David McElroy

When I’m with a woman I love and something bad happens, my first instinct is to reach out to protect her. It’s not conscious. It’s just the way I feel. But I never feel the same instinct with a man I’m with, even if I care deeply about him.

Some people would say this is cultural, but I think it’s hardwired in some way. The average man has a strong instinct to protect the women in his life that he cares about, and my feeling is that it’s deeply embedded in us in some way. We saw three examples of it on display in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., late Thursday night.

In at least three cases, men died trying to protect the girlfriends they had with them. In a situation such as that, there’s no time for conscious thinking. It’s all about gut instinct. How many other men in the theater that night were doing the same, but didn’t happen to die? There’s no way to know, but I’d be shocked if there weren’t a lot more who were instinctively willing to die to protect women they felt responsible for.

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Do modern Christians believe Jesus meant what He said in the Gospels? Do they believe they’re obligated to follow His commands? Or has American Christianity become something that has little to do with the words that the Son of God left for us?

In the last 22 years, the number of people who say they have no religious affiliation has more than tripled in this country. In 1990, 6 percent of people answered “None” when asked their religion, but it’s now up to 19 percent, according to one new study. Another survey from earlier this year shows that roughly 78 percent of people claim to be Christians.

When I look at the state of the country (and of the world), the question I have is why so many people still profess to faith in Jesus Christ. When people say they don’t believe, I have to confess that I don’t blame them — based on the example they see from most of us who call ourselves Christians. How many of those 78 percent of Americans actually believe? And how many are just attending services because they always have? And how many of the remainder just call themselves Christians because they happened to grow up in a church and never discarded the label?

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Somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,744 people died in the United States Thursday. Because of modern media, though, the only ones who mattered were the 12 who died in Aurora, Colo., in a horrific movie theater shooting.

It’s been barely more than 24 hours since the senseless killings, but I’ve seen serious stupidity and recklessness from many people. The truth is that the killer is a blank slate to almost all of us. We don’t know his motives. Any attempts to explain why it happened are simply a matter of us imposing our biases onto something we’re ignorant about. And look at the ignorance we’ve heard so far.

ABC News reported Friday morning that the shooter might be a member of a Colorado Tea Party group. Why? Because the murderer’s name is James Holmes and there’s a Jim Holmes in Aurora who’s a member of a Tea Party group. Making that allegation with absolutely no evidence — other than similarity in names — is some of the worst journalism I’ve seen in a long time. I’d say it represents the mindset of some journalists who want to believe that Tea Party types are violent people who might erupt at any moment.

Conspiracy nutcase Alex Jones is reporting that the shooting is a staged psychological operation by the U.S. government (video) to gain support for a new UN treaty related to the sale of weapons. In the description of his Friday show, the promo says that Jones “breaks down how it will be used to push through ratification of the United Nations’ gun-grabber treaty in the Senate and also manufacture anti-Second Amendment hysteria in the corporate media.” It’s hard to take Jones seriously, but a lot of people who don’t look at his track record of failed predictions keep listening to him. (It’s not just Jones making the claim. Here’s another site that makes the claim with no rational reason.)

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