[Annoyed Grunt]

Remember Cassie Bernall? Supposedly, she told the armed barbarians of the Columbine school massacre that she believed in God, so they killed her. Except it probably didn’t happen that way.

Now, apparently, a similar story is rising from the ashes of the similar slaughter at Red Lake High School. According to the brother of one of the survivors, who “says his brother said” so, the gun-toting Jeff Weise was also interrogating his potential victims and killing only theists. (From here on out, I’ll give them the benefit of doubt and assume that the secondhand claim is true.)

Already, I can hear the same old chorus: “Look, this is what atheism does; it turns children into vicious killers. Atheism is evil. See?”

No, this is not what atheism does.

1. Not believing in God does not make you a murderer. Not believing in God does not even remove the “wrongness” of killing other people. Only the theist or former who believes that morality can only come from God or from belief in God will suggest that atheism equals people like Jeff Weise or his hero Adolph Hitler. But the belief that morality requires theism has long been rejected by theists and atheists alike. Was Weise an atheist? Perhaps. But the argument only makes sense if Weise also believed that atheism erases moral rules. Strangely, the only way for an atheist to believe such a thing is to interpret his or her atheism through the theological lens of people who are not atheists, which would be like Democrats letting Republicans tell them what they think and why they think it.
2. Murdering people because they do believe in God does not make you an atheist. It makes you a murderer who targets people who believe in God. It does not rule out the possibility that you believe in God, or that you believe in a different God than the one claimed by your victims. I once knew a Christian who claimed that he refused to carry a weapon while he was a medic in the Vietnam war because he did not want to kill anyone without knowing “where they were going” (i.e., without knowing if they believed as he did). This strange rationale (he could have simply said that killing is always wrong, battlefield or otherwise) put him in the odd position of having no reason not to kill other Christians on the battlefield, so long as he knew they were Christians. There is no reason to think that a person who only kills people in a particular category is not himself a member of that category, unless he specifically says so. Even then, there is no reason to assume that his alternative categorization offers an internal reason for killing people of the other category. That is, if a person from category A is killing only people from category B, there is no reason to assume that category A includes a prescription for killing people from category B and hence commands or authorizes a person from category A to do so.

But the real trouble will come when someone suggests that I am being hypocritical for supposing that the negative actions of atheists do not reflect negatively on Atheism, while insisting that the negative actions of Christians do reflect negatively on Christianity. Here is where the profound differences between belief and unbelief are instructive:

Christianity comes with an elaborate, built-in structure of beliefs and behavioral codes; atheism comes with nothing.

Christianity comes with a God who has repeatedly murdered great masses of human beings for their alleged unrighteousness, including unbelief, and who promises that only believers will receive his eternal rewards, leaving the rest of us to unspeakable punishment; atheism comes only with a rejection of that God.

Christianity comes with an act of murderous brutality at its very core (thanks for reminding us, Mel) and an obsession with blood and bloody imagery; atheism comes with a rejection of the devotional value of blood and a rejection of the divine murder.

The history of Christianity is steeped in death and violence and blood and martyrdom and murder at a level that can only be compared to our modern radical Islamic factions, beginning with the Christian God himself. Most Christians today behave far better than their own God, and one is left to wonder why they insist that they have no justification to behave as He often has. Judging by their God and the history of their religion, Christianity improves humans no more than atheism makes them worse. People behave in ways that are easy, socially helpful, or personally expedient, at all different levels of rationalization, regardless of their myths or beliefs. But Christianity, unfortunately, has plenty within it to justify atrocious behavior. That’s what you get when you build a cathedral of faith around a petty little chest-pounding tribal warrior deity.

Speaking of which, one must wonder why Jeff Weise turned to the modern mythology of Nazism instead of embracing the gods of his ancestors, as politically correct Native Americans are supposed to do, and why, if the allegation of this survivor and his brother is true, he failed to notice that the original Nazis had no such disdain for theism. Unless this survivor and his brother are building a martyrdom hoax to give their massacre of sheen of meaning.

