Radical Agnosticism and the Theology of Mass Shooters

By Steve Bolton

                The perpetrator of last month’s rampage in Aurora was one of the few applicants chosen for the Colorado University at Denver’s doctoral program in neuroscience, which also rewarded his intellectual potential with a lucrative grant from the National Institutes of Health.[1] This exhibition of sociopathic behavior by a bright neurology student is not merely a bit of sick irony though, for it underlines an important psychological truth about the proliferation of such lunatics, one that our society refuses to face: it is impossible to deny that if any of these mass shooters had a genuine fear of facing justice in the afterlife, they would not behave as they do.

Our most brilliant academicians cannot identify the consistent psychology that underlies this seemingly inscrutable behavior, precisely because they have a taboo against discussing matters like justice or life after death, which are wholly spiritual but nonetheless have a direct effect on human psychology. The multiplication of these maniacs over the past three decades or so makes it a matter of life and death for us to understand their defective thinking - yet an honest analysis would lead us to question the underlying values of modern Western civilization, because these rampagers are merely among the worst products of the most vile biases and influences we are all indoctrinated with in a subtle way from cradle to grave. Among them are a series of prejudices against orthodox Christianity that are now so deeply ingrained that we no longer bother to question them, such as the assumption that morality is relative, that “all religions say the same thing,” or that all religions are of equal truth and value. At a more subtle level, the last prejudice effectively means that they are equally worthless. Regardless of the truth or falsehood of such arguments, such thinking has direct effects on human behavior which make it much easier for men to commit a certain class of crimes. In various times and places in human history, other societies have had to deal with the consequences of theological choices that are destructive in myriad other ways, such as devotion to the wrong religion, betrayal of a correct one by a hypocrite, or excessive focus on one particular aspect of a faith. What sets our civilization apart from all others in human history is its unique vulnerability to crimes that are only made possible by our reigning ideology of agnosticism, mixed with worship of materialistic things like money and status. Our psychologists and neurologists subscribe even more deeply than the general public to that materialistic ideology, which is why they are puzzled by the wildfire spread of mass shootings and other sickening crimes that are peculiar to our age. They’re never going to find the answer in a study of human brain chemicals, or in the latest fad in pop psychology, because the leading cause arises from the human soul – which is the one topic they have forbidden themselves to discuss.

 

Abnormal Theology 101

Prejudices like theophobia[2] and moral relativity lead to conclusions which are obviously preposterous to any layman who takes a few spare seconds to think through them, for the deeds of Mother Teresa are not equivalent to those of Osama Bin Laden or David Koresh. Anybody who has actually read through the world’s most influential holy books and theological treatises (like the Koran, the writings of Protestant theologians like Luther and Calvin, the Zend Avesta, the Old and New Testaments, the Upanishads, the Baghavad Gita, the Summa Theologica, the encyclicals of the popes and many others) can see quite obviously that they all teach entirely contradictory things, including widely varied systems of morality. The claim that they are all simply paths to the same form of enlightenment is simply factually false. They only look alike because we examine them from a great distance, where they shrink into insignificance. The reason most denizens of Western civilization, particularly the American branch of it, are so separated from these plain facts is that they are ingrained by the mass media, schools and universities to keep their distance from them. We are trained quite thoroughly that it is permissible to have an appreciation for sacraments, ceremonies and externals like stained glass windows, for their entertainment, cultural or therapeutic value, but to act only on the values of the prevailing philosophy of our civilization: atheistic commercialism. This ethos pervades our society in innumerable ways, including the knee-jerk assumption that people motivated by religious viewpoints are biased by strong emotional attachments and therefore can automatically be dismissed. Conversely, members of our intelligentsia are assumed to be “independent” and “impartial” despite their obvious embrace of a highly partial position, one that ironically makes it impossible for them to understand human psychology. Out of all the disciplines of academia, psychology, psychiatry and behavioral neurology have been in total disarray since their foundings more than a century ago, precisely because they are not allowed to speak of the spiritual dimension of the human psyche. Because they have deliberately thrown out half of the pieces of the puzzle of human behavior, they cannot solve it without jamming the remaining pieces together in nonsensical ways. To fill the gap, they resort to such quackery as Freudian psychology, Jungian dream interpretation, behaviorism and worst of all, explaining away free will by an over-emphasis on the mechanics of neurochemicals and brain cells. It is possible to explain a wider range of human behavior with far greater accuracy by understanding the underlying theology that animates a particular subject, for it is the human heart that determines what the mind thinks. Each theology also implies its own brand of morality, which sometimes takes the explicit form of detailed written commands like those found in the Koran, the Bible and the ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church. The prevailing theology which our academicians go to such great lengths to inculcate implies that there is no afterlife in which the downtrodden will receive justice and the wicked will be punished. It implies that morality is simply a social bargain between highly evolved animals, which can be altered at will. Being products of evolutionary competition, human life has little worth beyond its material possessions and social status. It is no accident that these are precisely the values ascribed to by all of the mass shooters of recent decades.

