"Times Like This"

Joe Holman, contributor to Debunking Christianity, has written an emotionally charged post that uses what Cho Seung-Hui did to throw a temper tantrum against the caricature of Christianity - the sappy and weak version - he held to.

"In trying times like these, when terrible crimes against humanity have been committed, like the recent murders of Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean man of Virginian Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, we must be extra careful not to rush to judgment or let anger get the best of us!"

Yes, let's not get carried away. One meat bag shot other meat bags. One cog in the evolutionary wheel of life shot other cogs.

Cho Seung-Hui was described as a deeply troubled man, one who never smiled or greeted strangers, and always expressed deep-seated hatred of “rich kids,” and people who led lives of “debauchery.” He took antidepressants, and it is believed once set fire to a dormitory, stalked women, and wrote very disturbing pieces of literature. He was what many would call “a bad guy.”

Surely what is left out above is not a mistake. If Holman read the literature to pick up on the above features of Seung-Hui's life, why did he leave out these features:

• "A law enforcement official who read Cho's note described it Tuesday as a typed, eight-page rant against rich kids and religion."
• "Cho indicated in his letter that the end was near and that there was a deed to be done, the official said. He also expressed disappointment in his own religion and made several references to Christianity, the official said."

If Seung-Hui had written that he was told by God to do what he did, atheists would be railing against the "evils of religion." But, in Seung-Hui, we have a man who dropped religion, and seemed particularly upset or angry with Christianity. Why does Holman leave this out?

"Where is God when terrible things like this happen?"

Controlling all the details of His plan. Holman may not like this, but God ordained that Seung-Hui would do this.

But, say God is nowhere. There is no God. Then what happened was about as "terrible" as an anteater filling up at the local ant colony.

"What we must remember is, God is there, even though it seems at times as though he isn’t."

The only way there can be real "times like this" is precisely because "God is there."

"God loves us all, including those of us who have chosen the wrong path. God loves Cho Seung-Hui very much and looks down from heaven with compassion, despite his wreaking sheer havoc on an unsuspecting college campus, taking many innocent lives in the process."

Where does Holman get this? God "loves" Seung-Hui but "Esau He hath hated?" Who said "God loves everyone?" Does he not "hate all those who do iniquity?" This is sloppy theology. This type of theology births apostates like Holman. No strong ground, and so when the waves of "times like this" come, he sinks in the sand. So, he gives up "the ground," but the unfortunate consequence is that he must also give up the reason for giving up "the ground" - that is, the "times like this."

"Jesus was right there all the time, looking down with love as this angry man premeditatedly sawed the serial numbers off the guns he used to blast screaming college kids into tomorrow. Jesus was watching as young people, with their lives still ahead of them, stood petrified with fear in those brief moments before their demise. Jesus was there, waiting in the wings to comfort those mourning families who lost their loved ones at the whim of a tarnished soul. Jesus was there, my friend, Jesus hasn’t forgotten! As the song goes, Jesus knows, Jesus cares!"

Holman needs to pepper his post with emotional verbiage to get sympathy. Holman doesn't want to tell it like it is. Holman believes Seung-Hui is an evolved meat bag. Holman believes the victims were evolved meat bags. Holman is a naturalist. The Personal has been kicked out in favor of the Impersonal. But the Impersonal doesn't care about Seung-Hui, the victims, or Holman. Holman must assert his feelings in the face of the Impersonal unfeeling force. To live a contradictory life is the Way Holman has chosen. He's Bertrand Russell's poster child:

"Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power." - Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship

Holman can stand up to the uncaring cosmos and shake his fists in despair, asserting his own meaning, but for some reason, Cho Seung-Hui cannot do the same. Seung-Hui looked into the "gate of darkness" and saw that omnipotent matter rolls on its way, making Cho's life ultimately meaningless, and so he acted upon this situation. What's Holman's beef with his own worldview?

"There’s a lot of anger in the air because of this tragedy. The world is wishing this guy straight to Hell, thinking of how much people like Cho Seung-Hui deserve to suffer, but its times like these when we must try especially hard to think like Jesus."

