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Lunatics Who Hear Voices and See Conspiracies

A Lutheran pastor at a parish in Newtown, CT, was asked by his Missouri Synod bishop (or whatever the Missouri Synod calls them) to apologize for taking part in a community prayer service for the families of the kids who were slaughtered there.  One of those kids was a member of Christ the King Lutheran Church.  

 The pastor apologized.  Maybe he has a family to support.  Maybe he is spineless.  Maybe his courage is on a leash.  I do not know.  I do not understand.  I do know something about the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod.  They have the courage of their arrogant convictions.     

 In Papua, New Guinea, the good citizens burned a young woman to death for being a witch.  They had beaten her mercilessly, until finally she admitted that she had caused a young boy to become sick, demonstrating that if you beat a witch long enough, she will admit that she is one, and should be stripped naked and burned on a trash pile.

 Surely you have read about the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials, a little over 300 years ago.  They had a logical system for determining whether women were witches:  They strapped them to a chair at the end of a pole, submerged them in a pond, said the Lord's Prayer, leisurely, and then brought the accused woman to the surface:  three times.  If she was dead, she had been innocent.  If she was still alive, she was a witch, and was executed.

 I try to be calm and philosophical about these things.  Life is not only a delight:  it is also dangerous.  It is dangerous to cross the street.  Cars have become therapy machines for angry people.  the goofy kid down the street may be planning to slaughter his family and a school full of six-year-olds.  A cop out in California may go on a killing spree with automatic weapons and one of those .50 caliber rifles capable of killing someone 3000 yards away.  That is almost two miles away.  

 But I really get scared when someone starts listening to voices and ghosts and gods, and decides to clean up the neighborhood by getting rid of witches and conspiracies and imaginary communists and Kenyans of immaculate conception.  

 There is no way to distinguish such god-fearing lunatics from ordinary garden-variety lunatics.  

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