Universally, these mass shooters ascribe to a particular brand of theology in which human life is devalued, social status is prized above all else and there is no afterlife in which they might receive justice against those who injure them, or be punished for injuring others. Quite often, they resort to a killing spree or an assassination of a celebrity in order to gain worldly social status through notoriety. Furthermore, many of them are intelligent enough to perceive that they’re not going to win the rat race for material wealth. At this point, they either try to punish those who deprive them of the wealth and status they feel they deserve, as in the case of many workplace shooters, or try to pursue social status through some other means, such as becoming a notorious mass murderer or the killer of a celebrity. Either way, they are taking the prevailing theology of our civilization to heart. This common denominator also unites them with other dangerous sociopaths who have multiplied like smallpox on the face of our society in the last four or five decades, such as stalkers and cultists. At first glance, there seems to be a lot of variety among these maniacs, but this is only because they differ in which fetishes they fill their empty hearts with. The Aurora shooter was obsessed by a Batman villain, while the man who shot Ronald Reagan made an idol out of actress Jodie Foster, but beneath the surface these two seemingly disparate killers were actually brothers in arms. Despite the insane variety in externals, such as the Aurora shooter’s Joker costume, or the fact that some of them hear voices, there is an uncanny consistency in their thinking, which stems from their common theology. Some of them start cults like the Manson Family, the People’s Temple in Guyana or the Branch Davidians, but even in cases like these where the maniacs have gathered followers around a particular idol, the moral codes that come with these pseudo-religions are about as far away from orthodox Christianity as you can get. In fact, the Heaven’s Gate cult revolved around the purely secular idea that the human race would be rescued by extraterrestrials. Even these seemingly religious examples disbelieve in an afterlife, or at least an afterlife in which they will pay for their crimes, just like the mass shooters who plague us today.  Either they perceive their actions as not being crimes, or downplay or outright disbelieve in judgment after death, or both, but virtually all stalkers, mass shooters and cultists in our day can be placed in the same category. Rather than being abnormal in a constructive way like Mother Teresa, they choose to act abnormally in a destructive way, by following in the footsteps of famous killers like the Son of Sam or the Green River Killer. They could put into action writer Ann Herbert’s famous quip and “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” but they choose to perpetrate random acts of brutality and senseless acts of violence. If only everyone would “pay it forward” like Haley Joe Osment’s character in the movie of the same name, then “abnormal psychology” wouldn’t be such a creepy term. Abnormality isn’t necessarily a bad thing, depending on what form it takes. The heroes of the 20th Century, like Archbishop Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, were all people who were so abnormally good that they were killed for it. The person they all drew their inspiration from, Jesus, exhibited such heroic virtue that the supposedly well-rounded, normal folks who served in the armed forces, the business community, the judiciary and the priesthood all colluded to have him killed. In contrast, the mass shooters and other maniacs of our time conspire to kill people who have never done them the slightest wrong.

Unlike Christians, secular psychoanalysts can never identify a model of psychological health to use as a reference point. Christians can point to Jesus as a perfect model of how a person should think and act, although his thoughts and actions were very difficult to imitate and considered abnormal and abrasive by the ruling classes of both his day and our own. Modern psychologists, however, cannot point to a historical figure who represents ideal behavior. This sets their discipline apart from every other medical field, for a nephrologist can say definitively that a particular kidney is functioning normally, just as a haemotologist can say for certain that a patient’s bloodwork is within expected ranges. It is impossible to judge how healthy a person’s behavior is, however, without making value judgments that immediately intersect with moral and religious issues. Disciplines like psychiatry, psychology and behavioral neurology are crippled from the beginning by their own bigotry, which forbids them to discuss the very issues under discussion, or to even admit that they are being discussed. In the end, they end up making quite definitive value judgments for certain behaviors and against others, but only by judging by what the prevailing moral standards and most popular modes of behavior are among the majority of society. In the end, this merely means aping whatever values the ruling class wants to instill in the populace, through the mass media it owns.  This de facto value system has several glaring drawbacks, including the obvious problem of what value normality has, if abnormality has become the norm. A paragon of mental health might then be seen as a deranged lunatic – as Jesus was when he whipped the moneychangers in the Temple. There is no room for heroic virtue in such a weak, upside-down view of behavior; at best, we will be expected to go with the flow, even if it leads to mediocrity or worse. As G.K. Chesterton once pointed out, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”[3] This merely echoes the stern warning in the Book of James against simply fitting in: “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” Likewise, mere “lukewarmness” in religious faith is condemned as an evil thing in Revelation, which is merely the last of the ceaseless warnings against contented worldliness found in the Bible. Either it is false, or the prevailing understanding of human behavior among our intellectuals is badly defective; both cannot be true.

