What caused the shooting?
Less than 24 hours after the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech, Ken Ham, the brilliant non-scientist who has opened the latest in a string of retarded Creationism museums, posted an article to his blog basically attributing the shootings to — believe it or not — evolutionary science.
With ole' Ken at the helm of this latest wave of not-so-subtle, anti-non-Christian, anti-intellectual, anti-science punditry, I can't wait to see who will be the next potluck-fellowship-meal-stuffed suit to credit Darwinian science with homicide.
Ken goes on:
Yeah? Bullshit! You did mean to say that, and you did say that.
Insensitive Christian opportunism is not just distasteful, it is disgraceful.
My heart goes out to the affected families. If I were to pray, I would pray that I never become as hardened and calloused and coldblooded as Christians like Ken Ham.
But then, maybe I've misread him. Maybe I've stated this too strongly.
What do you think?
To monitor comments posted to this topic, use
.
We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals—and humans—arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as “cheap.” (link)
With ole' Ken at the helm of this latest wave of not-so-subtle, anti-non-Christian, anti-intellectual, anti-science punditry, I can't wait to see who will be the next potluck-fellowship-meal-stuffed suit to credit Darwinian science with homicide.
Ken goes on:
I’m not at all saying that the person who committed these murders at Virginia Tech was driven by a belief in millions of years or evolution.
Yeah? Bullshit! You did mean to say that, and you did say that.
Insensitive Christian opportunism is not just distasteful, it is disgraceful.
My heart goes out to the affected families. If I were to pray, I would pray that I never become as hardened and calloused and coldblooded as Christians like Ken Ham.
But then, maybe I've misread him. Maybe I've stated this too strongly.
What do you think?
To monitor comments posted to this topic, use
.
Comments
Your guy, Stalin killed 20 million people How could he do that? For him human life is nothing. There is no God to accountable to.
I am not saying that the guy who killed students at VT was an atheist. But had he been taught that every life is in the image of God and God puts murderers in hell forever he would not have dared to kill the students. That is why, not taking God's commandments is as deadly as atheism.
I was thinking that before I got to that line.
Besides these two jerks, all we need now is another xtian to tell us it's all part of gods plan.
Look at Adolf Hitler. David Koresh. John Applegate (the cult leader form California who with 38 cult followers committed mass suicide).
When was the last time you saw a scientist or atheist waving that science book and riling the crowds to kill people by the millinos, including themselves?
Paul, you are the worst excuse for a Christian I've had the displeasure to tolerate.
Regardless, here's some history for you: (History is stuff you read in books, Paul. Books can be found in libraries, schools and bookstores. Check some out sometime.)
Stalin was brought up in the Georgian Orthodox Church, one of the oldest of Christian churches. He aspired to be a priest and at the age of 15 he won a scholarship to a seminary in Tbilisi (or Tiflis), the capital of Georgia.
He excelled in singing and sang a solo in the local church for Tsar Alexander III's birthday.
Paul, say hello to your guy, Ignorance, for me. I haven't seen "that guy" since leaving the company of morons like you and Ham.
Your guy, Stalin killed 20 million people How could he do that? Oh yeah - I remember now - he was a Christian. One of us. Forget what I just said. He's on my side, doing the work of my God. Sorry. For him human life is nothing, just like for my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ and his dad. There is no God to accountable to but those two.
I am not saying that the guy who killed students at VT was an atheist. Actually - sorry to admit - I don't know what the fuck I am saying! :-) But had he been taught that every life is in the image of God and God puts murderers in hell forever he would not have dared to kill the students, but instead killed members of his own family that don't worship out god first. That is why, not taking God's commandments is as deadly as atheism. Or taking Allah's..., or Zeus.. or, oh fuck - I'm appearing stupid. Forget everything I said, K? I am sorry. I should have done my research first. Dang.
God bless, -Paul.
(Actually, it's Wes.)
On the other hand I don't necessarily disagree with your responses. And yeah, Paul, it's not that hard to pick apart your post.
What strikes me out of all this (and after listening to the podcast) is the biting sarcasm and insults. If you want to make an intellectual argument, great! I'm looking for intellectual discussion on these topics, but you cheapen it when you make personal attacks on those who disagree.
I just listened to the podcast on the emotional experience of conversion, but insulting your opponents in a debate relies on those same emotional effects. It inspires fear in those who would disagree, it makes people feel guilty for what they say, it makes an emotional connection between the opponent and some unpleasant ideas.
It's hard to get through all the hammed-up sarcastic voices in the podcast - it makes me feel talked down to even if I would otherwise agree with the point you're making.
"Evolution taught us that life is cheap" - Paul
How can evolution teach us that life is cheap? Naturalism teaches absolutely the opposite. Life is fragile and could disappear with the coming of an astroid that we have no defence against. The quality of existence that we experience today has come at the expense of uncountable generations of evolution.
