Blaming it on Darwin

April 18th, 2007 Central Archivist Posted in News |

THE LAST OF MONDAY’S VIRGINIA TECH shooting victims had barely reached the hospital when the usual suspects were blaming the atrocity on Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evolution.

First out of the box was a poster on the premier conservative website only a few hours after the shootings took place:

One other point about these school and college shootings. When you take God out of the school system and teach these students that we evolved from animals (and there are no moral absolutes) -— we shouldn’t be surprised when they act like animals. I would be surprised if they didn’t. The two shooters at Columbine both believed in Evil-lution. [1]

The poster echoed Answers In Genesis‘ Ken Ham who wrote the same day:

We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals—and humans—arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as “cheap.” [2]

Note how both writers attribute the killings to teaching kids they evolved, and likening the teaching of evolution to the removal of God from public schools.

Neither writer evidently thought his argument through, however.  First off, millions of kids have been taught about evolution, but only a handful have ever “gone postal.”   Obviously, telling kids the whole universe “arose by natural processes” has had little impact on the psyche of the vast majority of children.

But there is something even more telling here.  School takes up only a fraction of a child’s time.  He may attend classes for six hours a day, five days a week — 30 hours out of 168.  The rest of the time he is under various other influences, including his family and possibly his church.  Who is supposed to be teaching these kids moral values?  Is it the sole responsibility of the school system, or do the parents and clergy also have a role?

The writers are tacitly admitting that religion and family are weak and ineffective in instilling moral values and such should be left to government educrats — precisely the position of the Left in this country. 

In the end, what happened here was one very disturbed individual decided to kill himself and take as many others with him as possible.  The writings of Darwin no more influenced him in his decision than the writings of Shakespeare.

[1] http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1818217/posts?page=141#141

[2] http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2007/04/16/how-could-loving-god