Cultural Corruption and the Roots of Mass Murder

Conversely, entire social groups can and do go quite mad; if that were not true, then the members of cults like the People’s Temple in Guyana were acting quite normally when 800 of them committed mass suicide in 1978 by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. Despite the prevailing dogma that all cultures are of equal worth, various tribes and nations throughout history have come to regard such highly anti-social and ugly practices as cannibalism and human sacrifice to be entirely normal. In a more famous example from recent history, a very large number of people in Nazi Germany decided it was perfectly normal behavior to gas 6 million Jews. The Jews didn’t see it that way. Like the perpetrators and victims of any other crime in history, the Nazis and the Jews made contrary moral judgments that cannot be reconciled any more than conflicting answers to the equation 2 + 2 can be; at least one of them must have been wrong. Morality cannot be a matter of human invention, because otherwise it would be alterable, in which case it is pointless, because we can simply alter our code anytime we feel like violating it. Furthermore, imperfect people cannot invent a perfect moral code; by logical necessity, they can only have one handed down to them from a perfect source, i.e. a deity. Morality is like mathematics, in the sense that it must be immutable and come from the same divine source, by the very rules of logic. It can only be discovered, not invented. Large groups of people can decide to violate it in one way or another, in the same way that large groups of people can also decide that the answer to the equation 2 + 2 is 15. When engineers get their sums wrong, buildings fall; when societies cling to wrong moral choices, the consequence is injustice, particularly to the weakest members. One of the direct consequences to our civilization of clinging to such false ideas as moral relativity, cultural relativity and the irrelevance of theology is the proliferation of maniacs who believe these things wholeheartedly.

The same ideas are often complemented by an even lazier brand of thinking: historical relativity, i.e. the idea that “things have always been this way.” This displays itself in myriad ways, such as the penchant of adulterers to assume that our ancestors were every bit as promiscuous as we are today, or the widespread supposition that crimes like child molestation, stalking and serial killing were always present in the same proportion in the past, but weren’t detected or reported. In the same vein, critics are likely to claim that mass shooters have always been with us. Thankfully, all of these profoundly stupid and biased notions can be easily disproven, for anyone who bothers to read, check statistics or consult the details annals of human history, all of which confirm an unsettling fact: all of these crimes are not only flourishing in the modern age to an extent not seen since antiquity, but are accelerating at a frightening pace in just the short courses of our lifetimes. We know in very great detail that the moral code practiced by almost all Americans at our Independence was something very different than what is practiced today, for many things our Founding Fathers would have considered heinous crimes are now considered commonplace, to the point that criticizing them is itself deemed evil. Their moral code was nearly identical with that espoused by the European peasantry from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., when the Catholic Church slowly inculcated Western civilization into a unique way of thinking. To the Founding Fathers and our distant ancestors from medieval times, virtually everything about our civilization would be considered abnormal, not just the proliferation of exotic crimes like rampages. Back then, contraception was considered a taboo, for why would anyone want to limit their family sizes? Promiscuity was unheard of. Divorce was still so rare in Britain at the dawn of the 20th Century that it took an act of Parliament to get one. For most of the Middle Ages, capitalism as we know it was punished severely; virtually everyone you see on the cover of Fortune 500 would have been whipped in the public square of most medieval towns. This litany of crimes that are no longer called such is topped by abortion, which was unthinkable even to the most radical feminists of Susan B. Anthony’s day. Until the early 20th Century, back alley abortions were very rare crimes that only the richest and most well-connected urbanites could get access to, but in the last 40 years since Roe v. Wade, one billion unborn children have been murdered worldwide so that their mothers could avoid the expenses they entailed. That includes 45 million American children, whose own mothers have coldly judged that they should have their tiny heads crushed by tira-tetes or their arms cut off by embryotomy scissors. It is often noted that mass shooters are rarely female, but that is not because they are incapable of killing; like Herodias, the worst of them are skilled at getting others to do their dirty work for them, which is precisely why you hear so much criticism of abortion doctors among right-to-lifers and so little disdain for the ultimate perpetrators. When women “go postal” they break up their families or get someone to kill their own kids. Solomon perceived that millennia ago in Proverbs 14:1: “The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.” It is not at all surprising that a society which tolerates such cold-blooded acts of genocide also produces maniacal mass shooters, for mass murder goes on daily at every neighborhood Planned Parenthood clinic, but no one stops it, purely out of grotesque favoritism. Abortion is excused on the grounds that unborn children are not really human, but genocide is always preceded by some dehumanization of the victims, just as the Nazis did to the Jews. Today’s rampaging maniacs take that logic one step further by dehumanizing everyone but themselves; only their wants or the injustices done to them matter, while those done to everyone else probably do not enter into their minds. Through crimes like abortion and preposterous philosophies like evolution, Western civilization has already made the notion of what is human relative and open to negotiation. Modern psychologists sweep all of this under the carpet, but by the consistent standards of our ancestors, we are all monsters. Normality is not a good thing if everyone has become abnormal. And as Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Archbishop Oscar Romero have shown, acting abnormally is not necessarily a bad thing either. Of course, in a relativistic world where all things are equal, it is impossible to make such value judgments, for any type of behavior is equally valid. We’re willing to accept that, until our murderous civilization is willing to start slaying in a way that we still haven’t stooped down to.

