The senseless massacre of children hits all of us. Loss like this crushes. For the Parents, the pain seems beyond endurance. Life stops.
Living becomes just taking the next tight breath and crying... crying... Why?
Are we really here? What did we do to deserve this? What point is there anymore?
All our assumptions are open for review. We are confused.
And then we start imagining what we could have done to stop this. What can we do now to prevent this happening again.
Who's at fault? Where was the protection? Nothing is safe anymore.
The ultimate fault lies with us not following the basic moral standards of civilization.
We do not have a built in instinct to differentiate between what is good and what is bad other than basic pain avoidance.
We need an external standard.
The standard we teach and live by determines the consequences, good or bad.
The reason all these murderers commit these atrocities is because they were never taught a standard of morality that holds life to be sacred.
When I was a child, raised with the standard of the 10 realities of civilization passed down to us by Moses, I could never even imagine why anyone would ever murder someone.
But after years of exposure to the moral relativism and narcissism of current society, it has entered my consciousness.
My training allows me to choose not to follow this possibility but the shooter had no such constraint.
If God can do anything why didn't God stop the massacre of children?
Really? Why didn't YOU teach your children how to behave? Why did YOU allow society to become corrupted by alien ideologies that worship false moral standards?
Why did YOU give up personal responsibility to the State? Why did you allow Politicians to convince so many that they were selfishly entitled to take other's wealth?
If they can take wealth without responsibility, why not Life?
Why did YOU denigrate the Religious? Why did YOU pervert equality under the law to mean equalizing all results and all people? Why did YOU let Politicians foster Jealousy and covetousness for Political gain? Why did YOU allow movies and TV depicting the joy of theft, murder, jealousy, revenge and adultery? Why did YOU allow conniving rascals to be portrayed as Heroes?
God didn't stop it because YOU willed it to happen! You willed the consequences when YOU did not follow the moral standards given to you through Noah and Moses.
It really is a cycle.
People see tragedy and conclude there is no God or that God is evil.
Therefore they question the moral principles they were taught and even question the point of existence.
Either they form a new opinion based on their own confused mind or they follow a strong leader's confused ideas that promise safety and order.
Ideas which come from minds with no clear differentiation between good and bad, result in a confused morality without certainty of a good outcome.
When people act from a confused morality there is a probability of massacre of children and suicide.
When a society adopts a confused morality , like the current United States, the probability becomes a certainty. Then...
People see tragedy and conclude there is no God or that God is evil... and the cycle begins anew.
Based on history and human nature, only through internal self control guided by the 10 moral principles, in a society informed by the same guiding moral principles and free choice, can people act for the good and avoid atrocities of bad.
External control does not work as well.
We can ban weapons and the murderers will adapt.
We can post armed guards on our schools and the murderers will adapt.
They will kill the guard or use explosives or find some other way around anything we do externally.
We have armed guards to protect banks, not from the robbers who adapt and rob the bank anyway, but to maintain order among the regular people and deter the amateurs.
Outside policing and laws cannot stop bad actions without becoming a complete Police state.
A Police State is slavery for it's people and the powerful rulers commit even worse atrocities anyway.
The massacre is a wake up call to address the cause of the moral confusion that motivated this person's actions and our society's moral confusion.
If we do not, then we will be like Israel, which faces a daily threat from it's own citizens, raised with the alien suicidal and homicidal moral standards of Islam, and have to post an armed guard at every school, restaurant, mall and community gate.
If the question still remains...
If God can do anything why didn't God stop the massacre of children?
Who says God is responsible to do that?
A human being of his own free will did the shooting.
Should God take away free will?
What would that do to all of us and the very nature of the Universe.
If God stopped every act of evil, there would be no heroic acts. In fact there would be no will to act at all.
Asking a powerful outside agency to fix everything is motivated by the pain of suffering.
If we felt nothing or just a small amount we wouldn't ask the question.
Centuries ago, when children routinely died from disease there wasn't this clamor.
We expected death and protected our emotions until the children reached a certain age.
Older Civilizations expected men to prove themselves on the battlefield and die in glory.
We didn't ask why God allows wars. We prayed that God would create more wars.
Calling on God or even government seems not to be based on a particular act but rather on how much we suffer.
We want something to make us feel better if the suffering is too great.
I wouldn't ask "why didn't God stop me from forgetting my 30% off coupon for Barnes and Noble".
We accept that question as silly. That's just too trivial.
We may be sad or beat ourselves up and lament the loss.
