Church Voices

More Rational Killings

Well, we’ve got another instance of a student killing spree. This time, on a Native American Indian reservation school, with the perpetrator being from a horribly broken home (as opposed to the upper middle class Columbine students). I don’t intend to portray these killings as a good thing, but without question they must be deemed a rational thing.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/138768/1/.html

I was struck at how the media organizations immediately begin searching for some means of demonizing the individual by connecting him to as many obscure beliefs and practices as they possibly could. He had ties to neo NAZI ideologies, and was said to have worn a black trench coat. Beware that infernal black trench coat… those people will shoot your kids to death. When looking for a problem in this young man, I think they’re missing the mark. It’s difficult to find demonstrable hopelessness or a slide to nihilism and the consequent desire to attain some modicum of significance, or just disappear, or both (as is the case here). Why is such a thing so hard to mark? Well, it is found in oh, about half of all teens today. If we honestly begin looking for “the warning signs” in any given teen, I think we’re likely to find them in abundance. Here’s the big surprise. We allow kids to operate under the assumption that there is no God, no eternal significance, no purpose in this life except what we/you compose, and we are shocked when they live out the reasonable implications of this worldview. I’m referring of course, to Sartre’s dilemma of why we should choose life over death in light of our knowledge that there is no eternal significance to our existence. Sartre excused his silly desire to continue to live with a rather pathetic dodge, saying that he did not want to use his freedom (to die) to take away his freedom (universal). How he deemed “freedom” to be “good” is clearly the result of the fact that he had popularity, money, and relative autonomy. Seldom does a teen have such boons.

Here we have a prime instance of a very rational non-theistic life and death. His father committed a somewhat less rational suicide years before and therefore did not make international headlines. This student (obviously ready to die), determined to leave a mark in his passing and no one could argue that he failed. Unfortunately his worldview did not, I’m sure, entail eternal consequences to temporal actions. So he’s experienced a bit of a rude awakening, thinking that the bullets that he put into himself would be the end of life’s misery… only to find himself birthed into misery unending.