Murdering of Pastors

[IShootBack]

Has anyone noticed how many Pastors are regularly murdered each month in America? I am referring to premeditated murder. The numbers are suprisingly high. What's up with that?

[flintlock]

I think there are a lot of disconnected people out there. Social ties to family or church are at a low point, and angry people see pastors as someone to lash out at. The ministers are after all a focal point in their communities just by the fact that they bring people together to worship. Some of the assailants may resent the attention the pastor gets, "why isn't anyone paying attention to me?", some have come to hate anything of a religious nature, and some undoubtedly have mental issues. Sadly, all this shows me is even more troubled times ahead.

[ampaterry]

Murder is a tragic sin, and I hate to hear about it.

Having said that, I want to address statistics and the news.

Remember a few years ago when there was a report about church burnings?
All the news venues started chasing this story, and we were treated DAILY to a list of churches that had burned THIS week!
Horror of horrors!
What was happening?
Who were these anti-Christian idiots ridding our country of churches?

So I did some investigating.
There are MILLIONS and MILLIONS of Churches in the USA.
A certain percentage of them are burned each year, just as a certain percentage of homes are burned, a certain percentage of quickie marts are burned, and a certain percentage of door-to-door salesman are cursed out.
I compared statistics - which were not REAL easy to compile.

There had been NO higher percentage of church burnings during this period of special reporting than there were the month before, the year before, etc.

Every now and then, there is a slow news day in Podunk, and bubba flashbulb writes up a big attention getting article about how many cars had flat tires in their state over the past week. Some guys at UPI come across the story and check THEIR area and find how many flat tires they find, and it is a LOT, so they put it on the news wires. Suddenly, reporters all over the country are looking for - and reporting - every flat tire they see, and the great flat-tire panic begins, with representatives from Goodyear, Goodrich, Cooper and Michelin all trying to explain that there is nothing wrong with their tires.

PLEASE don't take the humor in this post as trivializing the murder of anyone; as I said, murder is a horrid tragedy - BUT it may well be that there has been no increase at all -

Having said that, I will address the basic question of why would anyone murder a pastor.

Pastors are human, and subject to all the frailties of that.
We can fail just as anyone else can fail.
And those failures can cause us to be hated, just as anyone else may be hated.
Beyond that, Flintlock is right; there are people that TARGET pastors for special hatred for various reasons known only to themselves and to God.