But the suffering is a faint echo of how we feel for those elementary school children.
For the loss of a coupon, it is far easier to accept that free choice means we make mistakes.
If we are mature, we can accept responsibility for that lapse without blaming others.
We can see it as a lesson and devise some sort of way of remembering next time.
It's far harder to accept the consequences of free choice, in the case of murdered children.
Logically though...
If God can do anything and does not interfere with my 30% off coupon, why should God interfere with the children's murder?
If God can do anything and we expect interference with the children's murder, why not with my 30% off coupon?
Saving 30%? What's the big deal in the scheme of things?
But a child's death and the loss we feel, that affects us greatly.
But in the scheme of things... is there a difference?
What if there is reincarnation? What if one of the children was spared the pain of a wasting disease or tragedy later in life, to begin a new life right way.
What if another Stalin or Hitler or worse would have descended from someone in that kindergarten class?
We really don't know the bigger scheme, do we?
What is the standard to judge the "best" action for God to take?
Hitler's mother might feel the same pain as we would in losing a child.
But would the best action be not to allow him to commit suicide and spare the mother's feelings?
Have we ever considered that if the rules of Nature can be broken then maybe it would de-stabilize nature?
If nature is broken to prevent murder, there may be consequences that are worse.
Suffering does not go on forever. We do eventually feel better and regain purpose and zest for living.
Healing. Is that how God interferes?
Maybe God interferes with evil through giving us principles to follow by our own will and an active guidance to tune into.
Still think it's God's fault because...
If God can do anything why didn't God stop the massacre of children or the Holocaust or the WTC bombing or all the bad?
OK Kiddo. Here it goes.
The premise that "God can do anything" is false.
God can't do anything in the same way that we can't just keep making exceptions and altering a system we set up or the system falls apart.
In the same way that we are bound by our word and our morality not to do just anything.
In the same way that a grown person can't get into the jungle gym pipes in a play space made for children.
The images we have formed of what we think is God, are inaccurate.
These images and premises come from the faulty translation of The Hebrew Torah (five books of Moses).
OK get ready for your world to turn upside down.
God does not exist in our universe.
Our universe exists in God.
That is what the Hebrew of the Torah (Five books of Moses) tells us.
What is God? God is what is.
There is no image we can create that is God. All images are false.
The powers of nature and the Universe are not Gods although they are the manifestation of what is.
There is no bearded man sitting on a throne waiting to smote and punish.
No Hell of infinite torture.
None of the images we created in our mind.
What was translated as Lord or God, YHVH in Hebrew, means "existence/being".
Existence/being is intelligent in a way that is different from our intelligence.
("My thought are not your thoughts")
The intelligence of existence (for lack of a better phrase) is the seed of the intelligence of nature/the powers of the Universe (Elohim) and us.
As science is realizing, the Universe is more like a brain that processes information. Guess what? The first word in Genesis, "Be-Raishit", that was translated as "In the Beginning" also means With Intelligence. "Raishit" contains the root meaning "Head". Be-Raishit also means inside the Head, which is the brain.
The first Letter "Bet" means a shelter/house/container.
We could not live in "infinite existence" (again, for lack of a better phrase).
The being/existence – makes a sheltered place bounded by time and space where we can live.
A shelter protects but also conceals what is outside of it. We only see a small amount through the windows, so to speak. (Adam, Moses, the Prophets and the still small voice of guidance we all have)
Our sheltered Universe was created with a flexibility for how energy is transmitted and where it will interact (the science of Quantum Mechanics), which allows enough uncertainty at the sub-atomic level for there to be Free Choice. Our Universe is partially determined by the will of infinite existence, so that it holds together, but can be influenced by our will.
We are co-creators as the cliché goes.
According to the Torah, our first Human ancestors were given a choice of an implanted, clear differentiation with what would be good and what would be bad - or mixing the good and bad in our knowledge so that we would have to use our own free will to differentiate. We would act according to the good with the goal of eventually returning to this original Eden level by our own will. Our ancestors chose to consume the fruit of mixed good and bad and exert their will rather than be programmed with no choice. The consequences of confusion of good and bad are, that there will be death and suffering but also the possibility of magnificent achievement motivated by our will to good.
So it is WE who have to fix what bad leads to, not YHVH or the powers of the universe (Elohim).
Part II - History
In general, we have sucked at avoiding the bad.
Luckily a fail safe mechanism was put in that will put back clarity, after a certain time period is exceeded, if we do not achieve it through our will.
