John Stonestreet is a Christian apologist who seems to believe that
anyone who’s not a Christian is destined to go on a shooting spree or join a terrorist group.
This is ironic, of course, since most "terrorist groups" are filled with religious fanatics like Stonestreet himself. Stonestreet "believe" this is true, however, because, as far as he’s concerned, secularism is a kind of societal insanity that inevitably turns people into
homicidal maniacs.
Like believing a vow of clerical celibacy magically turns priests into
pedophiles or pederasts, the sheer ridiculousness of such a claim makes it hard
to take seriously. But that hasn’t stopped Stonestreet and other Christian
fanatics from repeatedly making such claims nevertheless. For them, the problem with the world today is
that "secular society is a curse," as Dennis Prager put it, because “life
is meaningless if there's no God." Ironically, the only people who agree with Stonestreet and Prager just happen to be terrorists.
In his article "Pop Nihilism and
the Allure of ISIS: When Materialism’s Promise Proves Empty," Stonestreet
condemns, "the materialistic salvation sold to us," which
"promises to fill the … hole in our hearts ... with stuff." The
“meaningless of (this) secular salvation,” he explains, leads some people to become
“bored," and others to “become angry, even murderous." To prove his
point, he offers the examples of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who killed 13
people at Columbine High School, and T.J. Lane, a 19-year-old who shot to death
three high school students in 2012. According to Stonestreet, the
"emptiness of Western materialism" not only poisoned the hearts of
Klebold, Harris, and Lane - who, he feels the need to point out, “were not Muslim”- it also prompted "two
beautiful teenage girls from Austria, aged 15 and 16,” to become “burka-wearing
recruiters for the terror group known as ISIS."
Hence, Stonestreet and Prager beilieve the problem with America is that we have failed to keep God in public schools, and forced children across this great land to all subscribe to Christianity, whether such a religion makes any sense or not, and regardless of whether those children want to become Christian or not. The reason they claim that God needs to be kept in our schools, was once explained this way:
Secular schools can never
be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction
and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation
is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion
must be derived from faith. from our point of view as representatives
of the state, we need believing people. (-Hitler, [quoted from Helmreich,
p.241])
It just so happens that it was Hitler who happened to so agree with Stonestreet and Prager, and as we shall see, Reverend Mike Huckabee.
It just so happens that it was Hitler who happened to so agree with Stonestreet and Prager, and as we shall see, Reverend Mike Huckabee.
In addition to his channeling of the Fuhrer's ideas about religion, Stonestreet's
assessment likewise illustrates a double standard currently employed by some Conservative
Christians today. That double standard comes from those who scoff at the
suggestion that a lack of educational resources in poor communities contributes to criminal behavior, while at the same time declaring that the
lack of God in the classroom contributes to shootings like Columbine. In the
former situation, blame is focused not on the environment but on the individual who committed the crime, regardless of their financial disadvantages or lack of educational resources. In the
latter situation, however, blame is focused less on the shooter - who is often just dismissed as "crazy" anyway - and more on detrimental effects of a an increasingly 'godless-society' on perfectly normal Americans. By shifting focus in this way, The Stonestreet's and Prager's of the world, conveniently shift the ultimate responsibility for such horrors from those who
perpetrate them within
schools, to all those who allowed the removal of God from
schools. The only problem with such a claim, besides the fact that it uses the corpses of every such tragedy as a soap box to sell a particular brand of the Christian God, is that the God such claims rely on was never removed from public schools in the first place.
The Supreme Court case that people like Rev. Mike Huckabee allege
“removed God from our schools” was Engel v. Vitale( 370 U.S. 421 (1962)). Yet Despite the claims
of Huckabee and others, this case did not
ban school prayer. It simply forbade the state of New York from reciting an official prayer at the start of each school
day. People were still perfectly free to pray in school, of course, both
individually or in groups. A year later, on June 17, 1963 Abington
Township School District v. Schempp (which was consolidated with Murray
v. Curlett), 374 U.S. 203 (1963) declared that school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools in the United
States was unconstitutional. Again, this case did not prohibit Bible reading in
public schools; it simply prohibited the school itself from officially sponsoring
such reading. As Charles C. Haynes of
the First Amendment Center wrote, the ruling required “that teachers and
administrators neither promote nor denigrate religion,” thus fostering “a
commitment to state neutrality that protects the religious freedom of students
of all faiths and no faith.”[i]
Claiming that these cases “removed God
from our schools” only demonstrates how some Christians think advancing their religion is a moral imperative, even if they have to lie to do it. In a previous attempt to scare people into a belief in
Christianity, for example, Huckabee used this same lie to explain the mass shooting
of kindergarten students in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Talk Show host Steve Deace
took that lie even further, claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre happened
because “children are taught that there is no God, and thus no real purpose to
their lives.” What both Hucabee and
Deace failed to mention, however, was that Adam Lanza, the person responsible for the Sandy
Hook shooting, was not the product of a public school system that was prohibited from using tax payer money to promote a particular religion. Instead, Lanza attended St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in Newtown
before being home-schooled by his mother, an ardent Christian and avid gun enthusiast.
On the one hand,
such claims falsely suggest that mass shootings did not occur before these
cases, or after these cases at schools where God was force fed to children too young to defend their own minds from such emotional manipulation. Both suggestions
are untrue, of course. In fact, the deadliest school-related massacre
in American history happened in 1927, at an elementary school in Bath, Michigan.
There, Andrew Kehoe, upset over a burdensome property tax, wired the building
with dynamite and set it off on the morning of May 18, killing 38 children and
7 others. What's more, a number of shootings have happened in religious schools and even churches.
In April of 2012,
for example, 7 people were killed at a Korean Christian college in Oakland, California.
In August of that same year, 6 more people were killed and 4 wounded when Wade
Michael Page opened fired at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. In October,
2006, Charles Carl Roberts killed 5 young girls and injured 6 others
at an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In March of 2005, Terry Michael
Ratzmann killed 9 people at a Living Church of God meeting in Brookfield, Wisconsin,
and in September of 1999, Larry Gene Ashbrook opened fire on a Christian teen
prayer rally at Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, killing 7.
On the other
hand, such claims also assert that, without God, people have “no real purpose
to their lives.” As Stonestreet puts it, “nearly every
commercial message tells us that … there’s nothing beyond the immediate
gratification of this world to live for.” First of all, I've never seen a commercial
that actually claims - explicitly or implicitly - that "there's nothing
beyond the immediate gratification of this world to live for" (unless it happens to be
in the superfine print that can only be read with a bionic eye.)
Second, the list of people whose ‘lives have no purpose,’
according to these ministers of Pop-Christian propaganda, include Stephen
Hawking, Alan Turing, the chemist whose work helped discover the double helix
structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin, Thomas Edison, theoretical physicist Peter
Higgs, Warren Buffet, George Carlin, Bruce Lee, Mick Jagger, and for most of his life, even Mark
Zuckerberg. If their lives are
representative of what it means to “have no purpose,” then the rest of us can only hope to be so lucky. Also,
such a statement further assumes that working for a better world, peace on
earth, feeding the hungry, curing the sick, clothing the naked, providing shelter for the homeless, and just generally helping others, only qualifies as a genuine “purpose” in life, if and when it is done for a belief in
God - and basically for no other reason, apparently. The people on the above list, in
other words, since they did what they did for some reason other than the glorification of God, therefore deserve to rot in hell for all eternity. And while these atheists find their
purpose in life by having the courage and wherewithal to design it for themselves, Christian diehards like Stonestreet and Huckabee apparently find their own purpose in life by criticizing others for doing what they are apparently unable to do for themselves.
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