My thoughts on seeing friends and family assigning the blame for the Sandy Hook massacre on our godless culture:


“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” ~Mike Huckabee, former governor, presidential candidate and FOX News personality

“[M]illions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me, and we have killed fifty-four million babies, and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences too. I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on.” ~James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family

“Here’s the bottom line. God is not going to go where He is not wanted. [W]e have spent fifty years telling God to get lost, telling God we do not want You in our schools, we don’t want to pray to you in our schools…we’ve kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, ‘Hey, I’ll be glad to protect your children but you gotta invite me into your world first. I am not going to go where I am not wanted. I am a gentleman.‘” ~ Bryan Fischer, Director of the American Family Association

The only logical end point for claims such as these is that this tragedy would NOT have happened if prayer and god were still in schools. It therefore places the full weight of blame on non-Christians. Evil exists, is the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning, and it's the non-Christians' fault that it manifests itself as it does. Convenient, no?

Let's deal with the obvious practicalities before moving on to theological ones. How, gentlemen, do you explain the lack of similar gun violence in countries where Christianity is not the dominant religion? Or dominantly Christian countries which have also "removed god" from their schools, without suffering similar tragedies? Or, more to the point, what about the gunman who opened fire at Creflo Dollar's church; the gunman who killed two praying pastors at a Florida church recently; the gunman who walked into First Baptist Church during service and shot the pastor to death and injured others; the gunman who opened fire at New Life Church; the gunman who killed three, wounded several, and held 50 churchgoers hostage at the First Congregational Church in Missouri? To say nothing of the tens of thousands of kids raped by priests on church grounds. Clearly god had not been kicked out of these institutions, yet they have suffered the same tragedies. How, gentlemen, do you account for those?

To suggest that god could have and wanted to intervene in this horrible tragedy, but stayed his hand because of his anger at decisions people totally unrelated to these innocent children made, is quite frankly disgusting. If god's idea of justice is to punish children--to literally riddle their tiny bodies with an average of a dozen bullets each--and not the people who actually perpetrated these "crimes," like legislators, homosexuals and atheists like me, what kind of justice is that? So far as we know, none of these elementary school children were gay or abortionists, so implicating them is the actions of a malevolent monster, no? Is god so tactically inept that he cannot use strategic strikes when meting out his justice? The god Christians worship and claim as an entity of pure, righteous love is willing to slaughter innocent children because the humans he created hurt his feelings. Is this really the god you want to align yourself with? The repercussions of this sort of thinking are malignant: God is a vindictive, jealous monster who intentionally used a mentally ill man to butcher children because he is angry with us and wanted to make a point. Either God instigated this event or he allowed it to happen--those are your only two options. Does either one look like the actions of the sort of deity worth worshiping? Is this the expression of a good God? Why would you worship a being prone to such violent temper tantrums, let alone use him as a barometer of your morality? Any god who requires a request to intervene in a tragedy or prevent a massacre, particularly one involving children, is not worth worshiping and cannot, under any definition, be called a good god. Is anyone so obtuse as to think that none of those school children or teachers offered up an urgent plea to god for help in the middle of the shooting?

Critics to what I've just said always play the "free will" trump card right about now. But could not God have rescued these kids through some means that didn't involve altering the motivations of the shooter? If the answer is no, then you forfeit the right to claim that God ever protects or save lives in any other sort of situation, such as car accidents, heart attacks, etc. Either god does or he does not have the power to protect innocent lives. And saying his ways are beyond our understanding is the mother of all cop-outs. If freewill is defined only as "obey me and things will go right for you, disobey me and you will incur my wrath," that is not remotely freewill. "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able," asked Epicurus, "then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

The truth of the matter is that these proclamations are just the 21st century equivalent of prehistoric people cowering beneath a rumbling volcano and sacrificing a virgin to appease the mountain god's anger. That a random event, natural or manmade, can be traced back to the actions of people angering a jealous and wrathful deity is superstition as old as humanity itself. If only we lived better, obeyed better, worshipped better, none of this would have happened. If only...

Frankly, I welcome comments like those cited above. It is a very effective lubricant, aiding in driving people from the faith. Atheists don't have to look for greater reasons behind the events of last week. They don't have to worry that they didn't pray enough, avoid temptation enough, or used their magical talisman incorrectly. Atheists do not read into events like this and find, at the center, the work or the devil or a vindictive god. We see it for what it was: a terribly troubled young man with access to the weaponry of the modern battlefield committing acts of senseless horror against innocent victims. And from there, we can make rational, logical determinations about how to proceed in pursuit of realistic explanations and solutions to these dire societal issues, be it better access to mental health services or more stringent regulation on guns, etc. Dobson and his ilk are doing atheists a great service by making mainstream evangelical Christianity unpalatable to decent human beings. At this point, there is utterly no difference between the theology of Dobson and Huckabee and that of the Westboro Baptist Church. And before you go and claim these people do not speak for mainstream Christianity, you must first answer me how one gets more mainstream than Fox News and Focus on the Family. You do not get to label people as the unrepresentative fringe only when what they say makes you look bad. The truth is, this is what you believe, Christians. Own it or abandon it. I've made my choice.

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