Sandy Hook Massacre:  At Issue—-Evil, the Human Condition, and Free Moral Agency

The mind-numbing horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut has the evolutionary-minded progressive liberal chattering class discussing whether or not this horrific evil was caused by psychosis or another type of mental illness. While most of them agree that one of the primary causes of this evil is guns, not one of them will consider if whether the massacre was the willful action of an evil-minded individual.

At stake here are three fundamental issues. First is evil. Why does it exist and what can be done about it? Second is the human condition, is it fallen or essentially good? Third is the moral agency of man. Is man able to choose not to hate, kill, lie, deceive, cheat, steal, rape, seduce and pervert children or is he a psychochemical machine or evolved monkey helpless to resist instinct and stimuli? Merely to answer this question is to demonstrate moral agency (free will). The truth is that man can in fact choose to lie or not lie, and the genocidal murderer Joseph Stalin amply demonstrated his own free will when he not only ordered the liquidation of millions of people but pointed out that whoever controls the mind of man can be the engineer of his soul, in other words, play at being God. America’s founding generation understood and fully accepted that man is fallen and is therefore a combination of strengths and weaknesses, good and evil. Each and every man is both kindly Dr. Jekyll and evil-minded Mr. Hyde, thus within each man exists the very real possibility of evil. The way to restrain man’s dark side is through morality—–Biblical morality to be specific-—self-discipline, personal accountability, and dilution of power so as to prevent it from accumulating in the hands of one or a relatively small number of fallen individuals.

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Because America’s Progressive Liberals reject the living, supernatural God and the Fall and choose instead to embrace evolution and Enlightenment concepts, they see no evil within themselves. No matter how obscene their language and actions, they are essentially good. Their lies for example, are ’caused’ by hateful, bigoted authoritarians who prevent them from telling their own version of ‘truth’ and after Adam Lanza, ‘…no one is more to blame for the massacre of 20 first graders and six women at the Sandy Hook Elementary School than the National Rifle Association…” (Progressives Plan March On NRA In DC Monday, Evan McMorris-Santoro, talkingpointsmemo.com, Dec. 16, 2012) In his commentary, “Guns,Guns,Guns” Daniel Greenfield points out that if you reject the Genesis account and instead embrace evolutionary thinking, then evil is a chicken and egg question and man is its’ helpless victim:

“… Violence had no beginning, except perhaps in the Big Bang, it was always here, coded into the DNA. If people are just grown-up animals, more articulate versions of the creatures who eat each other’s young, and sometimes their own young, there is as much use in wondering about the nature of evil as there is in trying to understand why a killer whale kills.”

Like their ancient pagan counterparts, neo-pagan Liberals believe that evil exists external to man, the helpless victim of forces beyond his control. Evil is in everything from forces and laws of nature (which may or may not be scientific or deified), DNA, and in the grey matter of all psychochemical machines (i.e., NRA membership) contaminated by evil thought systems. In this light hate crime laws, speech control efforts, gun control laws and zero tolerance policies are frantic, futile, superstitious attempts to control outbreaks of evil. Daniel Greenfield comments:

“After every shooting there are more zero tolerance policies in schools that crack down on everything from eight-year olds making POW POW gestures with their fingers to honor students bringing Tylenol and pocket knives to school. And then another shooting happens and then another one and they wouldn’t happen if we just had more zero tolerance policies for everyone and everything. But evil just can’t be controlled. Not with the sort of zero tolerance policies that confuse object with subject, which ban pocket knives and finger shootings to prevent real shootings. That brand of control isn’t authority, it’s authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more school shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.”

According to Progressive Liberalism, the two most evil thought systems are Biblical Christianity and faithful Judaism together with the first principles, moral law, and concepts arising therefrom: Original Sin, man’s fallen condition, his habitual abuse of free will, the two-created sexes, Ten Commandments, unchanging higher Truths, sexual ethics, the traditional family, free market ideas, and unalienable (God-given) rights of individual freedom including the right of life and self-defense. In a penetrating analysis, Fyodor Dostoevsky the apocalyptic prophet of the 18th century, identified Marxist Communists and their camp-followers (i.e., Socialists, Progressive Liberals) as terrible-willed devilish Gnostic revolutionaries waging war upon the living, supernatural God, His created order of being and His Revelation to man. Many years later Alexander Solzhenitsyn concurred with Dostoevsky’s conclusions. Marxist Communists (and America’s Progressive Libs) are neo-pagan Manichaean Gnostics. Seeing no evil within themselves, when they looked upon Russia they saw evil everywhere and like avenging furies fell upon and destroyed every source of it (i.e., churches, priests, property, family) as well as 60,000,000 men, women, and children contaminated by evil thought systems. Their wills not being submitted to God, then like Cain, even if they finally confessed to having murdered their brethren they would not repent of it. Lenin for instance, admitted that the blood of millions of victims dripped from his hands but he did not repent. Stalin was even more defiant. Just before the death of his body he sat up on his deathbed and shook his fist in the face of God. Ideas have consequences. They are more powerful than bombs. We can neither understand nor effectively counter Progressive Liberal ideas and the superstition and attendant madness ensuing therefrom until we understand what they believe about evil, the human condition and moral agency. @Linda Kimball Linda writes on worldview and related subjects.