Moral degeneracy at the root of our problems

Columbine. Blacksburg. Carson City. Sandy Hook. Aurora. Fort Hood. Nashville. Marysville. Charleston. Roseburg.
The list goes on a lot longer than this.

Whether a school, a mall or shopping center, military base, movie theater or a church, mass shootings seem to have become commonplace across America. Their occurrences are always shocking. The frequency alarming.
Instead of looking deeper into the reasons behind these killers’ actions, though, our society finds it easier to examine only skin deep and blame the weapons used to carry out their crimes.

Something drove these people to go to the descipably extreme measures they did. Something way outside of human reason motivated them to kill at random, spraying crowds of adults and children with bullets.
But we lack the courage to examine deeper what led them to the conclusion that senseless killing was the answer to their problems, and to ours. We not only refuse to examine, but we also do not want to accept the truth when it points squarely at us.

Nobody wants to believe that perhaps our collective culture has contributed to the mental instability of these severely disturbed individuals.

In most of the mass shooting events, the killers seemed to have a death wish; either taking others’ lives along with their own, or waiting for authorities to do it for them after they’ve committed their egregious crimes. What could possibly convince the shooters that life is not worth living anymore, either for themselves or for others?
Now, I don’t have the highest intelligence quotient, and I don’t claim to be smart or have all of the answers. But the Almighty has blessed me with the gift of insight. He has also blessed me with an accurate gut feeling, and the ability to know the answer based on hunches.

And my gut, a hunch, tells me something has been happening in American culture that has driven these killers to act out of utter frustration, blind desperation, white-hot anger and rage.

Modern America lacks something that was ever-present a century or more ago: Real hope.
The individuals who have committed mass killings within the past century were acting out because they did not sense that they had any hope for resolving their own conflicts. It was easier to blame others than to seek healthy, positive solutions to their problems. So, instead of being able to cling to something greater than themselves, something they could hope for, they acted out in blind rage and complete, utter hopelessness; choosing to snuff out lives that had nothing to do with their internal conflicts but nonetheless absorbed the ire.

For them, homicide and/or suicide appeared to be the only way out; the only real and final solution for dealing with their problems.

I find it more than a coincidence that the incidence and frequency of mass killings in America have increased as our regard for God, our Creator, has decreased.

Since the 1960s, popular culture has done much more than insist on teaching evolution in school to minimize God’s influence on humankind. The secular humanists, atheists and agnostics of pop culture have pushed to see God completely removed from school, from the courtroom, and from public places in general.

From the very beginning, the purpose was about much more than simply teaching another theory of human origin to school children. Scopes was a tool used to gain a foothold in the door; a Machiavellian means to an end.
And that end has been the death of God in American consciousness.

The people that have been steadily pushing God out of our daily lives have insisted that there is no God. He never existed in the first place. This has killed His presence in the hearts of millions of people, and with it the omnipresent hope that comes with Him.

Today our culture frowns on believing in things that one cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste beyond our physical senses. If it’s not empirical, then it doesn’t exist. So, to put hope in something greater than ourselves and which transcends our senses is looked at as a fool’s errand.

To believe and trust in an invisible deity is naïve. We can only count on what is carnal; not what is supernatural.
And so, when the physical world lets us down, again and again without mercy, we become understandably hopeless. There is nothing to count on when our physical world betrays us. We are told we should not believe in anything beyond ourselves. But when we feel demoralized inside from all of the hopelessness outside, there is nothing to believe in anymore. And when we have nothing to believe in, life becomes meaningless and pointless. Life starts to take on a desensitized character. We begin to see it about as valuable as all of the rest of the betrayals in the physical world.

Human life becomes about as precious as those pixelated versions depicted in video games, movies and television programs.

Because modern American culture has denied the existence of God, we have been left to our own devices and to deal with our problems ourselves. Our Creator gave us free will, after all, and we must accept and live with the consequences of our decisions and actions.

The consequence of denying God is that we don’t receive His help as long as we deny Him.
And one thing I know for sure: We have no answers apart from God to the marked increase in mass shootings over the past half century. Arrogant man has found no solution to this endemic problem independent of God.
And that is why we are grasping at straws by blaming guns. They are empirical or carnal objects, after all, albeit inanimate. But it’s easier to blame them than look into ourselves and ask why.

