This past Tuesday, two teenagers entered their high school in Littleton, Colorado, and casually blew away more than a dozen students and a teacher. They used semi-automatic weapons, shotguns, even homemade bombs. They giggled as they killed.
And where was God?
For some reason, he wasn't around to stop it. Or else he wanted it to happen.
The attack bumped Kosovo from the top featured story on news shows around the country. Local murder took precedence over foreign murder.
Maybe God was in Kosovo.
Oh, but God is everywhere, my Christian readers assure me.
If so, then God obviously wanted the school murders to happen, just as he wants the butchering in Kosovo to continue, just as he wants the killing to go on all around the world. He doesn't stop it, despite the fact that he has the ability to. Therefore it must be his desire to see his creations destroy themselves.
Some survivors of the high school tragedy will thank God for sparing them. They will be so grateful that God was with them.
But why did God not spare others? Why kill little children, whose lives are still ahead of them, and spare the elderly, who've already had their days of glory? Why kill the good and ignore the bad?
Likely as not, I'll receive emails from the many theists who visit these pages. They'll try to tell me that these atrocities are part of their allegedly loving God's plan. They'll tell me that ours is not to question the mysterious ways of God.
Bullshit.
Any sane human cannot help but question these actions (or lack thereof) perpetrated by a God who is supposedly the source of all morality. Any sane human would regard God's inaction as immoral. By the standard of morality we're familiar with, there can be no other interpretation.
If we're not to question God's ways, then we were created with the ability to form moral judgments, but not permitted to apply that ability to God.
This makes as little sense as when a parent tells their child, "Do as I say, not as I do." We humans learn by example, and it seems God certainly doesn't set a good one. The moral code he exhibits is certainly a lot less pure than mine. Or yours, I'd wager.
I wonder how many students at Columbine High School wondered where God was, this past Tuesday. I wonder how many of them will use this tragedy to become closer to God, because they were spared. And I wonder how many will begin to see through the God illusion, perhaps because they realize that God wasn't there, or didn't care, and allowed the murders to happen.
Many people are wondering if there will ever be an end to the kind of tragedy that sparked this article, for as long as our society can create people who kill, there will always be tragedies like this. And I sit here, wondering how to end this particular article, and think that maybe there will never be an end to it, either, for much the same reasons. As long as we live in a world ruled by superstition, I'll keep writing.
