WHAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN WE BELIEVE THAT LIFE IN MEANINGLESS

Historian Richard Weikart warns that when we think that life is meaningless and lacks inherent value, there is a greater likelihood that we will treat humans as animals:

• 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")

If we deny that life has any inherent value, there is little reason to respect the lives of others. It’s just a matter of the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, and Harris was celebrating his “freedom” from moral constraints with guns in hand.

When we reject God, we are not free from God. Instead, our nature requires us to find an alternative god, a governing set of “ideals” or meaning to fill the vacuum. In Harris’ case, it was “natural selection.”

We are creations who have no choice but to define ourselves, to answer the basic questions of life: “Who am I and what will give my life purpose and a reason to get out of bed in the morning?”

We also need to prove ourselves worthy of the ideals we have chosen for ourselves. Hatred led Harris to find for himself alternative ideals that would give his life meaning. He would now have to live up to the ideals of his god of natural selection. He would demonstrate to the would that he had the courage, which others lacked, to fully embrace its “truths” with blood and bullets. He was a product of his times.

Yes, he had the freedom to rebel against god in favor of his own Darwinian god, but is this really freedom? Instead, our freedom is maximized when we act in accordance with the principles of our nature. For example, a fish enjoys his greatest freedom when he lives within the constraints set for him, in the water. When a goldfish leaps out of his fishbowl because he no longer wants to be confined in his bowl, he loses the freedom he had once enjoyed.

We are designed to live in harmony with our moral nature. Harris had leaped out from these moral “restraints” which would have maximized his freedom, choosing Darwin in favor of Jesus. While his nature was continually telling him to stop, he was proactively pushing himself on.

When we kill God, we also kill our God-given nature designed to live in accordance with His nature. Harris chose the god of natural selection, and it selected against him.

Let’s not pride ourselves into believing that we are so different from Harris. We too are Harris. He is merely the canary in a coal mine who succumbs to the deadly gases before the rest of us do.

We are both dignified and destroyed by our beliefs. If we think of humans as mere animals, we will inevitably treat them accordingly and demean ourselves in the process. If we believe that there is no true good and evil, our behavior will eventually catch up.