Obviously, something about modern civilization has made this epidemic of mass murder possible. Human history has been stained from the beginning by massacres in wartime, or by veterans driven insane by the horrors of war or criminals bent on attaining some reasonable but evil goal, like robbing a train or killing a king. Violent fanatics devoted to evil religions have also been a scourge to the human race all along, from the diabolical rites of the Canaanites to the terrorist acts of Osama Bin Laden. Yet the human race has never witnessed a widespread proliferation of impersonal mass murder, perpetrated by people with no sane grievance against the victims of their massacres. Like serial killing and stalking, the proportions of this particular crime have drastically increased in one specific time and place in history. This is not to say that society “made” any of these killers, for that type of permissive thinking is merely more of the weak pabulum served up by modern psychoanalysts. By concentrating far too much on impersonal social pressures and the physical structure of thought in brain cells and neurochemicals, modern psychologists, psychiatrists and behavioral neurologists imply that there is no such thing as free will. These influences do exist, but it is the daily duty of every human being to make the free will choices to resist them when they would lead us to do inhuman things. Society is as it is because large numbers of people have decided to make it that way; it could flow in a different direction, if large numbers of people decided to change course. “Society” or a mysterious “chemical imbalance” (which are rarely demonstrated with blood tests) cannot be used as excuses for rampagers to avoid blame, because they made free will choices to not resist such influences. These mass shooters are often keenly perceptive of the deadly direction that society is taking, as the Unabomber was – but in the end, they choose to go with the flow, rather than resist it.

Mass Murder: Cut-Throat Competition Taken to the Next Level

Nevertheless, as a certain Jewish carpenter once said, “a good tree does not produce bad fruit.” By the standards of our ancestors, our civilization is producing many other varieties of bad fruit as well, so we shouldn’t be surprised at the emergence of newer, deadlier, viler forms of sin. At a deeper level, certain specific social factors may predispose a person (if they refuse to resist them) to become a rampaging maniac. For example, certain occupations seem to produce them more than others, which is how the term “going postal” entered the American lexicon. Many mass shooters seem to have a military background, which raises questions about whether some of the techniques used to train our soldiers – and sometimes to brainwash them – may have deleterious psychological consequences. Some of them are right-wing nuts, such as the perpetrator of a killing spree in Norway last year and the gunman who killed seven people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin a few weeks ago. Hate radio may play a role in stoking the “free-floating anger” of such unstable people, whereas in other cases, the mainstream mass media may act as a sort of idol, attracting maniacs to the promise of notoriety through mass killings or the assassinations of celebrities and politicians. It might be best to deny these people the notoriety they seek, which is why I am experimenting with removing the names of killers from this column; in normal cases it may be wise for journalists to expose mass murderers by denouncing from every rooftop, but people who eagerly seek such exposure ought to be cast out and forgotten in the way medievals did to the bones of some of their most heinous criminals. There may also be some wisdom to enacting tougher gun laws, to a point. I have some sympathy for the National Rifle Association (NRA), but they take their position to the point of fanaticism at times when they resist any and all gun laws. The excuse that “Guns don't kill people, people do” is true, but if a person makes that decision, I’d rather see them armed with a pocketknife or a revolver instead of an Uzi.[4]

All of these factors play have played a role in the current epidemic of massacres, but one that is frequently overlooked, perhaps because it is so obvious, is the spirit of competition which seems to motivate them all. In fact, with each passing generation, it influences all of us to a greater degree, as our whole civilization is slowly converted to commercialism, under the impact of a round-the-clock barrage of advertisements and capitalist propaganda. This new Gospel of Greed makes the possession of wealth a mark of social esteem and of God’s favor  (if one happens to believe in him) while conversely, the lack of it is a punishment for the unfit, the lazy and the “losers.” Of course, this is entirely contrary to the Bible, which is replete with warnings like Proverbs 17:5 that “He who despises the poor slaps their Maker in the face” and Sirach 13:24, that “Riches are good if they are free from sin, and poverty is evil in the opinion of the ungodly.” The rich businessmen who govern us, including the false Christians who are staunchly Republican, have to gloss over such frightening passages as Mark 10:25 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The Catholics among them have to likewise dispense with the writings of the numerous saints, particularly St. John Chrysostom, who universally confirm that this has always been the proper understanding of such passages. Christianity is not only steadfastly opposed to the idolatry of consumer goods, but stands even more adamantly against the class prejudice that often  animates preoccupation with material wealth, which cannot be used as a weapon to get ahead of the Jones’. What now sets Western civilization and America in particular apart from all other societies in history is the degree to which it completely contradicts these specific teachings, by turning capitalism into a virtual state religion. The material, ceremonial and sacramental trappings of religion can be tolerated in such a society, as long as in the end, the people betray whatever faiths they pretend to hold by following the Almighty Dollar; Christianity and other faiths are thus reduced to a form of therapy and entertainment, or worse yet, as an avenue to social advancement. The spirit of competition preached by those at the apex of society is also completely contrary to Christian values of cooperation; there is nothing intrinsically loving about driving your opponent’s firm out of business, or in deliberately eliciting envy in a neighbor by buying a more expensive lawn mower. Capitalists wholeheartedly believe that by creating a world in which everyone competes with everyone else to the fullest, we will all become richer; this is both a heresy and a lie, but they are succeeding in converting us all to this poisonous way of thinking.  The medieval Catholic theologians recognized that no one can ever win the rat race, nor can avarice ever be satisfied, for it is an infinite sin. They also recognized that the brightest of angels fell from grace precisely because he used his gifts to compete with everyone else.

