Packing Heat in Church

A Kentucky pastor is inviting his congregants to bring their guns to church on the Saturday before the Fourth of July:

"We're just going to celebrate the upcoming theme of the birth of our nation," said pastor Ken Pagano. "And we're not ashamed to say that there was a strong belief in God and firearms — without that this country wouldn't be here."

I just came across this quote in the wonderful book by Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate:

This brand of piety is horrified by the sight of the female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor. It laments the death of a fetus, but is apparently undisturbed by the burning to death of children in Iraq or Afghanistan in the name of U. S. global dominion. By and large, it worships a God fashioned blasphemously in its own image--a clean-shaven, short-haired, gun-toting, sexually obsessive God with a special regard for that ontologically privileged place of the globe just south of Canada and north of Mexico, rather than the Yahweh who is homeless, faceless, stateless, and imageless, who prods his people out of their comfortable settlement into the trackless terrors of the desert, and who brusquely informs them that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils.

But maybe he finds the smell of gun powder pleasing.