Extra points to whoever knows the obscure pop culture reference in the title of this post.

Easter Special

Yes, I have been a bad blogger lately, writing almost nothing here. (Instead, I’ve been commenting on other blogs, mostly Ales Rarus, where I wrote the bit I’ll share with you in a moment.) Unfortunately, I can offer no good “real world” excuse for my lack of participation on my own blog, since I spent most of the week sitting at home and reading books. (Among them, I highly recommend Doubt: A History, mentioned in my last post.)

At any rate, since it’s still Easter for another 3 hours and 10 minutes or so, and the following is vaguely relevant, here’s the aforementioned bit from the comment section over at Funky Dung. The comment to which I was responding came from someone called DLW. (Edits added later for clarity are in brackets.)

DLW: “It is not God’s fault that humankind rebelled so thoroughly from God’s standard.”

theomorph, in a fit of something or other: No, but it is certainly God’s fault for setting the standard and the penalty. The standard being, “Behave as I tell you to,” the penalty being, “or else I kill you.”

God actively and deliberately killed almost every living thing on the planet, according to the story [of Noah]. He makes Hitler look like a pansy.

[Originally,] God created everyone, then said he loved them, then told them how they had to behave (with the empty gesture of “free will” thrown in), and then when they failed to live up to his standard, he made them mortal (i.e., “the Fall”). Now they had to die, instead of living long, luxurious lives in God’s backyard, the “Garden of Eden.”

But even mortality didn’t scare them away from misbehavior. So this time he killed almost all of them, as I said, actively and deliberately, and mercilessly. He did the same thing again, on a much smaller scale, at Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s quite clear that God doesn’t give a rat’s behind (as Funky has taken to saying) who is on the earth, so long as whoever it is, they’re doing what he wants them to do. If everybody on earth is misbehaving, God has no problem with killing them all and trying to replace them with people who will behave as he wants. One can be glad, at least, that after the flood God learned his lesson and realized that this technique won’t work, because people are always going to misbehave.

Of course, his next big scheme was hardly any more praiseworthy. He couldn’t reform humanity by killing us all, so he got himself killed in a bizarre bid for our attention, along with a new and unimproved ultimatum. This time, you have to recognize and validate, by your “faith,” the Divine Suicide, or else, well, you’re already gonna die, so this time, if you don’t play along, then after you die, you’re gonna be tortured by fire (because even though God has promised not to destroy us with water, he still has fire at his disposal), or some metaphorical equivalent, depending on your interpretation. Either way, God has a (metaphorical) gun to our heads, and is not a nice guy.

Oh, sure, there’s salvation and there’s mercy, but only if you play along. Worship this guy who created us and now holds us hostage with his omnipotence. What if I don’t want to play along? What if, as I’m explicating now, I think the whole thing is disgusting and manipulative? It’s like forced Stockholm syndrome. It’s especially strange, too, since God is supposed to be perfect, but he somehow finds a way in his perfection to still have a persistent need and desire for humans to play along with his deadly game.

It was not a brilliant move on God’s part to give us the ability to think for ourselves, but still require us to reach a particular conclusion, a conclusion which, strangely enough, the vast majority of humans have not managed to reach on their own. Are we free but just too stupid to be right? Or is God an inept, murderous sociopath with borderline personality disorder?

The Scale of Doubt Quiz

This comes from Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book Doubt: A History, pages x and xi in the paperback edition. Ms. Hecht is a historian and a poet (and, in my opinion, pretty good lookin‘). This short quiz is “intended both to vitalize the issues by pulling them apart a bit and to help situate some readers among their peers.” Acceptable answers are Yes, No, or Not Sure. Here are mine:

1. Do you believe that a particular religious tradition holds accurate knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality and the purpose of human life?

That’s easy. No.

2. Do you believe that some thinking being consciously made the universe?

This one is a little more tricky. Is it possible that some thinking being consciously made the universe? Yes. Do I believe that hypothesis? No. Does that amount to a “Not Sure”? Philosophically, I am a “Not Sure” all the way, but functionally I am a through-and-through “No.”