Unfortunately, the mass shooters who plague us seem to perceive quite correctly that they are doomed to lose in a rat race with the Jones’, but react to it the wrong way. The Unabomber’s writings are said to be filled with accurate criticisms of how depersonalized and atomized modern technology has made society, but how did he react to it? By using technological devices called bombs in order to commit a highly unsocial act called murder, in a highly impersonal way against victims he didn’t even know. It would be more accurate to say that it is not technology that is atomizing society and fraying the social bonds between Americans, but the acid of avarice, which entices children to abandon their parents, people to move away from communities, women to smash up their families and men to betray their country by emigrating, all to make more of the Almighty Dollar. Technology, in fact, is the only thing capable of keeping our unhealthy, highly inefficient and increasingly anti-social society working at all. Whether they can articulate it or not, there are a maniacal few among us who perceive quite rightly that American social life is turning into a free-for-all that they are doomed to lose – but instead of walking away from the game, they overturn the board in a tantrum. Some of them, particularly workplace shooters, rightly feel trapped in their position in life, unable to do anything as their whole world crumbles – but that is a fate that, sooner or later, we all face, for we are all prisoners of a finite world from which there is only one escape, death. A few of them have legitimate grievances against employers, spouses or others who have treated them badly – as we all do, because in a cut-throat society like ours where everyone is out for their own interests, everyone is a victim because everyone is a victimizer. Often their grievances are illegitimate because they are the direct results of their own anti-social actions. In a world where Social Darwinism prevails, everyone is persecuted, because everyone is a persecutor, but these mass shooters seem to think that they are singled out for punishment unjustly. Typically, they exhibit a pattern of overreacting to bona fide injustices in grossly inappropriate ways, or by resisting what they falsely perceive to be injustices, both of which lead to social consequences that seem to confirm their fears of persecution. Michael Douglas’ character in the film Falling Down exhibits this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Like many other maniacs, he is intelligent enough to realize that once he goes off the rails, his life as he knew it will be over – but instead of using that as motivation to get back on track, they decide to use up what is left of their lives in one short burst. This type of paranoid personality is quite capable of calculating far in advance that they will certainly be captured or killed, which instead of acting as a deterrent, prompts them to escalate their war against society even further into an all-out blitzkrieg. It is quite similar to the paranoid thinking of Japan’s military leaders prior to World War II, who got caught in an endless cycle of conquering new territory in order to gain more raw materials for their war machine, which only increased their own insecurity and need for raw materials further, right up until the point where they saw no alternative left but to launch a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Like those befuddled generals, today’s mass shooters recognize that they are doomed to lose far in advance. These are not crimes of passion, but of premeditated, cold, calculating mass murder. What sets them apart from the rest of us, however, is that they don’t accept losing, as we all inevitably do. They often perceive with greater detail and accuracy just how cold and competitive our civilization is, but they react to it quite differently, by launching what really amounts to a one-man war against the entire planet.

