Looking for Causes and Reasons

With another mass shooting in the news, I see that there is the usual looking for a supernatural reason. My current fave is Dave Daubenmirewho says God let all those people die. Yahweh is going all Old Testament because this is His judgment on America. Daubenmire further asserts that "God's going to be killing a lot of people."

Well, alright then, if you say so.

I completely understand the desire for everyone to find the explanation that allows this horrific incident, and all those others where there is such a loss of human life, to fall into rationality, to dispel the absurd, chaotic nature of the world and allow The Reason to come forward so that we may understand how we can protect ourselves and our loved ones.

Here's the dirty little secret: there is no one reason. There are no steps you can take to make sure that you are not in the line of fire.

Now, I might contend that people like Dave Daubenmire, Pat Robertson and all the other ghouls with a microphone intoning their religious rationale for terrible events are simply maintaining their relevancy (and the donations into their coffers) by latching onto whatever is going on and searching their entrails for what they think their god might be up to with said event. I mean, they have to say something, right?

The listeners are looking to anyone who can soothe their frayed nerves, their worry that absurd events could touch their little corner of Terra - and there will always be people looking to fleece them.

If we really want to be serious about making things better with regard to mass shootings, we really need to get into some emotion-free research into guns, gun control, and mental illness. This blog post is not about guns per se. I am interested in people who are looking to god for reasons why this is happening. This shooting cannot be merely human-based with solutions that reside in the human, can it? Yahweh must be sending a message! (Of course, in the case of a shooter, we might find a motivation for shooting into a crowd, but that doesn't explain why one person or another finds themselves there.)

What I am getting at is since these events happen, can we make sense of why a given person or population was targeted? Broadening the circle, why is this person in a car accident, the path of a tornado, a robbery, a fatal illness, etc.? Whatever the reason, there is no evidence that it's because some god put that person there.

Really, we need to begin to get comfortable with the idea that some events are out of our control, the result of a chaos-math style calculation of events that just happens to place person X into situation Y. Millions of people making decisions - and we can only control our own. I understand the superstition of thinking there is something more, that if we cross our fingers or follow the right diet, we'll always be in the right place at the right time. I understand the feeling that, when things are always going wrong, a sneaky little Loki is giggling at my plight, and when everything is going well, a beneficent god is smiling down telling me she approves of me. But I have no logical reason to think any of that is the case. My hind-brain superstitious side pops up from time to time, but I know those are just thoughts not predictions.

We have to get comfortable with the absurd, that the universe is indifferent to our joys and suffering, that often other people are indifferent to our situation, occupied as they are by their own lives and circumstances. Get comfortable and find a way to live the best lives we can knowing that no one is raining down punishments or providing rewards to our inner lives. It's just us on this rocky planet going around the sun. It might all end tomorrow, and we should find a way to be fine with that.