If you are to suggest that this somehow is not equivalent or greater in value than a six day creation (obviously a rush job) to be annihilated fairly soon, then you have some explaining to do.
- Willem
I find it ironic that fundies make the claim that atheist believe life is worthless and cheap when in fact it is entirely the opposite.
"Kill them all. God will know his own" - Arnaud-Armaury, the Abbot of Citeaux, and "spiritual advisor" to the Albigensian Crusade
"Kill them all and let God sort them out," is attributed to Dominic Guzman, founder of the Dominican order of priests
And let us not forget Genesis 22:1-2 where god commands Abraham to offer his own son as sacrifice upon the alter.
How about Pope Pius V? He ordered the deaths of over 2000 Waldensian Protestants in Calabria, the slaughtering of Huguenot Protestants in France as well as ordering the deaths of any prisoners, and launching the final crusade against the muslims. He slaughtered thousands in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.
And then upon his death was vernated to saint-hood.
I simply do not see the love of life or respect of life in religion as it so wantonly claims. I also wonder at these statements to begin with when, at this time, there is virtually no information known or released about the killer Virginia tech.
Frankly, anyone that alludes to what the killers beliefs are based simply upon his actions is grandstanding and should be ashamed of themselves. Regardless if he was religious or atheist he was disturbed.
I find these comments by believers even more disturbing than usual. I sincerely believe that believers of religion are akin to the orcs and ogres of Mordor. To them their god is some great thing, but in practice it is truly some dark thing and they simply cannot or will not see that.
As I have said a few times before, Paul is not for real. He is a very clever atheist who knows how to get people going and he does a fine job of it.
Saddens me to see you admitting that you are a (probably willfully) ignorant moron. But you know, there's a way out. I think Dave needn't have been fully right, you may know what books are. What you clearly don't know, however, is that there are more books out there than just da wholly babble and the crappy books written by babblical cretinists and your fellow morontheists in general.
Next time you want to rant against "evilution", atheism and the like... read some on it first, to know what you're talking about.
Of course once you know, you won't try to rant anymore for you know there's no reason to... but that's not my problem.
"I am not saying that the guy who killed students at VT was an atheist. But had he been taught that every life is in the image of God and God puts murderers in hell forever he would not have dared to kill the students. That is why, not taking God's commandments is as deadly as atheism"
If God here is the Bible God, it is clear you are ignorant. Either you have not read the Bible, or the Bible contents were beyond your understanding.
The Bible God, as I and others have noted - because we have read the Bible - is a malevolent, revengeful, genocidal maniac, fit for the hangman's noose. He is reported, in this so-called holy gospel of his, to have killed humans and animals recklessly, which means unjustifiably, and he is reported to have instructed his followers, the Hebrews, to kill other humans who were not of their tribe and to seize or rob them of their lands and other possessions.
Here, read these lines, taken from the Book of Numbers:
• 11.1 Now the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of the LORD, and when he heard them his anger was aroused. Then fire from the LORD burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp.
• 16.35. fire came out from the LORD and consumed the 250 men who were offering the incense.
• 25.4. The LORD said to Moses, "Take all the leaders of these people, kill them and expose them in broad daylight before the LORD, so that the LORD's fierce anger may turn away from Israel."
• 25.16. The LORD said to Moses,
• 25.17. "Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them [etc]”
• 31.17. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,
• 31.18. but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
From Deuteronomy:
• 7.16. You must destroy all the peoples the LORD your God gives over to you. Do not look on them with pity and do not serve their gods, for that will be a snare to you.
• 12.2. Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains and on the hills and under every spreading tree where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods.
• 12.3. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places
From Joshua:
• 6.21. They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it - men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.
• 6.24. Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the LORD's house.
• 8.25. Twelve thousand men and women fell that day - all the people of Ai.
• 10.11. As they fled before Israel on the road down from Beth Horon to Azekah, the LORD hurled large hailstones down on them from the sky, and more of them died from the hailstones than were killed by the swords of the Israelites.
• 10.30. The LORD also gave that city and its king into Israel's hand. The city and everyone in it Joshua put to the sword. He left no survivors there. And he did to its king as he had done to the king of Jericho
• 10.39. They took the city, its king and its villages, and put them to the sword. Everyone in it they totally destroyed. They left no survivors. They did to Debir and its king as they had done to Libnah and its king and to Hebron.
Are you so blind [or dense?] that you can't see the image of the God you supposedly believe in? And if you believe in Christ being the goody-goody one, please remember that he claimed that "he and the
Father [God]are one".
There are numerous other passages in the Bible evidencing the racism, cruelty and hate of the Bible God.But this is NOT saying that he exists; we can only discuss about him as he has been portrayed, no more no less.