Saints have lamented for countless centuries about just how cold, cruel and ultimately disappointing this life can be, but what sets them apart is that they reacted to it in an entirely different way, by trying to fix whatever problems they could in this life, while hoping in an afterlife. Jesus and his followers, including modern leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, were not fools wearing rose-colored glasses. They knew that this life is full of injustice, but took care not to add their own, out of hope for a reward in the next. Today’s mass shooters take the same accurate view of the world, but refuse to die to themselves and end up leaving the world a much worse place than when they entered it. Like the angel who inspires them, they martyr everyone else for their own glory, rather than martyring themselves for the good of others. They have much in common with today’s Islamic suicide bombers, except that they die as martyrs to their own pride, rather than sacrificing themselves in the name of some over-arching cause, either good or bad. They are their own idols, with moral codes based on their own selfish interests. This is why they are preoccupied only with genuine or false injustices done to themselves, but lack the love to be offended by injustices against others. Once we get beyond their self-fulfilling prophecies, their perception that the whole world is against them may have some truth to it, because it is against us all. The saints understood this all too well – but instead of carrying their Cross like the rest of us, these rampaging maniacs seek revenge against the whole human race.
All of us are tested by life and none of us can say for certain how we would respond to suffering in certain ways, particularly unexpected ones; until we are willing to hang on a Cross for our enemies, however, we can safely say that we have work to our souls and love that is still lacking in our hearts. There is a new subgroup among society, however, that fails to carry their crosses in a spectacularly miserable way, one that has never been seen before in appreciable numbers. The reason for this is so obvious it is almost overlooked: they are not taught to carry them. In fact, the spirit of competition that pervades our increasingly perverse commercial civilization brands them as losers long before they’ve done anything wrong, merely because they haven’t won the rat race. Once they realize that they can’t win it, they have no incentive to restrain their anger, because we have taken it away from them denying the possibility of consequences in the next world for actions in this one. Such people begin by assuming that there will be no punishment for those who have wronged them in this life, then take matters into their own hands. They become vigilantes of a perverse sort, seeking to redress wrongs in this world because there is no hope of justice in an afterlife. Because selfishness is their creed and their moral code is malleable, the list of wrongs they seek to avenge inevitably includes actions that aren’t wrongs at all, or punishments that they deserved to suffer.  If they commit any wrongs in the course of their one-man war against the world, they of course need not fear punishment in the next either. They compound all of this by subscribing to one of the worst errors of our religion of Mammon, that it is possible to have forgiveness without a clear, detailed, unalterable moral code. How can anyone be forgiven if they’re not guilty of anything? Perhaps because our society is so riddled with the values of the Pharisees, most Westerners today fall into the trap of presuming forgiveness without acknowledging guilt, which is actually tantamount to whitewash. Today’s rampagers recognize only the guilt of their enemies, which they are never willing to forgive. Quite often, they end their miserable lives by committing suicide, which is even more prima facie evidence that they are unconcerned with judgment in the next world. In the Catholic moral code, suicide is not an escape, but a leap out of the frying pan into a fire which never ends. There are many false religions one could believe in which would not stand as a bar to mass murderers, serial killers and stalkers, but the original Christian moral code would give them all pause for thought.  If these mass shooters subscribed to that code, then they would have absolutely no incentive to kill themselves, or to kill others, or even to look at them cross-eyed. Once you believe that justice will not only be done in the next life, but done perfectly, it provides the power to overlook wrongs that we otherwise might be tempted to avenge ourselves. No one gets away with anything at all: they might be forgiven, in proportion to how much we forgive others, but not a single lie, not a bit of gossip, not a word of blasphemy, not a penny stolen will be overlooked and swept under the rug. That includes any injustices we have perpetrated on others, or instances in which we have failed to protect others from injustice when it was within our power. Once we subscribe to this belief, then it is easier to value the world less for idols like material goods and social status, and more as an engineering shop in which to make one’s own soul, for the very practical purpose of surviving eternity.

Quackery and Consequences

By teaching, even by omission or implication, that religion and the afterlife are of no consequence, or that justice and morals are malleable concepts, or by falling back on the unstated assumption of our civilization that all that matters in life is consumption and social status rather than good behavior, our psychologists, psychiatrists and behavioral neurologists are removing the only incentives these people have to correct themselves. These disciplines fail to take into account the fact that a man’s thoughts are not merely the sum of his brain cells and neurochemical charges, which must rearrange themselves to fit the thoughts we choose to think at least part of the time, otherwise there is no such thing as free will. If there really is no such thing as free will, then there is no such thing as evil, or blame to cast on monsters like the Aurora shooter. He might have been a brilliant neurology student, but if neurology affected his actions at all, it was likely through such false absolution. In some cases, maniacs of this kind are among the millions of Americans prescribed anti-depressants for chemical imbalances that they are almost never tested for, in what amounts to malpractice on a national scale. Any doctor who prescribed insulin without first testing them for diabetes could and would be sued, but psychiatrists and neurologists almost never test the serotonin levels of their patients before prescribing Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) like Paxil, Prozac and the like. There might be a place for such medications, but the degree to which they are wantonly prescribed, without adequate safety or efficacy testing, or even simple blood tests to confirm that the chemical imbalances are actually present, speaks volume about the arrogance and incompetence which riddle these professions. I have had to deal with these people for many years because of constant migraines and consequent panic attacks from the physical symptoms they produce, such as daily bouts of blindness and dizziness. Sadly, most of the people working in these professions are far worse than you can ever imagine. I have personally seen first-hand why Medicaid and Medicare are going broke and it is not because of a flood of patients, but the greed and incompetence of much of the medical staff, many of whom are simply looting the system - as I will discuss in great detail one day, when I post my misadventures in the health care system for public review. The arrogance of some is terribly palpable, to the point that they assert that they have no need to read medical journals, since they have seen it all in their own clinical practices; others have clearly gone off the deep end, perhaps after prescribing themselves their own concoctions. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. are given “cocktails” of different anti-depressants by such people, in combinations that have never been tested on anyone, anywhere, in the history of the planet. I have watched a few people I have been acquainted with go right off the deep end after being the first guinea pigs of these cocktails - which, of course, is often used as an excuse to experiment on them even more. At a deeper level, there is nothing more depressing for a depressed person or more worrying for anxious one to hear than that they are helpless to change their own thoughts, which are merely the result of atoms and mysterious chemicals moving around in their heads. When legitimate chemical imbalances and neurological damage affect behavior, it is usually more likely to produce more disorder or loss of function in behavior, just as smashing a clock will leave it less capable of telling time accurately. It won’t produce purposeful, directed behavior, particularly towards evil goals, for the same reason that a broken clock isn’t going to gain complex new functionality, like telling mean Greenwich Time or calculating in light years. By investigating the physical structure of the brain we may one day understand better how the brain accommodates itself to the thoughts we choose to think, but we will never find a cure for evil, or find an organ where the human soul resides. We could, however, lose the latter by seeking to find the former hidden away in some poorly understood region of the brain.

