First the facts, from the leftist New York Times.
They write:
It was a little after 5 p.m., a quiet time in a quiet neighborhood, before many people had returned home from work on Tuesday, when two women called 911 to report multiple gunshots and screams echoing through a condominium complex here near the University of North Carolina.
By the time the police arrived, three people were dead — a newlywed couple and the woman’s sister. They were young university students, Muslims of Arab descent, and high achievers who regularly volunteered in the area. A neighbor, a middle-age white man, was missing — then under arrest and charged with three counts of murder.
[…]Mr. Hicks, appeared to have a deep dislike of all religion. On his Facebook page, nearly all of his posts expressed support for atheism, criticism of Christian conservatives or both.
Last month, he posted a photo that said, “Praying is pointless, useless, narcissistic, arrogant, and lazy; just like the imaginary god you pray to.”
[…]His wife also pointed out his support for gay rights and the right to abortion.
Let’s take a look at what’s on his Facebook page:
Though no motive for the shooting has been confirmed, local media is reporting that social media sites connected to Hicks might offer a clue. Hicks is a self-described “anti-theist” who lashed out against all religions. Apparently he is associated in some way with United Atheists of America and uses social media to lash out at both “radical Christians and radical Muslims.” He also describes himself as a fan of atheist author Richard Dawkins.
TV programmes liked by Hicks include The Atheist Experience, Criminal Minds and Friends, while he describes himself as a fan of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
Hicks’ pictures largely consist of images with text mocking religion and supporting atheism, but include images of himself and his wife at Disneyland, what he describes as his “loaded 38 revovler”, and himself separately on a quad bike and wearing a suit.
According to his Facebook “likes,” Hicks is a man of the left:
His Facebook Likes included the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gay Marriage groups and similar progressive pages.
More:
Hicks is a vehement atheist, according to his Facebook page, where he frequently posts anti-religion musings.
Hicks frequently posted quotes of prominent comedians and atheists, including the prominent British atheist, professor and author Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins had previously expressed his goal of destroying Christianity. Since he turned down the opportunity to debate William Lane Craig multiple times, he must have some other meaning for “destroy Christianity” than “defeat Christianity utterly in a debate”.
I found it interesting that the Southern Poverty Law Center was one of his Facebook likes, since they were connected to a previous episode of domestic terrorism – the attack on the Family Research Council.
Remember?
Excerpt:
Wednesday’s shooting at the headquarters of the Family Research Council, a group known for standing for conservative and Christian values, is raising debate about the rhetoric surrounding hot topic issues like gay marriage.
In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the Family Research Council a ‘hate group,’ alongside neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, black separatists, and others.
The SPLC said it put the conservative group on the list not because the FRC believes homosexuality is wrong, but for “the propagation of known falsehoods in an effort to defame gay people.”
“I don’t expect everyone to agree with some of the things that we assert about the homosexual lifestyle, but we do present evidence in support of those assertions, and they are certainly not falsehoods or fabrications,” FRC Senior Fellow for Policy Studies Peter Sprigg said in defense.
The shooter, Corkins, was a big admirer of the well-known atheist philosopher Nietzche:
“His parents told the FBI that Corkins “has strong opinions with respect to those he believes do not treat homosexuals in a fair manner.”
Corkins definitely comes from the left side of the political spectrum.
According to the Washington Post: “Allan P. Chan, 28, a former George Mason student, said he met Corkins at a campus gym about six years ago. They worked out together, lifting weights, and began to socialize and watch television together. Chan described Corkins as secretive and somewhat odd. Corkins’s Facebook page included no photos, not even his own, and he displayed an intense interest in the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.”
Corkins was convicted of domestic terrorism for the attack.
So the common denominator for both of these shooters seems to be left-wing politics and atheism. Quite different from what the mainstream media would have you believe.
