Everyone wants to know why 24-year-old James Holmes, the killer in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, randomly shot over 70 people, killing 12 innocent moviegoers. Why did he do it? What was his motive? What drove him to massacre so many people he didn’t know, including children? The answer will never be provided by the psychologists, or the media, or the government. Most of them are too unwilling to figure out why these massacres are taking place. And even if they knew the answer, they would not want the public to know it.
But since I am old enough to remember a time in America when such massacres were unheard of, I suspect that I know why our society is creating young sociopaths with the urge to kill. It has something to do with our atheist education system and the nihilist morals they now teach. Forget the Ten Commandments; they represent the morals taught in the Bible, which the humanist-atheist educators have banned. The liberals have worked overtime to get God out of the schools. Indeed, the liberal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believes that the government should neither prefer religion over non-religion, nor favor particular faiths over others. The ACLU is opposed to prayer in schools. In other words it wants atheist government schools.
And the Supreme Court concurs with the ACLU and has prevented creation science from being taught in the government schools because it implies the existence of a supernatural being known as God. But when God is taken out of the schools, Satan, the father of lies, takes over. He enters through those atheist or nihilist teachers who have the power to influence their students in ways that turn them against God and life, and lead them to a love of death.
R. L. Dabney, a Southern Presbyterian minister, wrote in the mid 1800s:
The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God — this is his task on earth.
Dabney was a great Christian theologian, pastor, and Confederate Army chaplain. He was also chief of staff and biographer for General Stonewall Jackson, and he was a cofounder of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. While the above statement on education may seem extreme today, it is an indication of how far we’ve allowed education to fall from its original biblical purpose.
Can the wrong kind of education create dysfunctional sociopaths, virtual monsters? Of course. The National Socialists took over Germany in 1933 and used its public schools to turn ordinary German children into the monsters who were able to carry out the most heinous genocidal plan ever conceived by human beings. During the war, German soldiers were capable of committing the worst atrocities against civilians, which they eagerly documented with touristy photographs. The civilized Germans were no more born monsters than Americans are born monsters. Yet, just a few years of evil education made it possible for millions of Germans to turn against their fellow citizens who were Jewish, strip them of their citizenship, plunder their possessions, and finally murder them.
In the communist Soviet Union, the schools taught children to appreciate a social system that sent millions to slave-labor camps in Siberia, starved peasants in the Ukraine, and simply murdered the system’s opponents. Somebody had to carry out the government’s evil, and the schools provided more than a few willing hands.
In my book Is Public Education Necessary?, I showed how the Owenite communists and the Unitarians joined forces to create a public school system that would eliminate God from American education. They couldn’t succeed without the help of evangelical Christians, who joined the movement for public schools in order to proselytize Catholic children. But the Catholics did an end run and created their own parochial schools, which managed to teach their own children biblical morality, thus delaying the total takeover of the public schools by atheist humanists and socialists. And millions of Christians still patronize those schools.
The humanist hatred of Christianity was well expressed by John J. Dunphy in an article in the Humanist magazine (Jan.-Feb. 1983) entitled “A Religion for a New Age.” He wrote:
I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being… The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of “love thy neighbor” will finally be achieved.
The “religion of humanity” is a godless religion that has conjured up its own atheist moral code. What does that new moral code consist of? You will find it spelled out in the Humanist Manifestos, proudly published by humanists in 1933, 1973, and in 2003. In 1933, they wrote:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as the result of a continuous process. … The individual born into a particular culture is largely molded to that culture. … Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.
That was in 1933, when so-called religious humanists could create a godless religion without calling it an atheist religion. In the 1973 Manifesto, the humanists reaffirmed their atheism by stating:
As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. … Traditional moral codes and new irrational cults both fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow. … Humanism can provide the purpose and inspiration that so many seek; it can give personal meaning and significance to human life.
Their rejection of “traditional moral codes” means a rejection of the Ten Commandments. But what do they offer in their place? They write:
We affirm a set of common principles that can serve as a basis for united action — positive principles relevant to the present human condition. They are a design for a secular society on a planetary scale.
What are these common principles? They explain:
We appreciate the need to preserve the best ethical teachings in the religious traditions of humankind, many of which we share in common. But we reject those features of traditional religious morality that deny humans a full appreciation of their own potentialities and responsibilities. … We need, instead, radically new human purposes and goals. … [We] can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. … No deity will save us, we must save ourselves.
They then describe the essence of humanist morality:
Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stem from human need and interest. … We strive for the good life, here and now. … Reason and intelligence are the most effective instruments that humankind possesses.
And how are these humanist moral values taught in the public schools? Through such programs as situational ethics, moral relativism, and values clarification, none of which has any religious sanction. Christian moral teachings are banned. Arguments against gay “marriage” or lifestyle are considered hate speech, which is now considered a crime. Satanic or nihilist teachers have free reign to teach anything they want as long as it isn’t Christian or biblical. They can teach Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God is dead. According to the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Nietzsche “passionately rejected the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity for a new, heroic morality that would affirm life. Leading this new society would be a breed of supermen whose ‘will to power’ would set them off from the ‘herd’ of inferior humanity.”
Eric Harris, one of the students who planned and carried out the massacre at Columbine High School, was a great admirer of Nietzsche. We might ask, who among his teachers at Columbine recognized Eric as intelligent enough to read Nietzsche? The majority of the school’s dumbed-down students probably could not read Nietzsche even if they wanted to. Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, writes of Eric, “He could never get enough Nietzsche or Hobbes.” He further writes (p. 265):
In September, Eric titled one of his short essays, “Is Murder or Breaking the Law Ever Justified?” Yes, he responded — in extreme situations. He described holding pets and humans hostage, threatening to blow up busloads of people. The irony of masking grisly murder fantasies in moralistic essays amused him. A police sniper could save many by killing one, Eric argued. The law must bend. Eric made the same case in his journal but took it a step further: moral imperatives are situational, absolutes are imaginary, therefore, he could kill anyone he wanted.
That is what a humanist moral code can lead to. In lifeboat and fallout-shelter survival games, which is how values clarification is taught, students learn that murder is justified if the need is to save others. The students are given an extreme situation that will persuade them to accept the idea that murder is justifiable, in complete rejection of the biblical admonition, “Thou shalt not murder.” Once students accept the humanist-atheist premise, then there are no moral absolutes and anything goes.
As yet, we do not know much about James Holmes, except that he graduated from Westview High School in San Diego. But we doubt that the humanist curriculum at Westview is any different from that at Columbine. Eventually we will find out more about Holmes and how a smart student (he went on to receive an undergraduate degree in neuroscience from the University of California, Riverside) becomes a mass murderer. As for the education of Eric Harris, Cullen writes:
He pored through books such as The Nazi Party, Secrets of the SS, and The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. He cited a dozen scholarly books for his paper “The Nazi Culture.” It was a strong piece of work: vivid, comprehensive, and detailed.
The paper let Eric indulge in depravity right in the open. It began by asking the reader to imagine a stadium packed with murdered men, women, and children — not just filling the seats but piled high into the air above it. That would still represent just a fraction of the people exterminated by the Nazis, he said. …
He described Nazi officers lining up prisoners and firing into the first man to see how many rib cages the bullet would penetrate. “Wow,” his teacher responded in the margin. “This is scary. … Incredible.”
Unfortunately, this teacher was not able to give Eric a Bible to read. And it probably didn’t even occur to this teacher that a Bible was desperately needed. “Wow” is an inadequate response for a concerned Christian. A far better response would have been, “This kid needs help before it’s too late.”
