C O M M E N T A R Y

      I'm sorry I didn't speak out sooner

               December 12, 1997

As an ex-Christian who is not unsympathetic to Secular humanism, I am experiencing the recent teenage shooting murders in Paducah Kentucky as a very very unsettling event. As a parent, I do not know how the parents of the murdered victims are ever (if ever) going to be able to get over it. As a private citizen and conscientious individual who reads about these kinds of tragedies and strives to make sense out of them I suffer from the usual: a lack of complete information. For example, I wonder about the fact that it was a religious (prayer) group that got attacked: does this mean that the victim's religious convictions put them in harm's way or is this simply a coincidence?

It is true that I do not like Christians (when they are in their role as anti-reason faith promoters) but I believe that nobody but nobody should be made to put up with the kind of evil that that 14 year old murdering thug perpetrated on those three girls.

If anyone deserves the death penalty then surely that 14 year old kid does: developmentally 14 year olds have had many years worth of moral reasoning and know the difference between right and wrong. At least it seems to me that they did in my --religious, pre-Secular humanism-- day and age (I was a teenager in the late '50's).

I am not going to accuse Secular humanism here as causing the problem: the cause is the person who pulled the trigger. But what I would like to do, what I need to do is to acknowledge what I believe to be a major weakness in Secular humanism and by so doing make sure (damn sure) that I do not succumb to it. Secular humanism believes that when it does come down to fundamentals --when push does come to shove-- we have to do two things in order to inculcate right behavior in our children and loved ones. That is, we have to praise the good and NOT damn the evil. This view I believe is wrong and I think it is really really wrong when you consider that the Kentucky shooting tragedy is the kind of thing it could lead to (I am not saying that it did so lead, because to conclude this would take a heck of a lot more data and information then one gets from news media reports).

Fundamentalist religion --superficially speaking-- is better on this issue in that it ends up (in application and in spite of its theoretical underpinnings) in DAMNING the evil: a position I believe to be correct. Nonetheless, I do not believe this gives religionists a right to feel smug here (though I am willing to be proven wrong...maybe...this does give them a right to so be here). But this is not exactly the point. The point is that it is possible to teach children --who by their human nature need to be taught-- how to be moral and to teach them in fundamental terms what is and is not moral behavior. Murder is the lowest form of immoral behavior and for that reason we reserve one word for it: evil. Those who commit murder are evil.

And when push does come to shove, there is only one philosophy (that I know of) that is correct on many fundamental issues including this particular one. And though I am not going to name that philosophy here I do think that all people should do what it advocates. It advocates that we should, that we have to, that we must...do both: we must, PRAISE the good AND Damn the evil.

I can't say that had the foregoing (and not that of the pendulum swinging battles between secular humanists and religionists) been the MO in our public schools over the last couple of decades, that the Kentucky tragedy would not have occurred. Since human beings do have volition no one can guarantee that they can eradicate evil. All we can do is condemn it, organize ourselves politically to defang it and give our sincere condolences to its victims.

I condemn that evil kid in the news media reports who murdered those three girls in that Paducah Kentucky school house and I give my condolences to the murdered girls parents. I am sorry I didn't speak out sooner, but the issue wasn't as clear to me as it seems to be now in the aftermath of this tragedy.

_____________________
Gary Deering
Private citizen
St. Paul, MN

(unpublished-LTE's/Killer Kids...)