How’s that for a provocative title? I did my best.
It’s a new year, a new month, a new atrocity. Yet another individual decided to take the lives of as many of his fellow men as he could, consequences be damned. Not him be damned. Because damnation is not a thing. Which I guess means the consequences won’t be damned, either.
Why could such a travesty occur? Because gun are available?
Why would such a travesty occur? Because the killer insane?
How could such a travesty occur? Because of depression? Because of psychotropic drugs?
No.
It is because he believed what he was told his whole life. Because believed what we told him.
It is because there is no meaning to his life. Because we are not bearers of the image of God. Because we are just the descendents of bacteria which crawled out of the primordial ooz. Smarter, sure, but what does that matter? God doesn’t exist. Fate doesn’t even exist. Just time and chance acting on matter. Goodness doesn’t exist. It’s just a social construct. We are here, but there is no purpose. The empty blackness of the void looms before us. We will join it someday. It will be as though we never existed. We will be only a memory of those who still crawl the earth, until they too join the void. Until they join the nothingness. Until they join the despair that is not to be despairing, but not to be.
This is what he was taught. He believed it. He internalized it.
Time and chance, acting upon matter. Some people are good looking, and rich, and have friends. Not me. Just the dirty trick of the cosmos. I will avenge myself against the universe. I will destroy. I will take happiness from others, as it was denied to me. I will make them feel my anguish. My emptiness. My dispair.
Why were mass shootings not a thing 30 years ago?
The AR-15 was invented in 1956. Why didn’t shootings start then?
What was the god of the system in 1956? In 1956, the god of the system was the echo of a Christian morality. In 1956, the memory of the Christian West was too recent. People still had Christian presuppositions in their bones. They stood only on the cusp of the void, they had not drunk it. They had not become it.
The god of the system is chaos. The god of the system is pain. The god of the system is the darkness of the void. The god of the system is me, and I am the chaos, and the pain, and the void.
Do we want to end violence, or do we want to end violence against the innocent? Hopefully the latter. Even the American Left thinks the police should have guns, that they should wield the sword on behalf of justice. Even the British Left thinks the police should have clubs, to bludgeon the wicked into submission.
Do we want to end violence, or do we want to end gun violence? If you want to end gun violence, you can probably do it by ending access to guns. But you cannot end violence. Not with laws. People will use cars. Over the past few years, that has proved more effective than anyone had previously imagined. People will use knives. Knives kill more people than guns every year. People will use bombs and aeroplanes. Those have proven effective. People will use fists. Fists cannot be taken away. At least not easily. But they might try it in Qatar.
If you want to end violence, you have to change the philosophy. You have to change the way people think about who they are, who God is, who they are in relation to other human beings. You have to change people.
The God of the System needs to be One who punishes unrighteousness. One who is great in power, slow to anger, and who will by no means clear the guilty. Because to be found guilty means there is a standard. And to have a standard means to have an authority. And the only authority who could establish such a standard must be God.
