One of the interesting things I've noticed about all the emotional posturing about the Connecticut public school shootings is that a fair share of it is being done by people who claim there is no God, no good, and no evil. Some of those people also happen to be those who assert that the Earth has too many people.

So, I find myself wondering if they are knowingly striking false poses in order to hide their amoral inhumanity at a time when sensitivities are particularly acute or if they are merely intellectually incoherent. The logical fact of the matter is that if there is no divine spark within us, if we are merely bits of stardust that happens to have congregated in one of many possible manners, then therre is nothing wrong or objectionable in rearranging the stardust a little. What difference does it make to an atom if it now happens to be part of arrangement X instead of arrangement Y? What difference does it make to the universe?

And if consciousness does not exist, if it is the illusion that some of the more imaginative neurophilosophers claim it to be, then how can anyone possibly object to the elimination of the nonexistent? What tragedy can be found in the transformation from nothing to nothing?

And if there are too many people on the Earth, in the country, then is not the reduction of that excessive number to be celebrated?

And if it is good, moral, and legal to kill a child in a trans-natal abortion, how long after birth is such killing truly licit? Would it make the deaths of the young public schoolchildren more palatable to describe them as 24th trimester post-natal abortions?

In an increasingly post-Christian pagan society, what is is wrong, precisely, with killing schoolchildren?