I have lots of strong opinions. But when I approach people who disagree with me, my goal isn’t to silence, coerce or overpower them. That’s what secular leftists want to do to their opponents, often using the power of government. In my case, I’m a Christian theist. My job is to imitate Jesus’ way of dealing with his opponents. That’s more like showing them evidence and trying to reason with them about it. Persuasion is standard operating procedure for Christians. Not so for atheists on the political left.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Gosh, I am surprised this has not been reported on NBC. :-)
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“I have lots of strong opinions. But when I approach people who disagree with me, my goal isn’t to silence, coerce or overpower them. That’s what secular leftists want to do to their opponents, often using the power of government. In my case, I’m a Christian theist. My job is to imitate Jesus’ way of dealing with his opponents. That’s more like showing them evidence and trying to reason with them about it. Persuasion is standard operating procedure for Christians. Not so for atheists on the political left.”– That’s because Christians operate in a moral framework that identifies all people as created in the image of God and therefore worth respecting. Under naturalism the value of another person can be assigned based on personal needs and wants.
I would like to mention that most of the atheists and anti-theists mentioned advocate marginalizing Christianity (and other religions) rather than violence.
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I wouldn’t call this man an atheist sounds like he’s just using atheism for his own twisted reasons. Something is obviously wrong with that man and he hide behind that label. There are christians who are extremist as well but do I look at one group of christians and say they’re all like that no i dont. Many americans since 9/11 have a huge distrust and fear of muslim-americans. There are extremists in every religion and political agenda – dont judge the whole group based on the actions of a few.
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The only problem with that view is that WK has authenticated a long list of Darwinists imposing their “survival of the fittest” philosophy on the rest of us, through violent means, for example:
1. Suicidal Florida school board gunman was a progressive atheist
2. Atheist who shot Gabrielle Giffords read Communist Manifesto, liked flag burning
3. Eco-terrorist who shot up Discovery Channel building is a Darwinist
4. Harvard-educated evolutionist arrested for multiple-victim school shooting
5. The link between Darwinism, nihilism and public school shootings
And, we are not even getting into the big stuff, like Stalin and Mao. So, the difference between the many nuns who are currently flying airliners into skyscrapers (what – that’s not happening?) and the a-theists who are shooting up schools and theaters and offing Muslims because of limited parking is that, under Christianity, the fictional terrorist nuns are in contradiction to doctrine, but under a-theism, there is absolutely nothing morally wrong, in an objective sense, with shooting up schools or killing Muslims. To assert that there is something morally wrong with that, one has to steal objective moral values and duties from God. And, the “pope” and “cardinals” of a-theism agree with me here: https://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/an-atheist-explains-the-real-consequences-of-adopting-an-atheistic-worldview/
God bless!
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Again, as I stated before no matter what the religion or political view point you will have extremists. You can not judge an entire group of people based on the acts and misguidance of a few. I had a friend who was muslim and had to leave schoola nd go to a muslim community because christian bullied her and this was before 9/11; they even took her hijab off her head.
There have been violence done in the name of Christianity, it hasn’t been much lately but Christianity hasn’t been spared from violence, but I don’t judge everyone who is a christian like WK based on the acts of those who take matters into their own hands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_violence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_violence
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html
” Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence
By Kathryn Joyce, Religion Dispatches. Posted February 2, 2009.
Escaping an abusive marriage is no easy task for many evangelical women, many of whom have pastors that say physical abuse is no reason for divorce.
What is a good enough reason for divorce? Well, according to Rick Warren’s Saddleback church, divorce is only permitted in cases of adultery or abandonment — as these are the only cases permitted in the Bible — and never for abuse.
As teaching pastor Tom Holladay explains, spousal abuse should be dealt with by temporary separation and church marriage counseling designed to bring about reconciliation between the couple. But to qualify for that separation, your spouse must be in the “habit of beating you regularly,” and not be simply someone who “grabbed you once.”
“How many beatings would have to take place in order to qualify as regularly?” asks Jocelyn Andersen, a Christian domestic violence survivor and advocate, author of the 2007 book Woman Submit! Christians and Domestic Violence, an indictment of church teachings of wifely submission and male headship. As she sees it, by convincing women that leaving their relationships is not an option, these teachings have laid the ground for a domestic violence epidemic within the church.
Andersen writes from personal experience, describing an episode of being held hostage by her husband — an associate pastor in their Kansas Baptist church — for close to twenty hours after he’d nearly fractured her skull. Andersen was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, where she heard an unremitting message of “submission, submission, submission.” She saw this continual focus reflected in her ex-husband’s denunciations, while he detained her, of women who wanted to “rule over men.” Though Andersen was rescued by her church’s pastor, who had his assistant pastor arrested himself, she says other churchwomen aren’t so lucky, particularly when churches tell couples to attend joint marriage counseling under lay ministry leaders with no specific training for abuse survivors, who instead offer an unswerving prescription of submission and headship, often telling women to learn to submit “better.”