3. Is there an identifiable force coursing through the universe, holding it together, or uniting all life-forms?

I’ve never seen any mystical energy force that controls my destiny, so my answer must be No. (However, should any “identifiable force” be out there and paying attention, I would appreciate a cushy job that pays me well enough to live and gives me plenty of time to read, write, and think about such possibilities. Also, an official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.)

4. Could prayer be in any way effective, that is, do you believe that such a being or force (as posited above) could ever be responsive to your thoughts or words?

That’s tricky wording. Could it be effective? I suppose so. Is it? No. But, should any “being or force” happen across the requests posited above, experimental data may be provided that induce me to change my answer. In all seriousness, like everyone else I would love to be able to influence people, events, and the physical world by simply thinking thoughts or expressing my goals or sentiments into thin air. However, I have never seen consistent enough success at such attempts to raise my experience out of the sea of statistical noise, nor have any scientific investigations been able to discover evidence of prayer in action or a mechanism by which it might work.

5. Do you believe this being or force can think or speak?

Here again my philosophical and functional positions diverge. Does this hypothetical being or force think or speak? No. Could it have the ability to think or speak, but refuse to reveal its thoughts or words to humans? Yes.

6. Do you believe this being has a memory or can make plans?

No. However, see my answer to number 5 for nuance.

7. Does this force sometimes take a human form?

Since I answered “No” to number 3, I suppose that honesty and consistency compel me to answer No to this question, as well. But should there exist an “identifiable force” that cannot think or speak, nor have a memory or make plans, yet somehow unite all living things, perhaps understood to us only as a species of organization that we recognize as “life,” I suppose I would have no choice but to give a “Yes” answer. Does that amount to a “Not Sure”? Considering what I suspect to be the intent of the question, though–Are some individuals more divine than others?–my answer is a resounding No.

8. Do you believe that the thinking part or animating force of a human being continues to exist after the body has died?

No. If chemicals can disrupt the thinking and animating force of a human being while he or she is still alive, I fail to see how the inevitable physical entropy that will accompany death can have any other effect than complete and utter destruction of this “thinking part or animating force.”

9. Do you believe that any part of a human being survives death, elsewhere or here on earth?

Yes. All of the atoms and molecules that form our bodies will disperse and be recycled.

10. Do you believe that feelings about things should be admitted as evidence in establishing reality?

I’m not sure I understand the question. Can people have feelings about things that are not real? Perhaps. I can imagine future scenarios for my life and then have feelings about them, but they are still not real. Does my having feelings about them make them real? No. So I suppose my answer must be No, though I am not sure I have correctly understood the question.

11. Do you believe that love and inner feelings of morality suggest that there is a world beyond that of biology, social patterns, and accident–i.e., a realm of higher meaning?

No. Exactly the opposite. My experiences with “love and inner feelings of morality” suggest that “biology, social patterns, and accident” are the only forces in our lives.

12. Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?

Tricky wording, but I will have to say Yes, I think the world is not completely knowable by science. While I think science has the capability of making vastly more sense of the world than unsystematic individual impressions do, I also suspect that the human mind is simply not capable of understanding the universe completely. To do so would be a little like the old story of the map so large that it covered all the land. Knowing the universe completely would mean being the universe and being completely conscious of oneself, or transcending the universe, and human beings, even with the aid of science, are neither.

13. If someone were to say, “The universe is nothing but an accidental pile of stuff, jostling around with no rhyme nor reason, and all life on earth is but a tiny, utterly inconsequential speck of nothing, in a corner of space, existing in the blink of an eye never to be judged, noticed, or remembered,” would you say, “Now that’s going a bit far, that’s a bit wrong headed”?

I have read Douglas Adams and enjoyed what he wrote, which was not too far removed from this hypothetical hypothesis. How could I answer anything but No?

