The Texas Christian Massacre and the man who committed it
by David Robertson, Premier:
26 people dead. 24 seriously wounded. Yet another US gun massacre. They are becoming so common that it appears we are becoming more desensitised to these massacres – so much so that less than 24 hours later the massacre has become a side note on many of the news programmes here in the UK.
Perhaps it would be different if people realised that Devin Patrick Kelley, the shooter who walked into the church and shot as many of the worshippers as he could, was a Muslim immigrant who shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he mercilessly gunned them down? Except he wasn’t. He had nothing to do with Islam or with immigrants. Sadly in today’s perverted world there will be those who are disappointed that this is not the case.
Maybe if people realised that he was a Southern redneck evangelical Christian, we would now be having discussions on the BBC and the print media about the dangers of religion and how the Christian ‘Taleban’ in the Southern US are as dangerous as the real Taleban in Afghanistan? The secular and humanist Internet pages would be filled with dire warnings about how this proves the danger of religion. But that turns out not to be true either.
President Trump has already announced that this was a mental health issue by tweeting “this was not a gun issue is was a mental health issue”. (If the shooter had been a Muslim immigrant can you imagine President Trump tweeting ‘this was not an immigrant issue…this was a mental health issue’?). Perhaps there was a history of mental illness but it would be wiser to resist the almost pathological urge to tweet these kinds of pronouncements. It really doesn’t help those who suffer from mental illness to equate them with massacring people.
There is however an issue that has gone largely unnoticed in almost every news bulletin and report I have heard today; an issue that explains why the secular societies websites have been so quiet about the whole massacre. It appears that Devin Patrick Kelley, who once taught briefly on a Christian vacation camp, had become a militant atheist. He had joined that exclusive group of online atheists who take great pleasure in letting the world know how dumb Christianity is.
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