Sam Harris speaks with Bart D. Ehrman about the prophecies contained in the book of Revelation. They discuss his latest book, Armageddon, and widespread Christian beliefs about the coming end of the world.
Bart D. Ehrman is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity and a Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of six New York Times bestsellers, he has written or edited more than thirty books, including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, The Triumph of Christianity, and Heaven and Hell. Ehrman has also created nine popular audio and video courses for The Great Courses. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages, with over two million copies and courses sold. Website: https://ehrmanblog.org/Twitter: @BartEhrman
The Nashville school had plenty of prayers. But that’s no match for a killer armed with assault weapons.
In what has become an all too familiar story, all because Republican officials continue prioritizing guns over humans, another six people are dead after a mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. Three students (all aged nine) and three staffers died because of a shooter armed with “two assault-style weapons and a handgun.”
The entrance to The Covenant School (screenshot via Google Maps)
As of this writing, the motive of the shooter is unknown, so I won’t waste time speculating on that.
But can we at least put to rest the suggestion, that never made any sense, that more prayer is the solution to our gun epidemic?
I’m not talking about the trite, lazy way many politicians offer “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of mass murders, as if that’ll deflect from their own refusal to take action to prevent gun violence. Many people say it as a condolence because they just can’t think of anything else to say. It’s not going away anytime soon.
What can change is prayer as a literal answer to mass shootings.
This act of violence occurred at a private Christian school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America and run as a ministry of the Covenant Presbyterian Church. As far as religious denominations go, very few are more conservative than this one, especially on “culture war” issues. I say that only to point out how this was not a school lacking in prayer. They prayed all the time. Yesterday’s school day even began with a chapel service.
But for years now, one of the many explanations put forth by Republicans who are allergic to gun safety measures is that public schools don’t have forced Christian prayers. If they had prayers, the rhetoric goes, they wouldn’t have these shootings.
Last year, televangelist Kenneth Copeland said all school shootings are the result of the 1963 Supreme Court decision that removed mandatory Christian prayer from public schools, implying we needed to bring it back.
… If we heard more prayers from leaders of this country instead of taking God’s name in vain, we wouldn’t have the mass killings like we didn’t have before prayer was eliminated from school.
A few years ago, immediately after mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said “the lack of thought and prayers is probably the single biggest factor” when it came to gun violence. (Yesterday, proving irony is dead, he lamented how “some will make this a political issue before the names of the victims or the shooter or a motive is even known.”)
The Covenant School prayed and prayed often. Unfortunately (and predictably), prayers are no match for a killer armed with assault weapons.
Keep in mind that the people calling for more prayer never say that when they actually want something to change. When it comes to elections, Republicans never ask Christians to pray them into office. When it comes to abortion, Republicans never ask Christians to pray that people won’t have them. They know actions speak louder than words. They know passing bills or installing like-minded judges will actually get stuff done.
When it comes to guns, they call for more prayer—or mandatory prayer—because eventheyknow how useless it will be.
It won’t faze them that this shooting happened at a Christian school because they say the same prepared prayer line when shootings occur in churches, synagogues, and mosques.
We don’t need forced prayer in schools now because the gun crisis isn’t the result of forced prayers being removed from schools back then. There was no spike in school shootings in the decades following those Supreme Court decisions upholding religious neutrality in schools. Not until Columbine, really, did we start to see these horrific mass shootings by people who just wanted to unleash their rage and had access to weapons to make it happen.
A lack of prayer cannot be blamed for a uniquely American problem. Other nations don’t have forced Christianity in school. They also struggle with mental illness. They play video games. Yet mass shootings in those countries are incredibly rare. The common denominator in all the massacres we see in our country are the weapons. (Often, the same kind.)
Want to reduce mass shootings? Put more obstacles in the way for gun owners. Especially people who want weapons that can kill several people in seconds. Raise the legal age to own one. Make owners go through a certain amount of training. Register the weapons the way we register cars.
There are many more possible answers to the problem, but conservatives are hell-bent on fighting every single one of them because they love semi-automatic weapons more than children. Dead kids are a price Republicans will gladly pay to continue their violent hobbies. The NRA always takes precedence over the PTA.
We don’t need more guns in the hands of teachers—something that has routinely been proposed by the same people who don’t trust teachers to pick out books. We don’t need the death penalty for shooters as Republican Senator Rick Scottidiotically proposed (despite the Covenant shooter getting gunned down by police, putting a wrench in that plan anyway). We definitely don’t need congress members like the Republican representing Nashville, Rep.Andy Ogles, fetishizing guns like they’re a personality quirk and fun for children.
And now, since it appears that the shooter was a transgender former student, you can bet conservatives will cite that as the sole cause. Anything to get attention off their weapons of choice. (Even if it turns out this was some personal vendetta against the Christian school, the murders could not have occurred this easily or quickly without the shooter’s ability to acquire assault weapons.)
Republican lawmakers in Tennessee certainly don’t care. They recently passed a law banning drag shows in the name of protecting kids, but you can bet they’ll do absolutely nothing to protect kids from actual threats to their safety. In fact, it’s the opposite. Those lawmakers have proposed a bill to lower the age to legally carry a handgun in public from 21 to 18.
Prayers aren’t going to fix our problem. They never did.
