Virginia Tech: The Inevitable, Ghoulish, Theofascist Response

The first thing I did when I saw the news of the Virginia Tech massacre was to start making this picture of Ken Ham.

The way Ken Ham makes himself appear

I suspected immediately that Ken Ham would be prattling out some twisted, inductively weak, unfalsifiable theory about why the Virginia Tech massacre happened and I needed something to take my mind off of the killings for a bit (see, Ken Ham is good for something at least).

After a while though (I made the pic over a couple of days) I slowed down and decided to consider if I was going to go ahead and publish it. By that time Ken Ham had made a response, confirming my suspicions, but still I wondered if it was too soon to release something like this.

I took the time to consider my criticism of others’ explanations (and have obviously chosen to go ahead) and I haven’t even got around to expressing my views on the Virginia Tech massacre. Conversely however, Ken Ham, and a host of others took little time in exploiting the victims of Cho Seung-Hui for their own sinister political purposes.

Let’s start with Ken Ham…

Ham

It was Arthur who first drew my attention to the remarks by Ken Ham, exploiting the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre. This was no surprise given his exploitation of the death of Steve Irwin to sermonize us all with a “Steve Irwin is in Hell” post (I’ll link to a copy as soon as Answers in Genesis put it back up, or I can find an archived copy).

This is part of what Ken Ham had to say (by way of Dispatches, as Answers in Genesis is giving me 404s this morning);

“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.”“

Thanks Arthur, thanks Ed.

God banned from the science class? If it’s a public school, it shouldn’t be proselytizing anyway. They are taught about natural processes? Gee, how awful? Is that atheism? No. Ham is talking crap. Neither Methodist nor Catholic doctrine (just for starters) have a problem with these natural processes. Evolution (etc) does not equal atheism.

In any case, atheism doesn’t lead to a purposeless life. I don’t need a God (or a Christian) to tell me that killing innocent people is wrong. Utililitarianism tells me that. I (and other atheists) can reason meaning and determine the purpose of our own lives. Ken Ham is flat out wrong. Purposelessness by way of atheism is a non-sequitur.

And as for killing of the unborn; killing a pre-sentient amalgam of unfeeling flesh doesn’t count as killing a person. Ham is remiss to compare this to the Virginia Tech killings. He is remiss to exploit the dead in his quest for extremist Christian hegemony (at the expense of democracy I may add).

Ken, you no doubt disgust sensible, honest people.

Ken’s not the only one though.

D’Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is at it as well with this crap;

“Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found.“

(D’Souza, 2007)

Next time I go to a funeral, I’ll be sure to wear a big neon sign saying “ATHEIST” above my head. In my experience, when turning up to funerals, I get on pretty well with people that I have never met before, or barely even know. When they are Christians, they almost inevitably think me one of their own (mainly because I’m nice to them.) D’Souza needs to wake up and realise that just because he can’t see the atheists, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.

But he goes further;

“To no one’s surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist.“

(D’Souza, 2007)

What this should tell D’Souza is that people not having a relationship to the aggrieved tend not to turn up at funerals. When I die, D’Souza won’t be invited to my funeral, but that in no way reflects upon Christendom. Like Ham, D’Souza simply criticises what he doesn’t understand; that in a naturalistic universe (recognized not just by atheists), concepts of good and evil are constructed by humans.

Heck, look at it this way; secularism has no material existence. According to Ham and D’Souza’s twisted attempt at logic, atheists should be incapable of believing in secularism.

That D’Souza exploits the victims as does Ham, is contemptible. He doesn’t sledge schools and medicine directly though, he just attacks modern science

“If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.“

(D’Souza, 2007)

Well this is just silly. For a start, both theist and atheist alike have more than just science at their disposal. Also, the “people being just molecules” argument that D’Souza posits as Dawkin’s is far more reductionist than Dawkin’s own (D’Souza is playing the strawman tactic). Their are implications of the ways that these molecules behave; we don’t need a supernatural evil to explain depression when we have explanations such as serotonin deficiency (quite likely in the case of Cho Seung-Hui).

Somehow, I don’t think using the victims at Virginia Tech as fodder in a campaign against science (a good deal of which is taught at Virginia Tech) is going to go down too well.

Gingrich

D’Souza isn’t where the Ghoulish exploitation of the victims ends;

“..if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you’re committing an act of evil...”

(Newt Gingrich on ABC’s “This Week”, 2007)

This in response to a reminder of Newt’s foisting of blame for Columbine onto the liberal academics, liberal media, the liberal political elite and liberalism in general, who he claims shut down debate on the causes of Columbine. Yeah. Right.

We need to throw out political liberalism (aka liberal/secular democracy) because somehow if the state, academics etc don’t recognise that only God can tell people that it’s wrong to murder, then people will have no inhibition to murder. Sorry, God isn’t stopping me from murdering people; I’m stopping me from murdering people because I can reason that it is wrong by way of utilitarian ethics (that and I don’t actually want to murder people.)

Conclusion

Ham, D’Souza and Gingrich; each waging a culture war against naturalism, modern science and liberal democracy. Each willing to exploit the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre for their hegemonic ends.

Ghoulish.

~ Bruce

Update (24/07/2009): Got really sick of seeing the title turning up in my stats. Changed it. Now less easy to misconstrue the adjectives as being directed so heavily towards the man, rather than the behaviour. May look into how to block the image from Google Image search as well. Not ashamed of it. Just not happy with the way traffic is being directed to this post – the emphasis conveys the wrong message, I suspect.

Correction: Rather obvious spelling mistake in title corrected (it’s still in the URL if you’re that curious.) Additional piece of trivia – the spell checker in WordPress doesn’t actually check titles so it’s advisable to actually check them manually. If you care enough.

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