Haiti

Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince has been devastated by yesterday's 7.0 earthquake. With the extreme poverty of the nation (it's the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere), I can't imagine how terrible the destruction must be after a quake that strong. Hopefully, too many weren't killed, but I'm glad to see the US is responding quickly to offer aid.

Follow Up On the Religious Shootings

Over the past day, a clearer picture has emerged concerning Matthew J. Murray, the shooter in Colorado who killed four and wounded five at a missionary center in Arvada and New Life Church in Colorado Springs.

Murray had been kicked out of the missionary school in 2002 for mental problems that included hearing voices in his head, which made it immpossible for him to go on the group's mission trip to Bosnia. Eventually, he started sending hate mail to the school where he revealed a deep seated resentment towards Christians in general:

You Christians brought this on yourselves. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.

It's hard to say what he based his hatred on beyond his mere expulsion. Besides his time at the mission school, Murray's immediate family are all deeply conservative Christians, which might have played a role. But I doubt this shooting has much to do with faith. Murray obviously had mental problems that caused him to hold a deep resentment which he eventually tried to resolve through violence. Faith or lack thereof doesn't really factor into the picture.

As expected, pastors have taken advantage of the incident to further their ends. Pastor Gino Geraci of Calvary Chapel South Denver said:

We're taking a journey away from moral responsibility. We live in a culture and society that want to share the blame rather than holding people accountable and responsible for their actions.

And Rev. Andreas Hock, professor of Sacred Scripture at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary said:

Losing sight of God can mean losing sight of the value of human life.

I don't want to stoop to their level and use this shooting to toot the horn of atheism. As I said earlier, faith obviously has nothing to do with it. But I will use these pastors' comments because Christianity does the exact opposite of what they suggest it does. The central tenet of Christian faith is that Jesus will absolve the believer of all his sins, which is just a way of saying that Jesus will free the believer of all moral responsibility, so long as he believes. It does not hold believers accountable for their actions, so long as they're "born again" and put their faith in Christ. Second, this notion that religion is the only thing that allows us to value human life is absurd. If anything, it creates a sense that we are worthless creatures whose only purpose in life is to appease a seemingly indifferent diety, and it clearly segregates people into believers and nonbelievers, where the believers obviously have more worth than the infidels.

No, I don't think religion is the answer to society's problems, especially in this case when you have a young man who hears voices in his head. What he needed was proper medical care, not fantasies.

Click here to read more from The Rocky Mountain News.

Religious Shootings in Colorado

Earlier today there were two separate shooting incidents at religious centers in Colorado. The first was in a missionary training center in Arvada, a suburb of Denver, where two people were killed. The other was in the New Life Church in Colorado Springs (coincidentally, the one founded by Ted Haggard) where one victim was murdered before a security guard shot and killed the gunman. Police think the two might be related, but it's too soon to know for sure.

Of course, this is no different than the murder of innocent people going about their lives in any other shooting, but it just strikes close to home for me since I went to the New Life Church a couple of times when I lived in Colorado Springs. I found their particular brand of theology distasteful (even before I was an atheist), but I would never wish this upon them, ever. After all, even the biggest theocrat ultimately feels his or her actions are for the greater good. The truly evil are only the inhuman murderers such as the gunman who would indiscriminately murder innocent people. I think we can agree that we're all human and we can only make the world a better place if we all find a way to work together, regardless of our religious views or lack thereof.

My thoughts are with the families with the hopes that they will find the strength to overcome this difficult time.