Now, according to Ms. Hecht,

If you answered No to all these questions, you’re a hard-core atheist and of a certain variety: a rationalist materialist. If you said No to the first seven, but then had a few Yes answers, you’re still an atheist, but you may have what I will call a pious relationship to the universe. If your answers to the first seven questions contained at least two Not Sure answers, you’re an agnostic. If you answered Yes to some of the questions, you might still be an atheist or an agnostic, though not of the materialist variety. If you answered Yes to nine or more, you are a believer.

Apparently, I am what she would call a “hard-core atheist” of the “rationalist materialist” variety, though my reservations and nuances take me in the agnostic direction. But, as I have said for years, I think all honest people, believers or unbelievers, are agnostic. No person can claim to know with certainty anything which is beyond the ability of humans to establish with evidence or independent, unbiased corroboration. Everything else is subjective, which does not necessarily make it less apparently “real” to those who believe it, but cannot in any way lend to its establishment as objective reality for all people, regardless of their subjective views and wishes.

Now, I am curious how some of you others would answer these questions.

Defective People

Again, some high school boy (yes, they seem always to be boys) has taken firearms to school, created a tragedy for his community, and further bewildered the nation.

One day, if civilization survives (and sometimes I am not so optimistic about that), I suspect that people will look back upon our times with the kind of horror and curiosity with which we look back upon the “Wild West” or the “Dark Ages” (both of which are probably more mythical than factual where popular perceptions are concerned). Look what we have: religious fervor bordering on fanaticism; heightened nationalism, also bordering on nationalism and hearkening back to the historical problems of nativism; oddly self-conscious but unapologetic decadence; paranoia regarding terrorism and terrorists mixed with stunning nonchalance and a let’s-go-shopping attitude; the inexplicably bizarre foci of our government (steroid use in major league baseball?) in the midst of serious problems all around; voyeuristic reality television juxtaposed with a public outcry over indecency in broadcasting; persistent accusations of systematic racism and sexism in the midst of more tolerance than ever; constant involvement in wars and military actions around the world while wishing fervently for peace; and frequent school shootings. Plenty of grist for the mills of historians as yet unborn.

What’s the story with these school massacres, anyway? The only attempt at explanation I have yet encountered was Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, and I found that one disturbingly insufficient. (Ultimately, he appeared to argue that the massacre at Columbine in 1999 was the result of too much fear and paranoia in our culture. But I was once an angry high school student who felt trapped and thought exceedingly little of his peers and it was fear that kept me from acting out that range. I suspect that it was rather a lack of fear on the part of the Columbine shooters that allowed them to make their anger and arrogance into a violent demonstration of death. Fear of consequences is what keeps normal people in line, and is a helpful tool for social organization. Fearlessness is what allows people to take guns into public places like schools and office buildings to destroy the lives of others, while the rest of us just write blog entries under online pseudonyms to vent our anger and frustration.) So I want to know what people are thinking, if anything, about this recurrent problem, which is not going away. Can anyone point me toward other plausible analyses of the situation?

My personal estimation of the situation, however, is that most Americans are defiantly ignoring this problem. We have become extraordinarily one-dimensional when it comes to education. No one really questions the basic assumptions of our educational system–that it ought to be compulsory, that it ought to be universal, that higher education is for everyone, that more education equals higher pay, that more intense “standards” and better funding will solve any problem, and so on. Who is honestly and legitimately challenging these assumptions with substance? Where are the kinds of investigative and reporting resources that are being spent on trifles like the Michael Jackson circus, the steroids-in-MLB circus, the Scott Peterson circus, and the Terry Schiavo circus? None of those has the kind of depth and breadth of cultural impact as the school shootings, except maybe the Schiavo case. But, in our current obsession with decadence, we would rather worry ourselves about those other things while ignoring the serious defects in our social structure that must be at the heart of these school massacres. I suspect it is our infantile fearlessness in the face of danger that keeps us from addressing this proble. Time, and historians, will tell.

