Preaching to the choir

Church up the road has a pithy little thing on their signboard that I saw last night. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something along the lines of
Exchange Your Pieces
For the Peace of God
That’s a fine sentiment, but unfortunately the class of folks it’s directed at probably rarely darken the door of a house of worship.
Jesus said to turn the other cheek, but I doubt he meant to add “and let yourself get skewered by a Roman gladius in the process.”
The Hebrews of Moses’s and Joshua’s time were somewhat more savvy about this kind of thing — they committed deity-sanctioned genocide on Amalek simply because Amalek tailed their column in the desert and robbed, raped, pillaged and murdered the stragglers. And those Philistines, man — every time you turn around, you have to clean them out again.
Much as the churches here in town may hate it at the moment, self-defense is a basic human right. To that end, good folks like John Moses Browning (pbuh) et al. have been good enough over the years to provide us with basic tools to defend ourselves. And as Tam pointed out the other day (and I would link it if I could find it again), there were a whole bunch of jus’ us folks who had a nice little blogmeet last Sunday, wherein the ratio of attendees to concealed weapons probably approached 1:1. Yet to the best of our knowledge, there were no reports of gunfire in Broad Ripple that afternoon.
So you’ll pardon me, Reverend, but I think I’ll just keep packing, just in case some of your wayward flock continue not getting the Word.
UPDATE, 7/28: It was actually
TRADE GOD
YOUR PIECES
FOR HIS PEACE
I still don’t agree.