In fashioning animals from the generations of men, the secular regime reasons that it is only necessary to whisper into their ears the tale that they are but clever animals -- ultimately answerable to no judgment more elevated than their own passions. From their rosy-cheeked youth they must be converted to this dark confession. They are to be prevailed upon morning and night that they are the beautiful accidents of a careless universe -- intelligent enigmas brought forth from chaos to rut and piece together what existential scraps of happiness they can gather before they recede from being and are blown as chaff beyond the veil of temporal memory.

If you are posing the riddle of why men slaughter children with such careless distance and regard, I have your answer. Clever Beasts in the vacuum of God and His common grace are subject to no law but their own. The riddle is not why do they butcher en masse but what constrains them from doing all the more? But while a beast in nature will generally content itself with satisfying its hunger, the feral human heart can murder in rapture to the voice within or in obedience to its opaque and broken image enthroned on the seat of a god he will create. The stunted wisdom of curtailing access to weapons merely renders a free and moral remnant less free and at the mercy of blighted imaginations who will not adhere to laws -- because in nature, such wretches are veritable laws unto themselves. Having closely heeded their indoctrination, they understand exactly just what they are.

No human being alive can withstand the agony contained within the revelation that he is but a clever beast that has lost his claws. Torn from the judgments of Heaven or Valhalla, will not his manic soul diminish into the most dangerous creature alive -- a self-actualizing being with little to gain and nothing to lose? As Western Civilization sheds its Judeo-Christian brocade for the trappings of an unadorned virulent nihilism, will not each succeeding generation of children not display ever more meaninglessness as they grow wild in their passions and inconsolable in their longings?

Glenn Fairman is retired and lives in Highland, Ca. and can be reached at arete5000@dslextreme.com