A host of idiots has come crawling to light after the tragedy of Virgina Tech,* most of them making the fatuous claim that some kind of lack of religiosity is the cause of death for 32 humans and one psycho gunman. Pam notes that the most recent in this list is Chuck Norris, who is a sort of poor-man’s prophet, if by “prophet” one means “muscle-headed cretinous extrusion of ignorance”.
Quoth Walker, Texas Fuckwit:
I believe those who wield the baton of the secular progressive agenda bear significant responsibility for the escalation of school shootings. […] If we are ever to restore civility in our land and our schools, we must turn back the clocks to a time when such shocking crimes didn’t even exist - when we valued life and respected one another much more then we do today.
Now this isn’t as bad as suggesting marriage-equality laws in Oregon are the cause, but it’s pretty damn close, and it’s typical of the nattering drivel issuing from the orifices of the goddishly deranged.
The problem is that it’s a load of horseshit. School massacres are actually on the decline in the US, not the rise, and the truly worst one in US history took place in Michigan in 1927 — back when prayer wasn’t simply acceptable in schools, but a required start to each morning’s work.
The Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. Their deaths constitute the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history.
Apparently God’s Holy Umbrella wasn’t sufficient on that Spring morning. Perhaps if Chuck had been there he could have done something.
Oh, but wait, we have further evidence of both the failure of God and His Holy Agent, Chuck — in the form of the killings of October 2, 2006. You’ll note that this was before the Republicans lost control of congress, and definitely during the time when Saint Norris has blessed us with His Presence.
Of course in this case the victims were fewer in number (five plus the perpetrator), but the setting was more significant, since that was the day of the Amish massacre. The victims in this case were extremely religiously inclined and attending a parochial school — ideally situated, in the minds of the goddish, behind a double protection of His Holy Love. Right?
Now if I were an analytically minded Christist fanatic** I might be a bit puzzled by these two circumstances. They seem to belie the assertion that a “lib’rul” America is the cause of school killings; one occurred in a very religious setting, after all, and the other occurred in a time when America was still very aggressively christo-fascist.
Ah, but you see, that’s not the case, now is it? After all 2006 — like every year since Clinton was elected president — was a banner year for liberalism, atheism, godless…ism, and even Islamism. So it wouldn’t be too surprising, now would it, that the forces of Satan would be able to penetrate into a one-room schoolhouse. Besides, they were Amish, and we know that’s not exactly the right flavor of Christianity, or else the victims would have been spared. See?
And as for 1927 … heavens! Flapper girls, speakeasies, and women given the vote just a few years earlier. Naturally it’s no wonder that God was absent that day in Michigan; He’d turned His face away in shame. So of course it makes sense that in order to show His Divine Wrath, God would let several dozen schoolchildren get blown to pieces by a murderous lunatic. After all it was God’s Prophet Elisha who had 42 children murdered by bears, if one believes the Biblical account in II Kings.
23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. “Go on up, you baldhead!” they said. “Go on up, you baldhead!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.
To a Christist, it’s okay for God to be so pissed He murders kids in order to get a point across. That’s the problem with arguing with the goddish. They’re immune to reason. Even facts which undermine their claims can be wriggled away from.
Obviously religion — or lack of it — or even asinine nostalgia for the “good old days” bears no relationship to events in the real world. But then, neither do the claims of the religiously deranged, which is why I treat their claims not with solemn respect, but a healthy dose of relentless mockery.
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* I don’t consider the events at VA Tech to be a school shooting in the same way as, say, the Columbine killings. Tragic, yes — but college students in their 20s and older simply don’t hold — to me anyway — the same emotional weight as a roomful of young teenagers.
** There is no such thing.
