Is that cartoon a bit harsh? Perhaps. But while it may be heavy handed, the truth is that is exactly what is being taught to our children, a nihilistic worldview where God is absent and people are just animals waiting to die and turn into compost.
Most people, myself included, didn't read the last words of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the school shooter in Finland who killed eight people in his rampage. But Answers in Genesis posted them, and they are a chilling reminder of the secularist worldview:
I am prepared to fight and die for my cause, . . . I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection. No, the truth is that I am just an animal, a human, an individual, a dissident . . . . It’s time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on tracks!
If that sort of statement sounds vaguely familiar, it should becuase it is the same sort of philosophy advocated by Nazi Germany. The weak, the racially impure were not part of the master plan and because human life has no intrinsic value, it simply made sense in a mad sort of way to exterminate them. In Stalinist Russia, those who opposed the revolution were murdered by an atheistic regime. The same holds true in the Killing Fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot. The most murderous regimes in the 20th century all had a common thread, the rejection of God.
I guess that raises a question that may seem harsh, but again needs to be asked: if there is no God and there are no moral absolutes, why NOT shoot up your school? As a Christian, I can answer that question pretty easily: all people, Christians and unbelievers, are created in God's image. God has expressly commanded man to not murder one another (that raises the specter of just war theory, but that is not the topic du jour). So therefore we have been taught, and teach our children, that human life is sacred. But taking that God out of the picture makes moral decisions simply a matter of personal preference. I think killing is wrong, you think it is OK, so who am I to tell you not to kill others. Virtually every decision we make has some sort of consequence to others, so that is not a valid qualifier. Without moral absolutes that stem from an absolutely moral and holy God, each person is left to develop their own moral code and that leads inevitably to people shooting up schools in Colorado, Georgia, Finland and Ohio.
Unlike many Southern Baptists, I am not an advocate for prayer in public schools because I am not an advocate of public schools at all, but as we see in general God being pushed out of the conscience of our country we see a rise in murderous behavior. Moreover, not just violence but a general callous indifference. Man has always killed man, but where God is denied it takes on a coldness that is jarring at first and numbing later on.
The more man learns, in his own limited way, about the wondrous creation that God has made, the more that man seeks to supplant God. Rather than worship Him more for the wonders He has made, man takes his pitiful knowledge and ascribes godhood to himself. The story in the Garden is little changed today, man seeks knowledge to become like God and always fails and always will.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Romans 1: 19-25 ESV)
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