State, walks into a gay nightclub and murders 50 people, wounding even more, we should want change. Civilization should be horrified and repulsed by such barbaric acts, and we should want to understand the root cause of those acts and to fix them.

But it’s a bad thing to try and distill someone down to a single talking point. That’s human nature. We’re driven by emotions. We like to label something and put it in a neat box and say “See, that’s the problem right there.”

Going forward, Trump will use this to talk about the dangers of Muslim immigrants.

Going forward, Clinton will use this to talk about the dangers of access to guns.

Most likely, both will talk about access to mental health, because that’s the safest one. Nobody likes to think that someone who would murder 50 people is a mentally healthy individual.

And probably, everyone who is talking about it will have some valid points, but that won’t matter in the general hubbub of all the talking heads trying to shout the loudest, and those who oppose them shouting back, even louder, because that’s what people do when their ideologies are attacked, because it feels like an attack on them as a person. And so nothing will happen, and eventually we’ll move on, until it happens again.

I think that’s where the problem lies, or at least part of the problem. We cannot stand it when people attack our ideologies. And ideologies SHOULD be attacked. There’s no idea or principle in the world that should NOT be roundly attacked and discussed and debated.

There’s a famous quote from Steven Weinberg floating around that I’ve already seen today. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it’s interesting:

“With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

As I said, I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusion. There’s a lot of ways you can get good people to do evil things. Misinformation is one of them. The best way, of course, is misinformation from religion.

I’m not religious because I don’t believe it’s true because I don’t think it’s met its burden of proof.

I hate religion because of the effect that it has upon the world and what it makes people do.

Religions are built upon in infallibility of their texts and the omnipotent god who created or inspired them. And once you believe that you’ve tapped into the inerrant Word of God, and that Word tells you to commit some atrocity, why wouldn’t you?

Religious texts tell people to do horrible things.

The Bible says that homosexuals are an abomination, that you should murder witches, it endorses slavery and genocide and more.

The Qu’ran says to murder non-Muslims, that you can rape prisoners of war, that men can beat their wives, and more.

There is so much evil in these books that there’s an entire field of apologetics to rationalize and explain these things away. I’ve been there. I was a Christian for the majority of my life, I’ve had arguments with atheists where I was the one defending the Bible.

Most Muslims don’t believe in the horrible stuff in the Qu’ran. Most Christians don’t believe in the horrible stuff in the Bible. But they do believe in some of it. That’s why gay marriage wasn’t legalized in the US until LAST YEAR. That’s why gay people are being thrown off roofs to their deaths in Syria.

Some people believe in all the horrible stuff in their holy books, and they’ll follow it – sometimes because they have an agenda, sometimes because they simply believe it’s the right thing.

Convince someone that what they are doing is right, and good, and sanctioned by god, and they’ll do all sorts of things.

They’ll use it to argue for racial segregation.
They’ll use it to ostracize their own children for being gay.
They’ll use it to murder 50 people in a gay night club.
They’ll use it to fly airplanes into buildings.

There may be another way to defeat these poisonous ideas. I’m open to anything that will. But in my mind, there’s no better way than to systematically destroy the idea of the infallibility of these holy books.

Texts written 2,000 years ago do not represent the pinnacle of human understanding, and as long as humans operate under the assumption that something is necessarily true simply because a certain person (or book) said it (or claimed to say it), it will be used for evil.

This is a long post and it’s been mostly about religion, so I’ll remark just briefly on gun violence.

I’ve been a staunch Second Amendment advocate for my entire life. I own multiple firearms, including a high-capacity AR-15 of the type that was used in the Orlando shootings. I’m a safe, responsible gun owner and enthusiast.

And it’s getting really, really hard for me to rationalize that.

Guns don’t kill people. But boy, do they sure make it easier to kill people.

I have no idea whether banning guns or certain types of guns will stop the mass shootings in America. There’s a lot of compelling arguments on either side of the debate. But I do think we need to attack the ideology of gun ownership. It should not be an unassailable position. There are probably things that we can do to make our country safer and make it more difficult for murderers to murder 50 people.

I can’t go out tomorrow and purchase a fully automatic rifle or a grenade launcher. I’m okay with that. I don’t feel like my rights are being trampled by those facts. We have existing limits on the weapons we can own. Should we have more limits? Maybe.

We can’t be afraid of having a conversation about and taking a long hard look at some of our most staunchly held beliefs. We can’t be afraid to scrutinize any idea. Bad ideas, when brought to the light, are exposed and then discarded. When you examine a good idea, it only becomes better.