                Thomist psychologists who use the medieval understanding of the virtues and vices as their starting point could easily identify the seemingly inscrutable motivations behind such lurid modern crimes as serial killing, child molestation, stalking and mass shooters. They all stem from pride, which is a progressive spiritual disease that manifests itself in ways that are complex but nonetheless predictable. Furthermore, there is a supernatural element to certain cases of abnormal behavior that can only be explained by reference to the demonic. Modern psychiatry has some plausible theories about why schizophrenics hear voices – but they never dare to acknowledge, let alone explain, why those voices invariably speak blasphemies of one brand or another. Why is it that such a high proportion of the occupants of mental hospitals have dabbled with the occult?  Famed psychiatrist Karl Menninger encountered many cases of psychotic behavior that he had to admit could only be explained by demonic infestation. Other mental health professionals have seen first-hand how a certain proportion of their patients can be driven into frenzies by the mere presence of a Eucharist, even when hidden in the pockets of a staff member or visitor as they walk through the corridors of a mental hospital. America’s most famous exorcist in the 20th Century, Fr. Malachi Martin, wrote the definitive work on demonic possession, Hostage to the Devil, which encompasses four detailed accounts of the exorcisms of four Americans. It contains valuable explanations of certain forms of seemingly nonsensical behavior, including some patterns that I don’t think even Martin himself recognized.  Of course, if you don’t have time to read and need instant proof of the role of the diabolical in human psychology, look at the mugshot that frequently accompanied the Aurora story in the press. Anyone who has seen the chilling smirk on the shooter’s face knows which photo I am referring to. His eyes are lit up by a false light, much like the eyes of the leader of the Manson Family are in every photo taken of him since he went to prison.

                Mainstream academia refuses to discuss such issues because, quite plainly, they are prejudiced against orthodox Christianity. Westerners are generally trained to avoid the topic of religion altogether in a knee-jerk fashion; as G.K. Chesterton once pointed out, now that everyone is technically free to discuss religion, no one dares to. This prejudice is raised to full-fledged bigotry in modern academia, however, particularly against Catholicism, precisely because it acts as a break against the overweening pride of our intellectuals, who tend to make idols out of their particular subjects. Physicists don’t like being told that God is an indispensable first cause; economists don’t prefer to hear the Good News that capitalism (unlike distributism) has never worked in practice; historians don’t want to teach Christocentric accounts of human history; philosophers want to think without reference to the origin of Logic and Reason themselves; even many modern theologians want to be “free” to invent their own ideas about God, regardless of their objective truth. In this sense, modern psychologists, psychiatrists and neurologists are merely following the lead of their comrades in other academic disciplines. Discussion of God is unwelcome in Western universities, even in the innumerable colleges who falsely call themselves Catholic, especially if it is from an orthodox viewpoint. Regardless of whether or not the topic is offensive, it is highly practical, because how we answer the question of his existence colors everything we do, including the ideas our intellectuals adopt. The core problem of secularism is this: What if God is a tangible, objective part of reality, as real as the nose on your face? Even if he isn’t, then we still have to answer this question in the negative and use it as our first principle before discussing any other topic at all. Because if God exists, and he has ideas about a particular issue or academic discipline, then his opinions are by logical necessity perfectly correct. Ideas that contradict his are then, by necessity, false to some degree. Vague ideas about a general, laissez-faire God who mainly serves a therapeutic role have no place in these discussions, if that kind of God exists; we must then sort out the true statements made about him from the false ones, which is hard work, with no room for artistic license on the part of intellectuals.

