Why Do People Shoot up Schools? Because They Believe the Same Thing You Do

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.

Postmodern Coffee

I worked for several years during and immediately after university at a Christian camp and conference center, whereat I performed such divers jobs as serving food, hurdling kids down zip-lines at outrageous speeds, keeping kids from shooting each other with bows and arrows, keeping kids from shooting their counselors and pastors with bows and arrows, and scrubbing dishes. Glamorous work, what?

This coffee is relatively hot.

Anyway, I was working in the kitchen one morning, at something like 5:30 A.M., when I would certainly have been dead to the world if I had my druthers (my druthers being, alas, something which is so often withheld from me). On this particular occasion, I was propping my eyelids open with toothpicks and attempting to make coffee for the marauding hoards which were about to storm the gates and demand to be fed breakfast.

We used those big, square, two-gallon coffee pots like you see at any restaurant, and campers and counselors could grab a cup and get as much coffee as they wanted (which was usually a whole heck of a lot, and this coming from me). I was brewing four pots of regular, for the normal people, and two pots of decaf for those aberrant few who always manage somehow to sneak out without their handlers. Our pots for decaf coffee were marked by orange handles, as is the custom of the civilized world, as though to communicate by that particular monochrome what Dante might have rendered more colorfully as, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” or something of the kind.

So, I dutifully got out the orange-emblazoned coffee-pots, and began brewing. I stared blearily at the coffee-pots through bloodshot eyes. Something in my brain began to whir.

I blinked a couple of times. Probably it was nothing.

I stared some more and blinked again.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my sleep-deprived mind, a cog caught hold of a gear, something turned and I suddenly realized that although I had used the decaf coffee pots, I hadn’t actually used the decaf coffee packets. I had filled the decaf pots with regular coffee.

As I stood there, delving into the recesses of my bedraggled, pre-noon mind, and searching the depths of my memory, it occurred to me that, although I had prepared the coffee for the camp dozens of times, I couldn’t for the life of me remember ever actually opening a packet of decaf coffee.

Oops.

It’s okay though, right? I mean, it’s labeled as decaf, so it must be! In fact, until I realized my mistake, I firmly believed - nay, I felt - that the coffee was decaf. This makes it so. It’s in the decaf pot. It has an orange handle. What more could anyone want? It’s all a matter of identification, and that coffee was clearly identifying as decaf. End of story. Case dismissed. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Still, somehow I couldn’t manage to shake the feeling that, insist though I might that the coffee was decaf, those campers were gonna be wired.

Maybe that’s why they’d been pulling the fire-alarm every night. Live and learn.

If only I had some kind of application for this story, wherein I would emerge from this personal tale of woe possessing some perspicacious oracle pertinent to our modern times, shining a piercing light into the cloudy murk of the current philosophy and illuminating the fundamental flaws in the way the concepts of truth and absolutes are conceived of in our own era, or some such thing.

Nope, I got nothing.

Oh well.