Out of Order

More sloppy thinking about the Schiavo debacle, this time from a newspaper in the Vatican:

Who can decide to pull the plug as if we were talking about a broken or out of order household appliance?

No, who decided to start plugging people in? Who decided to start equating fifteen years of a “persistent vegetative state” with life? How is that living?

(Also, see my previous post on this subject.)

Propaganda Pledging

Turns out all those kids pledging to avoid sex before marriage didn’t put much conviction behind their decisions. In fact, the rate of STD incidence among them is just as high as among kids who haven’t made a pledge. Incidentally, when I was in high school, I went to some big youth rally, filled out a little card, pledged to save myself for marriage, and so on. A few years latter when, uh, certain opportunities arose, that little card and the pledge it represented never even passed through my mind. So I can’t say I’m surprised by this new study.

However, I doubt that the Christian organizations who promote these pledges are going to accept the results of this study, because they seriously undercut the propaganda value of their movement. It makes all the rank-and-file Christian parents feel happy to believe that their kids are telling the truth and harboring real religious conviction.

Establishing Dangerous Precedent

Been busy lately. Spent most of yesterday dressed up like a private in the 2nd Maryland Volunteer Infantry, Company H, circa 1863, though I did not go into battle, owing to my continuing recovery from my recent surgery. (I am almost back to normal, but not normal enough that I am ready to put on a heavy wool uniform and full kit, then mime a dramatic death on rocky, uneven ground.)

One of the topics that came up in our conversation yesterday was the Terry Schiavo case, and the impending federal intervention. This kind of thing, of course, goes straight back to our Civil War, which established the power of the federal government to get involved not just in the running of the various states, but in the individual lives of the citizens. Now we take this sort of thing for granted and forget that in the antebellum years of these United States, heavy-handed involvement from the federal government was vigorously resisted. So, in 2005, when the federal government is getting involved with steroid use in major league baseball (of all things) and passing legislation to keep “alive” one Florida woman who has been in a “persistent vegetative state” for years, most people don’t even blink. This is what the federal government is for, in the eyes of many Americans, apparently. Personally, however, I think the baseball hearings of the past week were an enormous waste of public money and time and resources. Regarding the Terry Schiavo case, though, I sense a far more sinister motivation.

Despite of the rhetoric of those who think Terry Schiavo’s death ought to be indefinitely delayed by medical technology, her quality of life is clearly not the issue. The issue is symbolic, and Schiavo has become a football in a vast game of political maneuver. While the allegedly “pro-life” side of the debate would like very much to keep this woman breathing to establish a precedent against the alternative (i.e., letting nature take its course), their success, now, will establish a far more dangerous precedent. If they succeed in hijacking the federal government and empowering it with the ability to decide the fate of a single individual, they have only taken us further down the road to greater federal intervention in the personal lives of citizens. Perhaps this time the government will function as the moral gatekeeper for the “pro-life” faction, but government is notoriously amoral, bowing to whichever party, faction, or business interest can hold its ear. The last thing we need is a government that thinks it has the right to get involved in the lives of individuals, just because other, uninvolved people disagree with what those individuals are doing, even when they are not committing crimes.

Lest you think removing Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube would be “murder,” you would do well to recall that (1) she might still live without it, though it’s not likely and (2) that if she cannot live without perpetual medical support, the natural course for her would be death. In other words, we have created this dilemma ourselves by advancing our death-delay technology and insisting that death be delayed indefinitely whenever possible, without regard to quality-of-life issues. Yesterday on public radio I heard a person-on-the-street interview and a woman commented that removing Schiavo’s feeding tube would be murder, and humans should not usurp the power of God to give and take life. But by that reasoning, Schiavo should never have gotten a feeding tube and fifteen years of medical death-delay despite her unquestionably low quality of life and undeniable inability to live on her own steam, so to speak, because doing so has usurped the power of God to let her die naturally.