And if you believe in the Trinity, you can simply substitute the term "Trinity" for God whenever the word "God" appears in the Bible.
Have you heard about the Crusader Wars and other wars initiated by God's so-called followers? Have you heard of the Inquistion that was allegedly sanctioned by the Catholic Church, which resulted in the death of thousands of innocent people, many of whom were women who were burnt to death after they had been falsely accused of being witches?
Your God was afraid of witches; he told his followers: You shall not suffer a witch to live.
His followers carried out his instruction and what happened? In Germany alone, if figures quoted are to be believed, about 100,000 women were burnt to death.
The Bible God, assuming he exists, deserves to be called THE ASSHOLE or SOB; other pejoratives can be added, as one sees fit.
That's right! In "conservative" Virginia, a gun permit isn't needed to buy a gun. You only need a permit if you want to buy more than one handgun per month.
So it was not evolution that caused the shooting. It was all the ultra-conservative Christians who regularly lobby to keep their guns.
I have on opinion on the gun issue, but as I told my husband, why do all those Bible-belt dwellers need guns? Don't they have any faith that God will protect them?
Ah! yes, they want the guns to kill animals...let's let them have the guns, perhaps they will shoot themselves one of these days when they realize what kind of animals they are.
However, there are more important points to be made.
Let's feel for those who lost people in Virginia and worry about putting down the superstitious later.
Gramps
Who bets he was responsible, just to be sure that he doesn't get it wrong and look like an idiot.
Of course, I have respect for those who got hurt or killed and for the grieving parents.
Those dumbass religious, who say they are burning in hell, or in a better place, or it was meant to happen or whatever, they are the ones who regard 'life' as cheap and meaningless and easy to use and dispose of. I say, get stuffed.
These folk can't wait for "Armageddon and the rapture," they couldn't care less about Global warming They want the end of human society as we currently know it. They see something akin to a nuclear exchange, as a good thing, because it would mean that the time has come for them to get their reward for believing in Jesus.
Now I'm not sure exactly how many people will have been lucky enough to be born in the right country, and have the right parents, and have had exactly, the correct acculturation, for getting the true version of Christianity, to lodge rock solid, in their brains, and shut down all critical, logical, and rational, thought, so that they will be judged to have the correct belief, and therefore be the ones to fly up into the sky with Jesus, but one thing is for sure....
....Several billions of the rest of us will be left to experience, the God awful mess, that they leave behind.
THAT'S "BILLIONS" WITH A B!!!
Dan
basically the same point of view, but said a lot nastier. I encourage you to read the thread. It's terribly opportunistic, and cheap.
You said, "It's hard to get through all the hammed-up sarcastic voices in the podcast."
I thought I knew what you were talking about until you used the word "voices." Now I'm confused. What podcast are you talking about?
However, these are college students and college professors. They probably believe the religion of gun-control and wouldn't carry a weapon. Carrying a weapon doesn't make one violent, but it allows one to stop a violent person, armed or not.
when they write something like this. As the anniversary of the
Coumbine shootings nears, we are
again reminded of how the Religious
Right will seize upon any tragedy
to promote their ignorance and
superstition. (Remember how they
tried to turn one of the slain
students into a Christian dying for
her faith? This later was shown to
be false.)
How any reasonably intelligent
person could believe the teaching
of evolution could spawn an incident like this is beyond me.
Most of us at this website believe
in evolution, or at least that it
is quite possible, and none of us
have gone around shooting anyone.
This type of religious opportunism
is sickening.
Perhaps, the VT Shooter got the idea to commit this horrible atrocity from Ken Ham’s god who, by example, has done this many times. Maybe the VT Shooter is the “Instrument of God’s Judgment” for the “Sins of Our Nation” as Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson suggested after 9/11.
I can’t write any more… I’m sick!
So why the pathological lying by these fundamentalist?
Because the evidence and the experiments overwhelmingly support the theory of evolution and overwhelmingly undermine the creationist's stories. That is all they have, stories and myths. So they must lie about evolution in every context because the theory of evolution says their creation story cannot be true. And they hate that.
They constantly lie about the evidence for evolution, what evolution actually "teaches" and even about Darwin himself (as if cutting the man down somehow disabuses his science...really, that's pathetic). They lie about its applications (e.g. eugenics is NOT an application of evolution, eugenics is an application of selective breeding practices on humans, which humans have been doing with animals for thousands of years) and even its adherents (e.g. Hitler was NOT a evolutionist).
Some of you may know, I am a zoologist, raised in a conservative chrisitian minister's home, went to a conservative christian high school and college, was a devout conservative christian. That all started to change when I realized, in my creation-based science classes, that the teachers and professors were lying about the evidence for evolution versus creation, lying about what evolution taught, and lying about the social impacts of evolution. Liars the lot of them.
