On Monday, the big news story was the shooting at the Amish school in Pennsylvania.
I watched some of the coverage on the news channels before going to work. It is a very sad time for their community. I was a bit saddened to hear some of the news people saying factually wrong things about the Amish. One of the things was that the Amish reject any help from the government – that is not true. Here in Ohio the Amish do accept some government support especially when it comes to health care and their children. When they do accept it, the community, later, will have an auction or market day to pay back the state for the aid they received.
Of course, after every violent incident involving a school or children, the religious wing nuts make statements like the one I read in a forum posting on our local newspaper website:
Do you think there is a correlation with taking prayer out of schools and the escalation of school violence? Innocent voices raised in prayer each day kept God’s protection over the schools. Parents better pray for their children each day, I know I do!
Then there was this bit last night on the “Free Speech” segment of the CBS Evening News by Brian Rohrbough, father of one of the students killed in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado:
ROHRBOUGH: I’m saddened and shaken by the shooting at an Amish school today and last week’s school murders [in Bailey, Colorado]. When my son Dan was murdered on the sidewalk at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, I hoped that would be the last school shooting. Since that day, I tried to answer the question, “Why did this happen?”
This country is in a moral freefall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak without moral consequences. And life has no inherent value. We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong, and I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children. Suicide has become an acceptable action and has further emboldened these criminals. We’re seeing an epidemic increase in murder/suicide attacks on our children.
That was just an uninformed comment. The Amish are about as religiously conservative as a religion goes, yet all their prayers didn’t “protect” them from the violence. It also doesn’t make one any saner. Mental illness doesn’t avoid the religious. In a press conference today, PA State Police reported the Amish school shooter wrote to his wife that he was angry with God.
Prayer is NOT a solution – it is what some do to cope with their lives.
People need to get some perspective. Mentally ill people, who perpetrate these killings, will do what they can to do harm. Unless we can gain some kind of psychic ability, we can NEVER prevent these incidents 100%.
The guy, who is said to have shot the Amish children, wasn’t on any law enforcement radar. The guy seemed to have just snapped (although I bet there were some signs his family and friends ignored).
My philosophy of life allows me to function without being crippled by the unknown. It basically boils down to “Crap Happens”. You deal with what you can control and try your best to slog through what you can’t control.