Think like Jesus? It is Jesus who said the world would be judged by His Words. It is Jesus who came to "bring a sword." It is Jesus that said it was His Way or the highway. Jesus said sinners would be thrown into the lake of fire. So, why does Holman not want to "think like Jesus?" It's because Holman has a nice Jesus. A blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus. An effeminate Jesus. Jesus with a dress, and without the jeans. So, Holman must attack a caricature, rather than the real deal.

Furthermore, it's at times like this when we must strengthen our resolve. Be consistent with our beliefs. Try to think like Momma Nature. Ultimately, no one cares about the victims. Ultimately, what Seung-Hui did, was not objectively, morally wrong. The grand Imperson doesn't have "moral obligations." We make them up! So, that what Seung-Hui did is called "wrong," is actually fantasy. It's made up. Reject Christianity and its story of the world, you must invent your own story. There is no grand meta-narrative, there's millions of subjective autobiographies. Windowless monads, without any pre-established harmony. And thus we need to not only affirm this worldview while engaged in polemical debate, but we must hold it when we face "times like this." We must not cheer the proclomations of the materialist worldview when we are detached from the issues of life, but when we run smack dab into them. Thus materialist Richard Vitzthum,

"Human thought and feeling is the most complex, versatile, adaptive, sensitive, perceptive, creative, purposeful, and voluntaristic product of terrestrial evolution and perhaps cosmic evolution as a whole... It creates all the value and meaning that humans find inside or outside of themselves. The material order outside of human self-enclosure and self-definition is empty of human value and meaning, consisting as it does of an aimless interplay of natural process dictated by invariable physical laws. Its amoral indiscriminateness contrasts sharply with the human compulsion to discriminate and judge. This compulsion evolved from the billions of years of biological adaptation to earth's environment that transformed simple cells into multicelled animals.

Human thought and feeling is a material offshoot of this very indiscriminateness. It consists of neural events that individually are insensitive, unthinking, and unfeeling as all other basic chemical reactions but that collectively are capable of processing raw electromagnetic signals into emotional and intellectual information. Although the process is not yet well understood, it may consist of computation that mathematically measure incoming arrays of signals against synaptic weightings in the brain's neural networks...." - Richard C. Vitzthum's "Materialism: An Affirmative History And Definition," Prometheus Books, 1995, pp. 230-232

So you feel upset about this whole Virginia Tech thing because your individually unfeeling neurons went snap, crackle, and pop. This whole thing wasn't really wrong. You just had some electromagnetic signals which operate according to laws of physics and biology give of certain physical impulses in yoru body. These are not right, wrong, or meaningful. It's the way it is. Seung-Hui had his own electromagnetic signals go off in his head, the results of which ended in what happened in Virginia. And, when the victims died, what happened on Holman's worldview? Well, electromagnetic signals ceased to "go off." And, all of this was set in motion eons ago by unfeeling and unthinking physical processes. No purpose for it. That's the way the cookie crumbles. It's no different than the erosion of the beach cliffs here in Southern California which were also brought about by prior unthinking and unfeeling processes. Cliffs erode, people erode. Sometimes they take more sand with them than other times. Oh well. This is the grand and glorious worldview of the atheist.

Now, I know that at "times like this," with "worldviews like that," it may be hard to hold back the anger. We know what happened was really wrong. It seems so hollow to look upon "times like this" and know that what happened was only wrong because we made it all up!

" Its times like these when the grace of Jesus Christ our Lord shines out brighter than the sun. The Lord is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance! We should not wish evil on this disturbed and erring child of God, no matter how horrible and unsettling his deeds."

And in "times like this" to wish for "cosmic justice" is to live contradictory to the way things are. Assume Holman's worldview and there will be no justice for the victims or their families! To wish for any ultimate meaning and ultimate justice is to wish that your worldview was not true! Thus the "times like this" cause the holders of weak theology to give up their worldview only to have the "times like this" cause the holders of evolutionary naturalism to wish that evolutionary naturalism were not true. Welcome the irrational man. He gives up a position which makes intelligible the supposed reason for giving up his position.

