Should we be surprised that a large segment of a culture that has divorced itself from the traditions and moral norms of Judeo-Christendom should go haywire and engage in self-destructive and socially pathological actions? It is an act of illusory hypocrisy when you trumpet a worldview that tells children that they are "little animals" of chance who are on this planet to solely experience pleasure and engage in self-interest, and then cry bloody murder when that interest just happens to include shooting little children in the head.

It is highly difficult for a mentally healthy person to drink up that much existential nihilism and to remain a rational moral being. How much more so for those fragile psyches who view the universe as an uncaring, inhospitable place where the only purpose to their benighted existence is what we can scrounge up on our own? In a world of no objective morality, whether one slits the throats of children or feeds them in a soup line is all a matter of choice; since ultimately, the pedophile and the saint all become food for maggots and the memory of our nobility or beastliness will disappear as the fragile flowers of May.

An entire parade of mass murderers has been unleashed upon the Western world as a result of its own incoherent internal moral anarchy. It is fueled by empty despair and volcanic anger that are obsessively directed towards random targets by crippled and evil minds stewing in this poisoned cauldron of nihilism. To hold an inert weapon morally responsible for human behavior merely compounds this ideological madness and conveniently ignores this Postmodern sickness of soul by trying to paint over the symptoms. But then again, those who do not believe in the immortal soul or that humanity exists for a greater purpose must find rest and satisfaction in a materialistic explanation of evil -- that bad things come solely from reductionist theories of faulty wiring and chemical imbalances, and not as the consequence of brittle and alienated people haunted by the quiet horror of their empty values and horizons.

I tell you truly: Man unleashed from his moral restraints and the strictures of an eternal justice and purpose is the most dangerous created power in the universe. Deny him a firearm and he will grab a baseball bat or the jawbone of an ass. Deprive him of the message of a loving and forgiving God and he will band together with others of a similar sensibility and converge upon airliners with box cutters or line boulevards with pressure cookers filled with nails and ball bearings. Nihilism comes in many flavors and forms -- but it certainly will not conform to the shape of the human heart, which was designed for something infinitely better.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. and blogs as The Eloquent Professor at http://www.palookavillepost.com/. He can be contacted at arete5000@dslextreme.com.