Regardless of which way you think on the issue, the worst possible scenario is the establishment of a precedent whereby the federal government has the right to decide life or death for people and their families, not on the basis of whether those people have committed crimes, but on the basis of whether those people are making decisions that conflict with the moral standards of other people who are not involved, but simply afraid to let them make a decision that they find offensive. In the case of Schiavo, the real question ought to be this: In the absence of a living will, first, what can be done, and second, who can choose to do it? But rather than sticking to the issues, the participants in this case, and all their myriad cheerleaders across the nation, have decided to turn Schiavo’s case into an emblem of their cause, successfully usurping whatever life Terry Schiavo might have and bending it to their own purposes, which I find reprehensible.

For further reading, check out this commentary by Michael C. Dorf at FindLaw.com.

[Update: Or perhaps federal intervention is not so foregone after all.]

[Update: Or maybe it is.]

Intelligent Design?

In the comment section of his most recent post, Brad has quoted a line from the Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, in the context of a few comments about “intelligent design”:

The assumption of an impersonal beginning can never adequately explain the personal beings we see around us, and when men try to explain man on the basis of an original impersonal, man soon disappears.

Perhaps Schaeffer was never adequately convinced, but that doesn’t mean no one else has been, either. To me there seems nothing inherently inexplicable about “personal” beings in an impersonal universe, in no small part because “personal” is a pretty vague idea to begin with (as are the terms “conscious” and “intelligent”). I see nothing transcendent about the particular organization of matter that characterizes humanity and its behaviors. Rather, I remain quite skeptical that ideas like “consciousness,” “intelligence,” and “personality” are anything more than lingual containers into which all sorts of vague and nebulous impressions might be thrown. Ultimately, they are circular: We call ourselves intelligent, personal, and conscious, then apply the same labels to anything that behaves as we would. When people talk about an “intelligent designer” or a “personal God,” what they really mean is that the universe was designed in a fashion they can understand, and that their God behaves roughly the way they do. But there is no reason to assume that a God or a creator-entity would or should behave in ways that are fathomable by or similar to human ways. It is entirely possible that a God or a creator-entity could be in some sense “intelligent,” but not in any way that is detectable by or analogous to human “intelligence.”

To me, the concept of “intelligent design” has always been sorely lacking in imagination. It posits a very narrow range of possibilities for what constitutes “intelligence” as well as “design.” Who is to say that what constitutes intelligence for other beings, even gods, is at all similar to that stuff we call “intelligence” in ourselves? Why must “design” mean something that is organized as humans would do it, or in such a way that makes sense to humans? Or, why couldn’t a designer, rather than designing a completed system, simply create a dynamic, evolving, self-regulating system and input a few parameters? And if a designer did such a thing, how could any observation of the outcome from within the system itself provide an accurate indication of the rules of the system, the original parameters, or the logic of their construction? Or, more radically, what is to stop the results of an unintelligent designer from being unexpectedly and, from our perspective, serendipitously successful, despite its own shortcomings? If humans can have productive accidents, why not gods as well? What of an intelligence that has not designed, but done something akin to rolling dice until achieving the current result? How could we recognize intelligence or design in such a thing? Or, conversely, recognizing what we consider intelligence or design, how could we be sure it was the result of an intelligence or a designer? Remarkably, proponents of “intelligent design” fail to bring up such possibilities. Instead they assume that what they see can only mean what they wish it to mean, rather than considering what else it might mean. In other words, even if the universe seems designed to some people, and even if it seems like the product of intelligence, there is still the hurdle of deciding whether that sense of design and intelligence is merely the artifact of our own “intelligent” organization of the data.

The French composer Olivier Messiaen used to take pen and paper outside to transcribe birdsong into Western musical notation. Then, having codified the sounds according to this system of organization, he could use musical instruments to reproduce the melodies of the birds, incorporating their music into his own. Does that mean the birds were composing music? Were they thinking of rhythmical structure or melodic form? Were their sounds the result of the same kind of “intelligence” it would take for Messiaen to write his own version of birdsong? Or did Messiaen’s action of transcribing birdsong according to his own method of data collection and organization merely impose a sense of intelligent order on sounds that were the product of something less than an “intelligent design” of the kind that might describe a human composition?

