Colorado Gunman Was Home-Schooled Fundamentalist

The latest in the Colorado tragedy is that the gunman, Matthew Murray was actually a home-schooled fundamentalist, or at least he was raised that way. Apparently Murray once attended the Youth With A mission training center but was thrown out. Since that time he was sending the school hate mail recently.

The really sad thing is a rant he wrote on a web site for people who have left fundamentalist sects. Murray is reported to have written, "You Christians brought this on yourselves'' and ``All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.''

Now I am going to go out on a limb here, but what the heck. When you are raised with a simplistic and "bible literalism" theology, you tend to see everything as either good or evil. Fundamentalist theology rarely accounts for shades of gray, and unfortunately that is what the real world is made of. In the end, when your understanding of spiritual and moral matters has not progressed beyond the "Golden Book of Bible Stories" you are headed for a crisis of faith. Seems to me that is what Mr. Murray had, and having no tools to deal with it, he resorted to the "smite or flight" mentality that these kinds of belief systems create.

What happened is tragic, and perhaps there would be no way to stop this kind of senseless killing, but I have to wonder if instilling the kinds of black and white values in our kids really helps ferment these actions. After all, if you believe that there is only good or evil in the world, then it is very easy to decide your course of action. Destroy evil? And then what to do with the evil that is created by that destruction?

I personally agree with Albert Einstein who wrote that the concept of good and evil is a mistake. Much like in physics there is no such thing as "cold", merely the absence of heat. There is no such thing as "evil", merely the absence of "good" or as I prefer the absence of God. What a better world it would be if we all tried to encourage this view. It would certainly be better to try to bring good to those situations that lacked it than to compound the problem by destroying or killing and decreasing the overall good of the world.