"We should all aim never to be judgmental or hateful, and we must be careful where we place blame."

This is Holman's Jesus. Holman's castrated Christianity. The Jesus of the Bible, had Holman ever cared to open it rather than hold to his faith by his feelings, said that we must judge. "You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Jesus doesn't say that we should take the plank out from our eye, and then do nothing about our brother, no, he says and then we may go to our brother and judge him.

People are quick to judge Cho Seung-Hui, but before they do, they should consider judging the people he executed first. They were college kids, most of them, and like the majority of young men and women today, probably experimented with premarital sex, smoked pot, and drank alcohol—not exactly followers of Christ! So we shouldn’t judge him too harshly.

Well, Holman is just pontificating here. But, what is his point? We shouldn't judge Cho because the people he killed may not have been Christians? I don't get it? What we should add, though, is that if these pre-marital sex engagers were so normal, possibly they had abortions as well. And so why can they participate in the mass murder of a population of our society - the unborn - but Cho can't participate in the murder of other members of our society? That's odd. Holman only has a problem with some people being murdered. The one he arbitrarily deems "human people." So, Holman shakes his fist at reality, makes up moral laws, and then makes up who is and who isn't allowed to be murdered. The unbelieving worldview is a big kid’s fantasy. They live in ways which contradict the way reality really is, and they tell us creation myths about things that happened "once upon a time, when a frog turned into a prince."

"Perhaps just before that last bullet ravaged his brain, doing away with his thought processes, he muddled a prayer to God, asking for forgiveness of his sins and relief from the pain of life under which he snapped. For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life! God loves Cho Seung-Hui, just like he loves you and me. He wants us to spend eternity in heaven together."

Holman even had a magic version of Christianity. Simply saying "the magic words" somehow does something.

Though it is highly unlikely that Seung-Hui repented, especially given that he was anti-religion, probably an atheist at the time of his rampage, let's say that he did. So, God forgives him. This is only on the basis of Jesus Christ's life and death. Jesus would have been punished in Seung-Hui's place. So, Christianity still preserves ultimate justice. There is no justice to be had for this event given Holman's version of reality. The desire for justice is a holdover from these apostate's days as Christians. They need to stop playing both sides of the fence. They need to repeat this before they go to bed: "A meat bag killed meat bags. A certain collection of chemicals killed other collections of chemicals. An animal killed other animals." They should not only cling to Darwin to "fit in" in the Science classroom, but Darwinism should be applied to "times like this." Thus Richard Rorty,

"The idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increated prosperity but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass--a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck." - Richard Rorty, "Untruth and Consequences," The New Republic, July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36.

"Maybe, even as I write this article, those slain men and women that meet God at the pearly gates are in for a surprise!"

But above he said they were not Christians.

Actually, after we're long gone, there will be no memory of these people or Seung-Hui. All is ultimately meaningless. People will forget. There will be no justice. And we all look rather silly protesting this and acting as if something "really bad" happened. Acting as if there is meaning. Acting as if reality were such that what Bertrand Russell proclaims was not true. In light of what happened at Virginia Tech, and coupled with atheistic evolutionary assumptions, can we really disagree with Lord Russell,

"Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand."

I think not. I plea for consistency from the atheists during "times like this." Go on, tell the world what you have no problem telling them from the ivory tower. God is dead, and with Him so are morals, meaning, and justice.

If you are honest with yourself, at "times like this" you need a God. You cannot live out your worldview. You need ours, the Christian's. But it doesn't come without a price. You must repent and submit to Jesus as Lord. You must live according to his rules, his stipulations. We will not disintegrate into The Imperson, we will meet The Person, and be judged by him. Instead of worrying where Cho Seung-Hui will be, worry where you will be. Truth be told, none of us are any better in God's eye than Cho Seung-Hui. To hate Seung-Hui is to hate yourself. If it is laughable that God would save him, it is laughable that God would save us. Oh but for Christ! If you want to find meaning here, justice, and the intellectual right to condemn Seung-Hui's actions, you need to hold on to Christ and accept His version of reality.