My analogy is crude perhaps, but I hope the intent is evident: it is difficult to make objective claims of “intelligent design” about something for which all known data has been collected and organized by the minds who have invented the concepts of “intelligence” and “design” themselves. There is no telling what data regarding our universe have not been collected, lost to the unconsciously selective gaze of the beings doing the collecting, and therefore unavailable to any judgments about the overall coherence and meaning of the universe and its structure.

Is our universe the result of “intelligent design”? Did “personal” beings arise from an “impersonal” universe? Unfortunately these questions are almost meaningless; they derive from words whose meaning is anything but clear and objective. However, I think extended reflection on the problem of what these words mean and how they are used can be immensely profitable to anyone who is interested in understanding the nature of human existence.

For me, however, it is time for bed.

More Christian Pathology

Hello there, Wisconsin Christian Terry Ratzmann, and goodbye. But, he (as well as Dennis Rader, no doubt), will be quickly denied and then forgotten as a “real Christian.” As we all know, “real Christians” don’t do these kinds of things, which means that anyone who does these kinds of things is not a “real Christian,” which is a handy circular definition. But as for me, I’m still waiting to hear a story about an atheist who bursts into a church service and starts shooting.

Interesting, as well, that people are scratching their scratching their heads about Ratzmann’s possible motives. Of course, there is a rumbling that he was angry about something said in an earlier sermon, and some are suggesting he was “facing possible unemployment,” but I expect the Angry Sermon Response theory will be ignored or suppressed as the investigation continues. The police have plenty of witnesses, no other suspects, and a dead perpetrator. Meanwhile, Christians both in that church and around the world will no doubt shy way from the idea that a Christian could be so angry about a sermon that he would be driven to kill others and himself. (Because, as we know from history, Christians have never killed anyone for reasons related to their belief. At least no “real Christians.” Right?) Furthermore, why would a man upset about potential unemployment take a gun to church, instead of into his workplace?

Speaking of the church and all those witnesses, what were they doing standing around and letting him reload? Some of them apparently tried to “confront” him by asking why he was massacring their friends and loved ones, but not a single one of them seems to have reasoned, “This guy is killing people in a church service; he said he’s going to kill us all; he’s reloading now; I could wrestle him to the ground and stop this madness!” However, having myself grown up in a rather pathetic, non-confrontational, “let’s talk instead of act” kind of Christian congregation, I am unfortunately not surprised by this turn of non-events. I even know a seminary professor who was so sold on pacifism and nonviolence that he stated in class that he would not defend his wife or children with deadly force, even if their lives were at stake.

I try very hard to appreciate the ordinary, flawed humanity of Christians, both those I know personally and Christians in general, but sometimes, like with this particular church shooting, I can’t help but see an almost humorous irony when police say that Ratzmann had “nothing significant in his background and no mental illness to indicate why he would do this.” There are plenty of folks (e.g., Richard Dawkins) who have no qualms with calling Christianity itself a form of mental illness, but I’ve known too many Christians who seemed like perfectly ordinary people. Still, a Dennis Rader or a Terry Ratzmann (or, maybe even more disturbingly, those very unheroic members of Ratzmann’s church) comes along and I can’t help but drift toward Dawkins’ perspective: Christianity ruins people.

I know, I know. Someone is going to come along and tell me that plenty of lives have been turned around by Christianity. Addicts and criminals of all flavors have been “reformed” by Christianity, right? Except all the dramatic conversions I’ve ever seen have seemed only to replace one addiction (to drugs, alcohol, sex, or whatever) with another (to God, Jesus, Sunday school teaching, evangelism, or whatever). There is even one in my family–a drunken womanizer who has now become so addicted to his religion that his wife has, at times, threatened to throw him out because of it.