We are treating the symptoms of a deeper, more pathological problem. Consequently, the problem still exists and we are doomed to see it repeated indefinitely.

Many people in America today lack the moral aptitude sufficient for understanding right from wrong; or, perhaps more poignantly, why there is right and why there is wrong. They’ve been taught by the very people who insist God and His decrees are non-existent that there are more gray areas than black and white. Right and wrong are relative terms, and differ from individual to individual, culture to culture.

The lines of right and wrong, and their very distinctive boundaries, have gotten blurred. The lines have gotten crossed, so that right is now perceived as wrong, and wrong is now perceived as right.
The result has been chaos.

We have heard these messages for decades: There is no purpose to life; our being here is entirely by accident. The complexity of life as we know it was a complete fluke. So, go and do your own thing. Do what makes you feel good, and disregard what others think.
People have taken this message to heart, and now they have absolutely no regard for others; either morally or civilly.

Our actions, collectively and individually, are self-serving. There is no better example of this than on Black Friday morning when mobs of people rush the stores to get the best deal before anyone else can.
People have gotten into brawls over material. They’ve crushed to death people in their mob-like frenzy. All in selfish endeavors.

In truth, there are times when what others think does matter. For instance, society has determined that sexual exploitation of children is a crime, so should a person go ahead and do it because it makes them feel good, disregarding what others—meaning collective society—may think?

We have determined that bullying is wrong, too, but we are perhaps intruding upon someone else’s right to feel good at the expense of others without regard for their feelings or what they may think about that.
When a person in the wilderness loses his compass, his chances of getting lost are much greater. The American people have lost their moral compass in a wilderness of chaotic relativism.

The truth is that life is not just a cauldron full of random ingredients that make up some sort of strange stone soup. It is not simply chaos occurring whenever and however it does.
There is a purpose to life, and there is a compass that can help us navigate through the chaotic events that seem to overcome our physical senses.

The truth is that this compass is not relative, either. There is a true north, just as there is with a physical compass. There is a south, an east and a west, too. Its directions are not whatever we want them to be, and whatever makes us feel good.

And the truth is that God is not dead, after all. We’ve just killed His existence in our hearts, and with Him a moral compass to direct our lives, to give us hope.

Theologians have defined Hell as being separated from God. When we deny His existence, kill Him in our hearts, then we are choosing to live separate from Him. And the life we forge for ourselves becomes our own Hell on Earth.

Perhaps this is the greatest tragedy that has come with the sense of hopelessness so many people feel today. They are literally living in a man-made Hell that doesn’t have to exist. But we’ve chosen it, and many more people don’t even realize it.

In their minds, this is the way life is and always has been: A meaningless, hopeless, purposeless pit of existence.
Historic King Solomon of Israel expressed in the Book of Ecclesiastes the futility of all of our actions apart from God. Everything is meaningless if done without God.
He was right.

Hopelessness has now become an epidemic that has infected old and young alike. It is the youth, especially, who are most vulnerable because they aren’t mature enough to cope with life’s disappointments. Without God, things get bleak and hopeless pretty darned fast. And they are the ones who have routinely taken their own lives along with others. They seek a way out of the chaos of life, out of the hopelessness, purposelessness and meaninglessness that they have perceived human life to be.

If we are going to get anywhere close to solving the problem of moral degeneracy, which has led to the increased frequency in mass killings, then we need to acknowledge the existence of God. We need to bury our human pride and reach out to Him for help. We need to honor instead of despise Him.

If we do not, and we continue on our present course, then current trends will continue, even worsen, and the events that follow will serve only to continually humiliate us.

Jesus Christ says in His Gospel that those who humble themselves will be exalted, and those who exalt themselves will be humbled.

Humans have been humbled numerous times throughout their history. And, in America, the mass shootings of the past century should have served to humble us as well. But we insist on continuing to exalt ourselves, so we are continually humiliated by our pride.

The Old Testament Book of Proverbs also says that pride comes before a fall. America has fallen so much, that you’d think it would have shaken all of the pride out of us by now. But no. We continue to proudly exalt ourselves, deny God, and insist on going this life alone and apart from Him.

How many more falls do you suppose we may be due? I perish the thought, and so should you.

— Writer Brett Fisher lives in Carson City and contributes regular opinion pieces and cartoons.