WHAT WE BELIEVE IS HOW WE ACT

Historian Richard Weikart argues that will follow our thoughts:

• Eric Harris, the co-conspirator behind the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, confided to his journal just a few months before his rampage, “I just love Hobbes and Nietzche [sic].” On the day of the shooting he wore a T-shirt that proclaimed “Natural Selection,” and in his journal he stated that he loved natural selection and thought we should return to a state of nature where everyone had to fend for themselves. He wanted the weak and sick to die; his solution was to “kill him, put him out of his misery.” He also expressed utter contempt for humanity and dreamed of exterminating the entire human population. Although Harris had personal reasons for his hatred of humanity—he felt belittled and left out socially—he had also absorbed ideas prominent in our society today. It seems clear from his musings that Harris thought life was meaningless and death was natural, so why worry about it? On the same day that he wrote in his journal, “I say, ‘KILL MANKIND’ no one should survive,” he also remarked, “theres no such thing as True Good or True Evil, its all relative to the observer. its just all nature, chemistry, and math. deal with it.” Earlier he had written, “just because your mommy and daddy told you blood and violence is bad, you think its a law of nature? wrong, only science and math are true, everything, and I mean everything else is man made.” ("The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life")

Others had been social outcasts, but they did not kill. However, our secular society had virtually handed Harris a collection of deadly weapons:

1. The denial of a “true good or true evil”
2. “Natural Selection”
3. Survival of the Fittest
4. Denial of Human Exceptionalism
5. “Only science and math are true, everything, and I mean everything else [including God] is man made.”

When we kill God, only death remains. We are both dignified and destroyed by our beliefs. If we think of humans as mere animals, we will inevitably treat them accordingly. If we believe that there is no “true good and no true evil,” our behavior will eventually catch up with our beliefs, and the results will be costly.