From the other end, no doubt, will come those people insisting that Hitler and Mao and Stalin and company were atheist butchers. To which I can only reply as I have on numerous other occasions: Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and every other brutal dictator you can think of may have been an atheist in the sense of not believing in a supernatural God, but every one of them also replaced that overbearing, immaterial Being with some other overbearing, immaterial Ideology, be it nationalism, communism (or some other political -ism), Aryanism, or overblown egotism. (In the case of Hitler, it might have been all of those.) But atheism as I conceive it, and as most garden variety atheists conceive it, does not involve a replacement of the rejected god, but a rejection of overbearing, immaterial Forces (be they gods, ideologies, egos, or anything else) themselves. That is, atheists reject anything that might function or be construed as a god, which is why the allegation that atheists make gods of themselves is so frustrating, ill-informed, and at times downright odious.

This, I know, adds some perhaps unwelcome elasticity to the concepts of theism and atheism, but it is probably the most prevalent functional view of what atheism means to atheists. We are suspicious of motivations, both our own and those of others. We try to catch ourselves playing out the scripts and roles created by belief narratives and ask whether, in the absence of those belief narratives, our actions would be justifiable. Religious people, and servants to ideologies, however, are not concerned with these questions, and will do anything if their religion or ideology or belief in that overwhelming, immaterial Force commands it. (And if they don’t, is their belief really so foremost as they insist?) My favorite example is Martin Luther’s infamous declaration that he would eat dung if Christ commanded it. Good job, Marty. Smart thinking. And, of course, we all remember the recent events of 2001, in which a few men murdered thousands of people while under the influence of their god’s alleged blessing.

So again I ask, where are the atheists, the people who seek freedom from religion and ideology, who are barging into public places and using deadly weapons to kill their fellow human beings? The problem is not so much that religion and ideology forces people to act like animals, but that religion and ideology can be so easily used to justify such behavior. As Steven Weinberg famously said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Or ideology.

The Christian University

The library director (“Director of Library Services”) of my small, liberal arts Christian university recently died of cancer. He was only 55. The latest edition of the alumni magazine contains an interesting tribute to the man and his career, including comments from friends and colleagues. One of my favorite professors (who once cornered me in the library and told me I needed to change my major to history–I didn’t take his advice) made a fascinating comment about the late faculty member: “He was drawn to the study of the Renaissance, a period when the human spirit broke through the conventions of the past and expressed itself with force and insight that still shapes us today.”

How, I wonder, will the conservative evangelical community, upon whom the university depends for its support, perceive that comment? Indeed, as a student I constantly wondered what the rank and file of our denomination (we called it a “conference”) would think of our intellectual freedom and the professors’ tendency to ignore the theological mission statement of the university, in which “the human spirit” provides neither force nor insight to the Christian witness. I later found out, anecdotally. During my student days, important members of my home church had gone to the pastor and expressed great concern about what was going on “down there” at our university. What prompted this? Yours truly, and the apparently unanswerable hackles he raised. It may be alright to study the Renaissance in a Christian university, and promote discourse on the force and insight of the human spirit, but don’t try to get back between the pews with your new perspectives. Just shut your mouth and follow tradition.

Many a youngster has gone off to a Christian university and come back challenging The Faith. Knowledge and the tools of research have a funny way of making a rather closed and partisan tradition look, well, rather more closed and partisan than it seemed to the zealous, if ill-informed, piety of youth. I have a bittersweet relationship with my alma mater. On the one hand, I have great admiration for its professors, who were decent people that encouraged me to think freely and broadly. On the other hand, I cannot ignore the wrapper of evangelical public relations and the denominational support that gives the university its community image. Wave after sticky wave of pious freshmen wash up onto the deceptive shores of the university, attending classes where their faith is subtly undermined while organizing worship services and outreach groups. Meanwhile, those decent people professing their subjects live strange double lives, keeping the faith in one hand and knocking it down with the other. It is a strange way to live and think, though it is so profound and nuanced that I have a hard time calling it something so crass as mere hypocrisy. Perhaps pathology is a better word.