Huckabee the Huckster

In the wake of last Friday's dreadful shooting in Connecticut, USA, in which twenty children and their teachers were slaughtered by a lone gunman, there has been no shortage of revolting drivel to deepen the world's sense of grief and shock.  Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, clearly implied that the tragedy would not have happened had schools continued to promulgate Christianity.

Mr Huckabee claims that God has been excluded from schools since 1963, and therefore bad things have happened in schools, including Friday's mass killing.  Leaving aside the obvious rejoinder that God's behaviour as documented in the Old and New Testaments makes him a prime candidate for exclusion from any civilized school, Mr Huckabee presumably believes that God is omnipotent.  How, then, can God be excluded from anywhere?  Mr Huckabee must mean that God chose to allow children to be gunned down by a madman, because the ancestors of those children elected to separate religion from education half a century ago.

Such a being as Mr Huckabee's God is surely, in the eyes of any rational and compassionate observer, an evil, egocentric fiend of the first water.  If He has an issue with US education policy, why not arrange a revelation to the President?  Why does He feel the need to terrorise and then murder twenty innocent children, leaving their parents grief-stricken for the remainder of their ruined lives?

Friday's events were devastating, awful, indescribably tragic.  But it is also a tragedy that people like Mr Huckabee can broadcast such repulsive I-told-you-so condemnations, in pursuit of their own political agendas, when people are at their most sensitive and vulnerable.

Mr Huckabee opines that people will refrain from doing wrong only if they are afraid of standing before God.  Does he really believe that the only reason people do not rape and murder is because they are afraid of divine retribution?  If he were to discover that God does not exist, would he then become a murderer?

The Connecticut shooting was perpetrated by an individual human being, empowered by liberal gun laws.  In order to minimize the chance of repetition of this senseless carnage, we must look not to God, but to the reality of readily available, deadly weapons in a world where there are nasty people as well as nice ones.