Atheist writers have tried to make the case that religion is the cause of all the evil in the world. Get rid of religion, and we’ll all live happily ever after.[1] For a brief time, there were a few news articles that reported on a school student in Finland who shot and killed eight people (six students, a nurse, and a principal). Here’s how Reuters reported the story:
“Eight people were killed when a teenaged gunman opened fire at a school in southern Finland on November 7, 2007 hours after a video was posted on YouTube predicting a massacre there. The gunman was a pupil at Jokela High School, a teacher who witnessed the attack told Reuters, and had walked through the school firing into classroom after classroom. . . . The YouTube video, entitled ‘Jokela High School Massacre—11/7/2007,’ was posted by a user called ‘Sturmgeist89.’ ‘I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,’ read a posting by a user of the same name. ‘I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.’ Sturmgeist means storm spirit in German.”[2]
The shooter described himself as “a social Darwinist.”[3] An almost identical article appeared in Sky News but with no reference to the Darwinism association.[4] I haven’t heard any of the New Atheists explain this evolutionary “logic” and how it might be morally wrong for an atheist to kill the unfit. I’m most interested in what super-atheist Richard Dawkins has to say since he blames religion for all types of ills: “Religious beliefs are irrational. Religious beliefs are dumb and dumber: super dumb. Religion drives otherwise sensible people into celibate monasteries, or crashing into New York skyscrapers. Religion motivates people to whip their own backs, to set fire to themselves or their daughters, to denounce their own grandmothers as witches, or, in less extreme cases, simply to stand or kneel, week after week, through ceremonies of stupefying boredom.” Dawkins doesn’t like to talk about the irrational, dumb, dumber, and super dumb belief system called Communism and the 100 million deaths at the hands of its atheist practitioners.
Dawkins has a real problem on his hands since he believes that “human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection. . . . From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb.”[5] Evolutionists need the Christian worldview of altruism (super niceness) to maintain sanity in the world. If atheists were truly consistent with the tenets of their materialist faith, they would praise the Finnish Darwinian killer for following “a rational point of view” that led him to argue that it was proper for him to “eliminate all who he believed were unfit.” Instead of killing himself, he should have demanded to be tried by a jury of his atheist peers. He could have called Dawkins as a witness and called into evidence the following statement made by him: “In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice.”[6]Footnotes:
[1] It was a Scottish missionary who convinced some African communities from killing twins. “In pre-colonial times some communities used to kill twins and occasionally their mothers, believing a double birth was an evil portent and that the mother must have been with two men to bear two children at once.”
[2] “Eight killed at Finland school after YouTube post,” Reuters (November 7, 2007).
[3] David Williams, “Eight shot dead including principal in school massacre predicted in YouTube video,” Daily Mail online (November 7, 2007).**
[4]** News.sky.com posting
[5] RichardDawkins.net article**
[6]**Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133.