The tragedy at the Texas elementary school this week conjures up a lot of thoughts. Two questions in particular are on everyone's mind: Why do these things keep happening? What can be done to stop them?
I think that the answer to the first question is three-fold. First, too many young people are in the grip of a murderous nihilism because as a society we've rejected the only belief system which gives us any basis for valuing human life and for treating others with respect and kindness.
Second, too many young men have either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship at all. When a boy is alienated from his father, or has no father in his life, he often turns to violence as a way of expressing his masculinity and venting his resentments.
It would be interesting to see research, if any has been done, on the relationship the young men who commit these horrific crimes have with both God and their biological father. I'm quite sure that the majority of these killers are atheistic materialists, whether they're aware of it or not, and either have no father or have a dysfunctional relationship with him.
Third, many of our young are immersed in a culture of violence and death in which they hear about killing, talk about killing, laugh about killing, and practice killing in their video games for hours every day.
Those three toxic elements form a psycho-emotional time bomb in the soul of a young man which can turn him into a killer.
By abandoning the Judeo-Christian worldview that was the mortar which held our society together for three centuries, and replacing it with an atheistic materialism that offers no ground at all for morality or for conferring worth on other people, we've stripped our young of any basis for thinking of others as valuable in their own right.
In the absence of a God, people are valuable only to the extent that others value them, but atheistic materialism offers no reason why anyone should value any other human being. If we're nothing but animals then, like animals, we can be slaughtered if someone has the power and the inclination to do it.
Likewise, in the absence of an earthly father, young men often seethe with bitterness, alienation and resentments that often lead to anti-social behavior. Indeed, the one commonality among the vast majority of men in prison today is fatherlessness, yet our culture has decided for some perverse reason that fathers aren't really necessary.
Add to the spiritual and emotional emptiness entailed by fatherlessness an entertainment culture of grotesquely violent and pornographic film, music, and video games and the surprise is not that young people wantonly kill but that they don't do it more often than they do.
People immersed in what passes for entertainment in much of our culture become desensitized to death. They learn to see others as targets to be "blown away," not as people to be loved and respected.
Some will object that lots of people play these games, listen to violent music, watch movies depicting mass slaughter, and yet they don't kill others, but this misses the point. People reside on a spectrum at one end of which are the most psychopathic among us. The more we revel in bloodshed and horror the more we get shifted along toward the violent end of the spectrum.
Everyone who feeds on violence becomes a little more desensitized, a little more hardened. Everyone tends to see others as a little less valuable than they would have, and some who would not otherwise be inclined to harbor violent fantasies now do, and some who would not otherwise be inclined to actually carry out their murderous fantasies are pushed further toward exactly that behavior .
Tragedies like last Wednesday's will recur as long as we continue to erode the spiritual foundation upon which any morality must stand and substitute in its stead a culture that glories in violence, death, and horror. Just as we are what we feed our bodies, we are, too, what we feed our minds.
If this is correct, and I'm convinced that it is at least a major part of the problem, then the long-term solution to mass murders in our schools and elsewhere is to recapture the spiritual understanding that we've lost in this country and to reject the culture of death the adults among us so blithely tolerate and our young so eagerly embrace.
We'll take up a possible short-term solution in tomorrow's post.