So, people like Ken Ham, Dr. Kennedy and Paul have to lie about a scientific theory, and lie about atheist's and their moral code to get sympathy for their immoral religion and the horrible god they worship. They are some of the most ethically challegened people in our society. Just look at Paul's comment to brigid...heartless, self-righteous, judgmental, and arrogant. Just like the god he worships.
Stronger now
All posts by these two will be deleted when discovered.
Everyone else: Please refrain from feeding the trolls.
Thanks.
"What would Ham think if it were revealed that Cho came from a deeply Christian background, as many immigrants from South Korea do? How does Ham know that religion in classrooms would not actually increase the mass murder rate?"
See the entire Article by clicking here.
- Cho Seung-Hui
"To die is gain and to live is Christ" == dangerous idea. Paul's "It's all good" message has gotten a lot of people killed.
"We have forgotten God. That's why all this has happened"
From the article:
When we ask, "How could this happen?", we cannot do anything better than quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said of the cruel rise of brutal and tyrannical communism in his native land, "We have forgotten God. That's why all this has happened."
When people ask the question, as they did on 9/11, where was God when this campus was terrorized, the proper response can only be, "Our culture has spent 40 years telling God to get lost, and defiantly declaring to him that he is no longer welcome in our high schools, our colleges, and in our public squares. It shouldn't come as a surprise to us that, after spending four decades telling him to go away, he's not around when he's needed."
At some point, we simply need to say enough is enough. We need to say the lives of our schoolchildren matter far more to us than inane and wholly unconstitutional rulings of the Supreme Court, which banned prayer from schools in 1962, the Bible from schools in 1963, and the Ten Commandments from classrooms in 1980. We need to say, "We can read the constitution just as well as you, and it gives you no authority to tell us what we can and cannot do in our own schools."
We need to rise up and say, "We are bringing prayer back to our public schools, we are bringing the Bible back to our public schools, we are posting the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom in America, and we frankly don't care what the Supreme Court thinks about it, because it is the lives of our children, not theirs, that are in danger."
If only one student or professor had taken advantage of Virginia's laws to arm him or herself, the massacre might have been cut short
On the other hand if the state of Virginia didn't allow someone "who presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness" to buy guns the massacre might have been avoided altogether.
Cho seen as danger to himself
Of course. That would explain why the US, the most conservative Christian nation in the west, has a much higher rate of murder, violent crime and teenage pregnancies than ANY other European country or Canada. Most of which (with some exceptions like Italy and Poland) have had a much more secular populace for much longer, and are much less influence by religion in matters of government.
And, according to the documents and video/photo material, Cho used CHRISTIAN imagery and (as quoted above) identified with Christianity, which makes sense as he was raised in a "strongly" christian home.
And to the "anonymice" person who wrote this:
the religion of gun-control
It makes me realize, once again, just how stupid the general populace is in America. Want to know how bad it can get when everyone walks around armed? Take a trip to Baghdad.
As for this whole "carrying on campus and the classroom" idiocy, I taught college biology classes for 7 years and I saw some situations develop in which the campus police had to remove students who had become confrontational(usually student on student). A couple of cases involved a student under the influence.
I shudder to think what would have happened had they been armed.
Can you imagine frat parties where everyone is armed?
'Cause nothing says fun like whiskey and a gun.
The fundies think we'll all be safer if we start beleiving in fairy-tales. They think that if everyone of us would give up rational thought that we as a society would be better off.
Can someone explaine how giving up reason can cure insanity?
Can anyone explain how you can have a free theocracy? Isn't that an oxymoron?
How many freedoms must we give up to be safe? One? Three? Which ones?
I live in the bible belt and feel safe as long as I am not confronted by an unarmed christian trying to get me to convert. "BELEIVE OR BURN!!!"
Am I really free?
stronger now
Dan
Next they'll be blaming every bad thing that happens on women being allowed to vote. Oh wait - they already blame everything bad on what Eve allegedly did in Genesis.
By the way, I went to Virginia Tech. I was stunned on Monday, depressed on Tuesday. But I'm trying to think of the people who are hurting worse than I am - the kids who were injured, parents and friends of the victims, and the kids who are trying to go to school in what is now a completely changed atmosphere.
When I was there in the 80s, VA Tech was a comfortable, friendly place in the social life and challenging and interesting in the academic life. It was everything college should be.
I wish that people would just realize that this was the work of one very mentally ill person. It has no roots in anything else.
Judas was seen as the devil by Jesus because he cared about money.The rich man would never make it to heaven. There are thousands of examples why rich people shouldn't be given a chance if you look through the christian lens.
It is sad what happened. It wasn't shocking that Jesus was a part.
The calloused opportunism of these people, using this tragedy to promote their religious agendas, is absolutely sickening.
Jim Earl
Well put. And we are not exploiting the personal tragedy of others to advance our agenda and knock down straw men.
Post a Comment