That fall back is referred to as Messiah or Mashiach which means "to pull" our consciousness to clarity.
It also refers to the anointing of kings, another lesson to help us pull back to clarity.
The Israelites asked for the false protection of Kings and were told of the consequences – death and taxes. Children forced into battle, economic hardship etc. Our will - our responsibility for the consequences.
"We have met the enemy and it is us" – Pogo
If WE finally take responsibility and stop looking to "God" or the State, we can change the consequences.
Biblical History is there for us to learn from. Have you? When did you last hear this, if ever?
I'm skipping a lot (also a pun for Lot and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah :)
Cain kills his brother. The rest of the society that formed still persisted in being unable to differentiate good and bad and allowed the bad influences to dominate.
They robbed and murdered putting their interest above other's suffering.
We were implanted with a language that described reality perfectly and in which we all understood each other perfectly.
Noam Chomsky, a famous atheist linguist, proved that language is innate. It follows that the first language was also innate.
We see this first language reflected in Biblical Hebrew and the word roots in Akkadian and other ancient languages.
Corrupt Leaders took advantage of the capacity of our original implanted language to influence people to be one with the leader's goal of mastery over the human race.
They even found a place where all could gather together and not be dispersed physically as they were not dispersed with language.
Together they built a tower to spread their name and serve as a beacon.
The tower became the people's obsession, more precious than their lives or wives and they lost all discernment of good and bad.
At that point, the one language was broken into 70 to prevent gathering together to implement that which is inspired by the bad inclination.
But... that still didn't work. So, existence (YHVH) interferes, through the intelligent universe (Elohim). Elohim speaks to Noah to build an ark.
Elohim, through Nature on Earth, flooded away that society and started over again with Noah's family.
The Ark was the incubator of learning to care for others. Noah and his family had thousands of species to care for. They had not one moment's rest.
Out of the lessons learned, Noah's children founded academies to teach 7 principles that would guide society away from the inclination to bad outcome.
They are: Appoint unbiased judges, don't murder, don't steal, don't be cruel and eat an animal alive, don't worship and gather under the false power of an idol/image/Leader, don't hump everything in sight and don't pooh pooh any of the above.
The rainbow was the symbol that there would be no further interference by Elohim using nature. So don't count on big disasters to give us a moral leg up anymore.
Despite the babel and the principles of Noah, we still made statues and continued to appease all the powers of Nature like the Sun and the Moon and the weather. Abraham was able to perceive an inkling of the true nature of our universe and realized that all the forces of nature that people worshipped out of fear were really one and that some sort of unifying power must be responsible. He taught this monotheism, how to achieve this insight (meditation, contemplation and awe) and moral principles for 75 years. His influence appears in many of the Eastern schools of thought and religious practices.
Abraham's descendants through his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, kept their focus on the 7 principles and did not lose their language, moral teachings and culture despite abject humiliation and slavery in Egypt. Or vice versa despite glory as rulers or princes in Egypt (Joseph and Moses). These Israelites were entrusted with 10 principles of civilization, through Moses, to guide away from the bad. (Expanding on the 7 principles of Noah and adding: explicit identification of YHVH, telling the truth, managing jealousy and covetousness and accepting the burden of parental/ancestral teaching and history)
The Israelites were appointed as guardians of the words transmitted to Moses and have preserved them exactly as written.
They were given a religious practice, to reinforce living with the 10 principles, and serve as a light to the rest of the nations. The rest of the Israelite screw ups are documented in the Prophets for people to learn from mistakes as well as moral achievement.
Eventually most of the nations either adopted the 7 principles or in the case of the Christians the 10 principles.
Islam adopted the 10 principles, as mangled by Muhammad, among themselves but added a Political system that reinforces everything bad towards all others.
We were instructed to teach these principles to our children and remind ourselves of them daily. If we chose our actions, government and mores of society according to the guiding principles we would not have holocausts or tyranny or massacres of children. When we fail to imbue these principles in our children, government and society, we suffer bad consequences.
When we organized society, for the first time since Moses, according to those 10 principles in the United States, we had an outpouring of technology to cure disease and improve the material wealth of the impoverished. The less of those guiding principles that we teach and follow, the more technology is turned to bad, as the shooter did with his rifle, Hitler with trains, death camps, computers and gas chambers, Stalin with his blockade of Ukraine and Muslims with planes and bombs.
History is repeating itself and we are responsible to get it right this time around.