And any God who lets six people get murdered because not enough people were stroking His Holy Ego isn’t a God worth worshipping anyway.
“We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary. How much trust and love we wrest from life and lavish upon life is largely a matter of how well we have befriended our existential loneliness — a fundamental fact of every human existence that coexists with our delicate interconnectedness, each a parallel dimension of our lived reality, each pulsating beneath our days.
Sunlit Solitude by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
She writes:
When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening.
In Buddhism, all suffering is a form of resistance to reality, a form of attachment to desires and ideas about how the world should be. By befriending our loneliness, we begin to meet reality on its own terms and to find contentment with the as-is nature of life, complete with all of its uncertainty. Chödrön writes:
We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions — all our ideas about how things are — keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way… We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.
So faced, loneliness becomes a kind of mirror — one into which we must look with maximum compassion, one that beams back to us our greatest strength:
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.
A train with 350 passengers aboard collided with a freight train. Two of the carriages “basically don’t exist anymore,” a regional governor said.
Death Toll Climbs After Trains Collide in GreeceA train with about 350 passengers collided with a freight train near the city of Larissa in northern Greece.CreditCredit…Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times
At least 36 people were killed when a passenger train and a freight train collided in northern Greece, with an impact so intense that cranes were being used to remove wreckage in the search for survivors, a Greek fire service official said on Wednesday.
The cause of the crash, which happened just before midnight on Tuesday near the small town of Tempe, was not immediately clear. About 350 passengers were on the train as it traveled north from Athens to Thessaloniki, according to Hellenic Train, which operated the route.
TempeSite wheretrains collidedRoute of thepassenger trainheading towardThessalonikiTempeThessalonikiAthensGREECEALBANIALarissa
Eighty-five people were taken to hospitals with injuries, and 66 were admitted, the Greek fire service said in a statement. With the recovery operation still underway, there were fears that the death toll would rise.
“Windows were shattering and people were screaming,” a young man, who was not identified, told a television crew after surviving the crash. “There was panic in the carriage. A huge chunk of metal from the other train had come through one of the windows.”
It was the worst rail disaster in Greek history, according to reports in Greek media. The deadliest crash in recent memory came in 1968, when a collision involving two passenger trains near Corinth, about 40 miles west of Athens, left 34 people dead.
Several carriages derailed upon impact, and at least three caught fire. A spokeswoman for the Greek police, Constantina Dimoglidou, said the process of identifying the dead had begun at a hospital in the city of Larissa, about 20 miles south of Tempe, asking relatives of passengers to call a hotline for information.
Most of the victims were young, the Greek health minister, Thanos Plevris, told reporters outside the hospital. “It is a terrible process for parents and relatives,” he said.
Asked by reporters about the cause of the crash, Mr. Plevris said that it was not the right time to focus on the circumstances of the disaster.
“The priority now is to nurse the injured and support the families who have lost their loved ones. Everything else we will deal with afterward,” he said.
On Greek television, experts aired their concerns about rail safety in the country, claiming that there were problems that had not been addressed for decades, though it was not clear what led to the crash.
Destroyed carriages at the site of the train collision in northern Greece on Wednesday. The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.Credit…Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times
“Nothing works,” Kostas Genidounias, president of the association of Greek train drivers, told state television.
“Everything is done manually,” he said, adding that neither the signals nor the traffic control system worked. “If they had been working, the drivers would have seen the red light and the trains would have stopped 500 meters away from each other,” he added, noting that he and colleagues had frequently reported malfunctioning systems recently.
“We are constantly complaining about it,” he said.
Greece had already stood out in Europe for the lack of safety on its rail network. From 2018 to 2020, Greece had the highest railway fatality rate among 28 European countries per million train kilometers, according to a 2022 report by the European Union Agency for Railways. In 2019, the European Data Journalism Network, a group of media organizations, reported that from 2010 to 2018, 137 people died and 97 were seriously injured in railway accidents in Greece, with an average of more than 15 deaths and 11 serious injuries per year. The media network attributed the problems to unsafe level crossings, poor infrastructure and traffic management systems, and understaffed companies.
Vasileios Vathrakoyiannis, a spokesman for the fire service, said at a televised briefing that the rescue operation was “currently concentrated on the two first carriages of the passenger train, which have overturned.” He said four cranes were being used.
Television footage showed red cranes looming over the twisted, charred wreckage, as police and rescue workers in fluorescent jackets surveyed the scene.
“This is a terrible night,” Kostas Agorastos, governor of the Thessaly region, said on television. He said that two of the carriages “basically don’t exist anymore. Because of the strength of the impact they were thrown into the air.”
The army was assisting with the rescue operation, and the Greek minister for civil protection, Christos Stylianides, was coordinating the state’s response, while Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was on his way to the scene.
Vassilis Polyzos, a local resident, told The Associated Press, “There were many big pieces of steel,” adding, “The trains were completely destroyed, both passenger and freight trains.”
Mr. Polyzos said that he had seen people who appeared to be dazed and disoriented trying to flee from the trains as he arrived on the scene.
“People, naturally, were scared — very scared,” he said. “They were looking around, searching; they didn’t know where they were.”
Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times. @NikiKitsantonis
The Pencil-Driven Life 