TechgnosisWeb Prime

The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, where a deeply disturbed individual went on a rampage and killed at least 33 other people, was a horrible event. It was horrible in terms of human life and potential lost. It was horrible in terms of the emotional damage done to friends, families, and acquaintances of the victims. And, now, it is also horrible due to the opportunistic little ghouls that have crawled out of the woodwork trying to, first, blame the whole thing on ‘teh terrists’, and then, once it turned out that the shooter was not Islamic, to try and blame (brace for it)… evolution and atheism. I wish I was making this shit up. (This is gonna be long and quote-heavy, so I’ll plop it all behind the ‘more-wall’)

Nevermind that the shooter seems to, at least in part, have been inspired by religion: he made statements about how he wanted to “die like Jesus Christ” (yeah, because when I think about Jesus, I always go back to those 33 other people he killed right before nailing himself up on that cross.. what, that’s not in your Bible? Funny, it’s not in mine either.) I could go on a while about how often you read about people committing horrible crimes against themselves or others, and then trying to justify their actions with some variation of ‘God told me to do it’. Or ask folks to point me at the last time an atheist went on a killing spree due to his lack of belief in a Big Sky Daddy. Bad sci-fi stories aside, secular humanists do not go around ‘thinning the herd’ or ‘eliminating the less desirable genetic specimens’ against their fellow man, especially since humanism itself is built on a basis of moral beliefs about the intrinsic value of human life and knowledge, on its own terms. Religious fanatics, however, have no problem quite literally ‘demonizing’ those who do not believe the same things they do, and reducing their state, in their own mind at least, to something sub-human, something easy to kill. History has shown and continues to show that a low esteem of one’s fellow man + religious belief leads more often to killers than the same low esteem + knowledge of, say, evolution. The latter might lead to someone who’s an asshole, but that has more to do with the low esteem part, and less with the evolution. Not to mention they’re less likely to flip out and kill me.

But I’m getting sidetracked: the point here, in the VT shootings as in any others, is that the person who committed these heinous acts was deeply disturbed as a human being, and using it to justify one political/moral/religious point of view over another is both despicable and ghoulish. So I suppose I should be surprised that all-around idiot Rush Limbaugh managed to come out of his prescription drug-induced haze long enough to say this:

Maybe there needs to be more religion and prayer at our universities, folks. Maybe there needs to be a sense on college campuses that there’s something bigger than the individual. Maybe there’s something larger than the professor. Maybe they’re not too young to learn that there are many things in life larger than self, and maybe being able to take comfort in a relationship with that which is larger than self ( i.e., God) would have a calming effect on some of these people who go absolutely nuts and lose their sanity. But that’s even arguable. But can you imagine the leftists hearing me say this now: More prayer, more religion at our university? “Separation of church and state!” would be the template there. “What are you trying to do? You’re trying to force a religion on people!” No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no! You don’t understand. You can’t possibly because you’re irreligious.

And then there’s dear little Ken Ham, blaming the whole thing on evolution and atheists:

We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals–and humans–arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as “cheap.”

I’m not at all saying that the person who committed these murders at Virginia Tech was driven by a belief in millions of years or evolution. I don’t know why this person did what he did, except the obvious: that it was a result of sin. However, when we see such death and violence, it is a reminder to us that without God’s Word (and the literal history in Genesis 1-11), people will not understand why such things happen.

One of the nastiest little buggers that have piped up after this all came out has been Dinesh D’Souza, from Stanford University (for shame, Stanford, for shame..), who apparently couldn’t wait to pipe up and use this event to misrepresent, misquote, and mis-characterize those nasty evil atheists before the smell of gunpowder in VT had even dissipated. His first little rant uses the fact that Richard Dawkins was not invited to speak at the VT memorials as some sort of condemnation of atheism, claiming that atheism and science has nothing to offer people at times like this, and therefore, atheism is bad, bad, bad.

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing. Even secular people like the poet Nikki Giovanni use language that is heavily drenched with religious symbolism and meaning.

PZ Myers tore him apart, of course. After realizing that he had riled up the atheist community with his little tirade, D’souza decided to up the ante, and put out a second blog post that was built even more completely upon lies than the first one was.

One clever writer informs me that atheists don’t deny meaning, they simply insist that meaning is not inherent in the universe, it is created by us. Okay, pal, here’s the Virginia Tech situation. Go create some meaning and share it with the rest of us Give us that atheist sermon with you in the pulpit of the campus chapel. I’m not being facetious here. I really want to hear what the atheist would tell the grieving mothers.

You know what, I think I’ll let PZ Myers tear this one apart too. Or, just as good, I’ll quote the response from one Sean Goff, who really says it all a lot better than I ever could:

I’m not sure if you’ll actually read this or not, but I hope that you do, because I’ll tell you right now that I am going to have a different reply than what I see above. I am not going to point out that you have insulted atheists or tell you how offended I was at your comments. Instead, I’m actually going to answer your question.

First, we’ll get the basics out of the way. Hi, my name is Sean, and I’m an atheist.

When a tragedy such as this occurs, most people turn to prayer. Even as I type these words, there are probably people praying for the victims of the VT shootings… but I am not one of them. Prayer has been shown not to work both scientifically, and logically. It does nothing aside from making those who are doing the praying feel better about themselves because it might help them to cope by making themselves feel as though it is accomplishing something. I wish it did, but it doesn’t.

So what do I do instead of praying? How do I cope and what can I do for these victims and their families? Well, for starters, I’ve long since come to the realization that two hands working do more than a thousand clasped in prayer… and so, I work.

Yesterday, I sat down and I wrote letters. These were not letters of prayer, mind you, as those sent by the campus ministry members of my college to be placed in front of a building at VT were. Instead, these were letters to my congressmen, my senators, and my governor, explaining some of my opinions on why there need to be more restrict hand gun control… a difficult task in its own right for a staunch conservative such as myself.

It might also be important to note that I did not even mention the VT shootings, aside from in my opening remarks which went as follows: “Recent events have compelled me to write this letter, though it should be noted that I had come to these conclusions long ago”. (Tempting as it was, making martyrs of those who do not know the cause is unethical. A shame, then, that so many others have already begun to do this.)

As Kurt Vonnegut (a fellow skeptic whose death I had to mourn just a short while ago) used to say, “So it goes…” Bad things are bound to happen. Tragedies are bound to happen. There is no transcendent “why” to the matter. The best that we can do, being the paranoid little apish creatures that we are, is not to “move on” as you proposed I might suggest in your article… but to progress. Whenever we find ourselves confronted by something as small and inconvenient as a bad day or something as grand and tragic as what we are discussing now, the best thing that we can do is learn from what happened and progress.

We must address the problem, we must assess the problem, and we must take steps so that we might progress from this problem.

Again, candlelight vigils and prayers simply aren’t pragmatic… they might allow some sense of comfort to those mourning the events, but it does no more than talking to a counselor or friend or even writing a blog or journal entry on the subject.

We don’t need more prayers right now, but rather, a realization that, if there are still high school and college students bringing guns to campuses and schools… and that it is this shocking to us still, then perhaps this we need to focus on the issue some more.

Well, there are this atheist’s thoughts on the subject. I hope that I’ve made my case that atheists do not simply “C’est la vie” our way through tragedies. We mourn just as those who pray do, we just try to be practical about it.

Learn from tragedy, grow from tragedy, and progress.

Namaste… after all, we’re all made of the same star stuff,

- Sean

Rock on. As for what Dawkins would say at a time of loss and when losing someone he cared for deeply, we have no further to look than here. Suffice it to say, it’s not ‘get over it’.