There are two ingredients required to make a mass shooter: a horrific worldview, and insanity. Many of us already live peacefully and contentedly with a horrific worldview. For those of us who deny the existence of God, the implications of that worldview are indeed horrific. Without God, our lives are meaningless. Without God, there can be no morality in an objective sense. If we are the result of a meaningless, unguided process that formed us from stardust, then torturing a baby for fun is no different from enjoying a pizza or going to a movie. That statement seems extreme and horrific because it is. But there is one thing it is not, and that is illogical.
Of course, none of us actually live that way, because that would be awful. Most of us live our lives as if good and evil do exist objectively. We let the dissonance lie in the back of our brains like some sort of foggy mystery, and we try not to think about it too much.
A nagging inconsistency
But for some, that inconsistency between our observed moral universe and belief in a Godless one festers like a splinter in the psyche until something must be done about it. When this happens, we have three options: we can pursue a path that necessarily leads to Christ, we can put a numbing agent on the splinter and try to forget about it a few more years, or we can choose pure nihilism.
GK Chesterton famously asserted that it’s not imagination that drives one mad, but pure analytical logic. “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
Only the truly insane can afford to be perfectly, consistently, logical. The rest of us must find a way to function in a God-created universe full of wonder and mystery. Once we have reduced all the mysteries of the universe into a material equation to be worked out logically in our heads, we have set the stage for insanity. Darwinism set the stage in 1859. It has since transformed into a meta-worldview that spawned thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Peter Singer, who advocates for the truly insane practice of infanticide. These people became the new clergy for a replacement religion that began to inhabit the universities before trickling down to our high schools and elementary schools.
And all seemed fine for a while because as I said, no one actually lives as if these philosophies are true. Because we aren’t insane. These ideas are the luxury of western thinkers living in a society insulated by the Judeo-Christian ethic.
Ingredient #2: Insanity
But then ingredient number two entered the scene. By the start of the 1960s and the sexual revolution, American psychologists had internalized the teaching of Darwin, leading them to treat humans as walking bags of chemicals that could be tinkered with to cure all ills of human nature. In the 70s, the populations of mental hospitals reached epidemic levels. In the 80s, we emptied the hospitals and released the patients into the general population. In the 90’s we started drugging them.
Today, we have Xanax, Zoloft, Celexa, Prozac, Ativan, Desyrel, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, Effexor which amount to 290 million prescriptions per year- and that’s not even all of them.
Almost every single mass shooter in the last several decades was on one or several of these drugs. Whether it was the drugs that made them insane, some abnormality in the brain, or a combination of both, it’s clear to me that when insanity met nihilism, we then had a growing population of people who were ready to follow nihilism to its logical conclusions.
If you can manage to find the manifestos of many of these killers, study the books they read and what they thought, you will find there is a cold, internal logic to their thinking, and it’s all rooted in nihilism. In their own worldview, they did absolutely nothing wrong. In a Godless universe populated by nothing but carbon-based animals, a mosque shooting is no different than stepping on an anthill or removing an invasive species of carp from Lake Erie.
It has taken the closed-loop reasoning of the insane to show us how insane our thinking has become. The chickens have come home to roost. If we do not turn back to God as a culture, I fear these mass shooters will continue, and only get worse. Eventually, we will elect one of them to public office. I pray that’s not what it takes to wake us up.
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