Something terrible has happened, and a community sits tonight in a church-building, coming together for comfort and safety, coming together to spill out their grief in the presence of all their loved ones. I have complete respect for this; the church provides ritual and place to accompany the community, and has for centuries, and I don't see it as a religious event so much as a humin one.
However, I want to take this opportunity to share a different form of comfort, one disconnected from religion. The comfort an atheist takes in science, and also the comfort an atheist takes in the idea that there are no supernatural explanations or influences at play in tragic events.
Religion will say, "That man is in hell," and "Those children are in heaven." Both of these thoughts are a relief! The children aren't really dead; they're just somewhere else. And that bastard ... he's being punished the way we wish we could punish him for hurting us all so deeply.
Atheism can't offer anything so comforting, and if all of the social pressure to believe in religion were removed entirely, I believe that this lack of comfort alone would send some people in search of the supernatural. All we can say is, that man doesn't exist. If he thought he would be famous, he was right, but when he thought that, some part of him probably had a narcissistic vision of watching everyone talking about him. Nope. He's just another dead animal right now. At the same time, there is comfort in knowing that there really are no unseen, evil influences loose in this world; there are no demons, no evil spirits that might have caused him to do what he did. Because we know this, we also know that we need not be afraid that a perfectly normal person will become possessed--a common fear of the pre-scientific age.
Religion asks, "Why did this happen?" Some of the answers will be, "Satan tempted the man," "God allowed it to happen in order to test your faith," "God couldn't stop human agency," and "It's a sign of God's wrath." One of the more costly tolls taken by religious thought is an
extra-heavy burden of blame in the wake of any tragedy. If only we had
pleased god more, angered god less! If only we were more perfect in our
faith, less tempted, if we prayed more, sinned less often!
Atheism says, "Nothing those children or adults did brought it upon themselves. No benevolent being decided to make it happen, or to avoid preventing it from happening." No one but the killer had an influence on where and when this event happened, on who lived or died. It was random. Randomness is terrifying. Randomness means that Hurricane Sandy can sweep good children out to sea; it means that I could be struck tonight by a bullet shot by some idiot in a car driving by--or by an asteroid, for that matter. Randomness means that I am not safe, not really, not ever.
Really? ME? I'm not special, I'm not safe because god loves me? If danger comes into my life, no magical being is going to rescue me? It takes some getting used to--even now, over a decade free from religion, I sometimes find myself resorting to a religious type of pattern-seeking, trying to read the future, but without a god to turn to for reassurance that my "prediction" is correct, I wake up to the fact that I won't know, can't know how things will work out.
On the other hand, the randomness of existence goes hand in hand with an appreciation of the fact that I am alive. A thousand incidents of potential lethality have not killed me, from the garden-trowel incident when I was 18 months old, to the ear-infection when I was 14, to the bizarre encounter with a crazed drug-dealer a decade ago. My parents, likewise, were not killed before I was born, nor was I one of the hundreds of eggs that went exactly nowhere in their reproductive attempts. Instead, I am alive--one tiny little animal among 7 billion of the same species, surrounded by a carpet of beautiful life on one hell of a lucky little planet. My own UNimportance in the grand scheme gives me great comfort, as well. My actions do not reflect well or ill on some Grand Plan. I am not responsible for events on some Celestial Sphere. I'm just me; this is merely my life.
The heroism shown by teachers, the principal, the school psychologist--that was "just" them. The legacy of their lives was in the protection of their children. They live on in memory; only for a few generations, granted, but no god was required for them to be good, and I am more in-awe of them, feel more joy at their having lived, because their actions were not the result of any influence but their own strong protective instincts.
Why did this happen? Religion answers "God" and "Satan" and "Sin."
Atheism looks to science for answers. What do we find? Mass shootings are almost universally committed by angry, young, depressed males, who are most likely to be white. There are more violent gun deaths where there are more guns. There are not more violent gun deaths where there is more "mental illness"--there is no evidence that this shooter had a "mental illness." Both murders and suicides are often followed by "copycats." And the United States has the greatest percentage, hands down, of both gun deaths and mass-shootings. A brief survey of news coverage also indicates that, when white males commit mass-shootings, the term "mental illness" (a term that is essentially as meaningless as "physical illness," which includes everything from hangnails to cancer) comes up repeatedly, while non-white murderers are more likely to be called violent criminals.
Why did this happen? Because a depressed, angry white male had easy access to guns (his mother was a gun-buff), wanted to kill himself, wanted the nation to know about it, and knew from other, recent shootings that a sure-fire way to become "famous" would be to do what they had done. Or one step worse.
Religion asks, how do we keep this from happening again? Religion answers, "Pray." I can only point out that, statistically, at least 70% of the victims will have been Christian, and most of them will have either prayed or been prayed-for sometime recently.
Atheists ask, "How do we keep this from happening again?" and starts looking for ways to change one of the proven factors in the chain of causation. Take away guns, screen for and treat depression, deny media coverage to these evil pricks--that last one won't happen, but I can wish.
Despite horrors like the one that just happened, we live in a time of reduced violent crime and murder. Can we thank religion for that? Are there more churches? Do more people pray? Has this become a monotheistic country, all worshipping the correct deity in the correct way? No. Sorry. The change has come due to science; psychology, sociology, and psychiatry have all contributed to education, law enforcement, and mental health care, and we live in a safer, saner world as a result. We focus on teaching children empathy, we're addressing bullying in our schools and workplaces, and we've torn down a lot of the -isms at the heart of many violent crimes.
There is a common humin morality encoded in our genes, one that long predates the Christian god: "Do to others what you want them to do to you." In other words, act with empathy. Think about how what you're going to do will impact everyone around you. Science has helped to expand on this idea, allowing us to include more and more "others" in our view of "people who feel like me," and starting in on extending this empathy to other creatures on the planet. Perhaps we'll extend it far enough, fast enough, to find some way to turn the tide of extinction that we've set in place. If not, I take comfort from a fossil record that shows that, though massive extinctions have threatened life on earth at least five times in the past, life will go on--without us, perhaps, but all the beauty that is here will rise again.
