[The article first appeared in 2022 after the Uvalde, Texas, shooting at Robb Elementary School. It seemed wholly appropriate for the horrific shooting by a monster in Maine last week. The shooter escaped and was found dead two days later by his hand. He had been in a mental facility for two weeks before (what powerful drugs was he on?) his rampage and claimed to be hearing voices in his head transmitted through his hearing aids. Both local police and his fellow Army Reservists were all aware he was having significant mental issues.]
“It seems that the truth is that if you did understand the motivations of these vicious killers, then you would be as evil as they were.”
It is a horrifying and heart-tearing time again. On October 25th, a forty-year-old killer murdered at least eighteen people in Lewiston, Maine, and wounded scores of others.
Each person murdered was a hand-crafted child of God, connected to so many others whom they loved and who loved them; each a priceless soul with a unique purpose and hope for tomorrow.
One person made a decision that took all that away in a moment and, for the wounded, doubtlessly left some with physical and emotional damage that may last a lifetime.
Through the various organs and filters of the media, the culture is once again attempting to explain a single incident of mass murder. It is raw and shocking in its scope and suddenness – random and terrifying. What made this man believe that strangers he didn’t even know deserved to die?
The media beguiles us and captures our emotions in a way that the murder of one innocent person can’t, or the nine people murdered on the streets of Chicago this past weekend alone can’t, or tens of thousands of nameless citizens murdered by their own governments across the planet this past year can’t, or the uncountable thousands dead at the hand of Islamic radicals, or Chinese communists this year can’t.
If you don’t believe in Evil, you have to invent reasons.
So, we have mobs of psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and every manner of professional academics, and of course, our simple-minded and corrupt political class, noodling out loud about “what would drive a man to do this,” as though that can be known through some scientific matrix given enough time.
Yet, inevitably, history shows that as the years pass and we go back and look at the trials and evidence, we never know more about the Hommes’, Haris’, Klebold’s, and Lanza’s, and the rest of the mass killers than we knew the day they knelt to Evil and did its bidding.
Even with the Islamic mass murderers – the Mateen’s, Hasan’s, and Farook-Malik’s – while we know for whom they claimed to be killing, in the end, it was Evil, too, that stage-managed the events – just to kill.
It seems that the truth is that if you did understand the motivations of these vicious killers, then you would be as Evil as they were. They are unknowable except through the lens of Evil.
None of this is new. Every recorded epoch of mankind is violent, and ours is no less so. In just the last hundred years, perhaps one hundred million people were killed by their own governments through starvation, firing squads, forced marches, gulags, torture, and hacking to death. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Tojo, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and the list goes on and on. It was less than thirty years ago that Rwanda fell into ethnic genocide. In less than four months, 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered, mostly with machetes, not guns.
Evil uses whatever implement is convenient. Just to kill.
Theologians and philosophers have been writing about the problem of Evil for thousands of years, of course, dissecting its origins, nature, or even if it exists.
For this observer, it isn’t very complicated. We don’t have to look any further than the words of Jesus Christ, who confirmed for us that the human family has fallen, and since Cain killed Abel, the pattern is clear. Evil uses human vessels to travel into the history of men, to place them in spiritual slavery unless they turn to a Righteous God and His ways.
Jesus frequently challenged the religious and legal authorities of his day over the nature of Evil – that they clung to in their natures. When they wanted to kill Jesus, He explained to them that they didn’t “know” Him, because,
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He [the devil] was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When [the devil] lies he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44.)
His blunt truth spoken to the Jewish leaders two thousand years ago still rings down through the ages; we live in a binary world. You serve one or the other.
When men forget the Laws etched in the hard stone and mock righteousness, succeeding generations become increasingly unrestrained because they no longer understand how to read the moral compass of their Designer.
It is interesting to note that in the post-Judeo-Christian era that has darkened the West generally and the U.S. increasingly, each tragedy and the ensuing chaos brings not more clarity about the nature of our crisis but merely ever mounting calls for striping innocent people of their rights and privileges in a free society while ignoring the role of virtue and the education of our young.
We don’t talk about recapturing the righteousness of our founding and our civic compact or the promises that “it will go well with us” if we return to the Righteous covenant that God provided. Instead, for two generations, we have ripped every reference to God and the Ten Commandments from our schools and public discourse as quickly as possible, and the radicals want still more gone. The goal is an amoral population. It can’t go well for us.
Having removed the Truth, we are left only with lies. Then the best among us become capable of the worst about us. And we grow monsters in our midst.