                Either such a God exists or he doesn’t, for both viewpoints cannot be true. If he is a part of reality, like Antarctica, 1 + 1 = 2 and the color red, then it is crucial for us to understand him, for very practical reasons.  Assuming that he was benevolent, if we started to make decisions contrary to his will, then we would sooner or later suffer as a result of choosing philosophies opposed to his. God’s ideas on any subject are by definition correct, so ours are incorrect in exact proportion to how much we disagree with him. Sad to say, this has been the norm for centuries, because all of the popular agnostic ideas that entered the modern mind during the Reformation and Enlightenment up until the present day have been disastrous in practice. Nazism and Communism were the direct results of the combination of numerous heresies together; the abandonment of Catholic just war principles led directly to the breakdown of international order that produced the Napoleonic Wars and World Wars; in economics, financial crashes began precisely when capitalism was born in the 16th Century and have been with us ever since. And in the realm of human behavior, the replacement of Thomism with innumerable fads in pop psychology has likewise proven disastrous. The disciplines of psychiatry, psychology and behavioral neurology preach dogmas that are irreconcilable with Catholicism, with deadly results for everyone concerned. The epidemic of mass shootings is merely one example of their utter failure to explain human behavior. Together, Catholic doctrines about morality and the afterlife would make it utterly impossible for any disgruntled American nut to simply go postal. By simultaneously denying them justice in the afterlife, threatening them with punishment for their own injustices, making moral standards malleable, denigrating free will and weakly giving in to the spirit of competition that acts as an acid on our whole society, our mental health professionals have indirectly  made this epidemic possible. As a practical matter, if we want to fix the problem, we ought to teach everyone a contrary philosophy, such as Catholicism, which provides strong incentives against such bad behavior. You can find daily communicants who are sinners, but statistically, you don’t find many serial killers, mass murderers or stalkers among them. During the recent pedophilia scandal, numerous child molesters were found among the Catholic priesthood – but this because a vast section of the priesthood long ago abandoned Catholicism itself. This was merely one isolated ripple in an unprecedented flood of apostasy over the last couple of centuries, at least in the Western branches of the Church. If this had not occurred, then secularists would not have had the strength to impose their defective understanding of human behavior.

There is no practical substitute for educating people into a religion that is most in accord with the truth about God, whatever it may be. In the absence of these values, opposing ones will continue to gather strength and stretch the fabric of society to the breaking point. If you stretch anything long enough, holes will begin to appear in random places, and our civilization is no more immune to this than tissue paper or Swiss cheese. Soulless people like these mass shooters will continue to appear here and there, across a widening swath of the planet, increasing in number and deadliness until the one philosophy capable of keeping them in check has been eradicated. At that point, the odds of one of them gaining access to weapons of mass destruction becomes the real concern, because we know for a fact that this is the one type of human being who certainly will use them. The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction doesn’t apply to them. In fact, it never really applied to Mao Tse-Tung, who once frightened Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev half to death with a scheme to lure American troops into China, then nuke his own territory and kill hundreds of millions of his own people, using Russian missiles. There is no bargaining with such men, nor appealing to Christian values they don’t have, any more than there is in dealing with these mass shooters, who have blank and empty holes where their consciences ought to be. Westerners who have lost their appreciation for Christianity often assume that its humanitarian assumptions are universally shared, but they’re not; they have to be instilled, which is why missionary work is so incredibly utilitarian and practical for the whole world. Pharisees likewise tend to think that their enemies can always be bought off, but historically, not all of them can be. The longer we go on assuming the benefits of orthodox Christianity while actively suppressing its teaching, and acting on Pharisaical assumptions about human motivations that only apply to our own commercial civilization, the shakier the security of the whole human race will become. As so often happens with deep social problems, the ultimate consequences will be found in foreign policy. The psychological and theological mistakes that make mass shootings possible will, if left unchecked, eventually become a national security problem. Sooner or later, we will come to a time when the vine of Christianity will have gone dry and the world will no longer be able to live off the capital the Catholic Church endowed it with for two millennia, as Chesterton once spoke of. At that point, even bigger holes will open up in the fabric of society, perhaps in the form of a single man, in the wrong place and at the wrong time, with access to the weaponry of an entire nation. Then the whole human race will understand why Voltaire, despite his hatred of the Catholic Church, had to admit that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” The disbelief of mass shooters is not only directly responsible for their own diabolical behavior, but in turn, their multiplication in the midst of an unprecedented wave of apostasy serves as a powerful proof that God does in fact exist, so we should stop reinventing him.

The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.

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[1] For more details on the guy’s academic background, see news articles like this one and this one.

[2] This term was apparently coined by a Fr. Wasman a century or so ago, according to Arnold Lunn, one of the leading thinkers in the Chesterton-Belloc school in the mid-20th Century. See p. 69, Lunn, Arnold, The flight From Reason, 1931, L. MacVeagh, The Dial Press Toronto, Longmans, Green and Co.: New York.

[3] See The Everlasting Man, 1925, which is available at Martin Ward’s excellent site, G.K. Chesterton’s Works on the Web.

[4] Yet even the most draconian gun laws aren’t going to help much in the future, thanks to the proliferation of technologies with deadly applications we haven’t even thought of yet. When I was ten years old, my parents were able to buy a science kit as a Christmas gift for me, complete with radioactive uranium and radium, so I could build my own cloud chamber at home. While sifting through my father’s physics books, I came across a catalog physicists could use to order any type of gas you could imagine, including deadly radioactive radon, if they had a spare thousand dollars or so. I’m sure there are better safeguards against that sort of thing now, but only against the deadly uses we’ve thought of. Think of what might happen a generation from now, when every parent might be able to buy their kids gene splicing kits to take to the neighborhood science fair. Once that kind of technology becomes ubiquitous, it will be very difficult to keep aspiring maniacs from designing their own plagues at home. We can’t afford to let such technology fall into the wrong hands, so it is absolutely critical that we identify whose hands those are, as well as why they would be the wrong ones.