Pastor Holladay takes care in the taped sessions to explain that enduring abuse is not a part of a wife’s call to submit to her husband — a principle that Warren and Saddleback espouse. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says it’s an attitude of submission to let someone abuse you,” he says in the audio clips. Nonetheless, Andersen finds it telling that the issue of submission always arises in church discussions of domestic violence, “subtly reminding women of their duty to maintain a submissive attitude toward their husbands.”
That this occurs even in Warren’s church, which is derided by more conservative Southern Baptists for its purported cultural liberalism. Andersen sees this as proof of the centrality of male authority throughout mainstream evangelical culture, “which can still be maintained in a controlled separation but is seriously threatened when a woman is given leeway of any kind, for whatever reason, in ceasing to submit to an abusive husband by divorcing him.”
There are more blatant examples of excusing abusive male authority among stricter proponents of complementarianism and submission theology. In June 2007, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Bruce Ware told a Texas church that women often bring abuse on themselves by refusing to submit. And Debi Pearl, half of a husband-and-wife fundamentalist child-training ministry as well as author of the bestselling submission manual, Created to Be His Help Meet, writes that submission is so essential to God’s plan that it must be followed even to the point of allowing abuse. “When God puts you in subjection to a man whom he knows is going to cause you to suffer,” she writes, “it is with the understanding that you are obeying God by enduring the wrongful suffering.”
While Saddleback’s teachings certainly don’t make such an explicit argument for submitting to violence, and Holladay tells abused women they must seek safety before they attempt to reconcile, there is a similar profession of helplessness before biblical mandates. In the audio clips, Holladay protests he could tell women that there was a third biblical justification for divorce, “a Bible verse that says, ‘If they abuse you in this-and-such kind of way, then you have a right to leave them.’” But ultimately, he says, there’s not, and the question of separation versus divorce comes down to a matter of dealing with the pain of fixing a marriage now or later, almost a matter of discipline…” more
Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome: Christian Women and Domestic Violence | Reproductive Justice and Gender | AlterNet
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CoRa
I think you are totally missing WGC’s main point. Let me state it to you succinctly. (He can correct me if I am mistaken, of course.)
1.) No one is saying that people have not done things in the name of Christ that were terrible.
2.) The difference is that the people who have done these things have done them in CONTRADICTION to the teachings of Christ.
HOWEVER –
The people such as Muslims and Atheists who have committed atrocities are acting IN PERFECT ACCORD with their doctrines (The Koran specifically calls for the merciless killing of infidels – an infidel is anyone who refuses to convert to Islam) and their world views (The atheist worldview is based squarely upon an acceptance of the idea of Darwinian Evolution, a concept which completely rules out any absolute standard of moral rights and wrongs. Accordingly, there are no good actions or bad actions, only actions that happen in the course of the ebb and flow of nature in its pursuit of the survival of the fittest. Obviously then, if you are a survivor, you are simply more fit than those who have not survived, nothing more, nothing less.)
Please note carefully this chasm of difference between those who commit atrocities despite what Christ & His followers taught, and those who commit atrocities BECAUSE OF & IN PERFECT ACCORD with what their leaders & sages (Muhammed & Darwin) taught & espoused. While liberals naively wish to paint all parties as all the same with their broad brush of historical incredulity, their whole exercise only serves to illustrate their own cavalier treatment of facts as it suites their own agenda.
JMG
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I understand what WK stated perfectly
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You also missed what I actually wrote. Look again carefully please. I said you missed WCG’s (WorldGoneCrazy’s) point. I said nothing about WK.
JMG
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That was WGC.
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Child of Ra, you are confusing moral ontology with epistemology. Also, I refuse to reply to a list of wikipedia “references.” (WK has already outed wikipedia as “less than” scholarly.) I gave you WK’s peer-reviewed sources and you responded with wikipedia. Really?!? Now, if you would like to make your claim for objective moral values and duties from Star Trek, I am all ears. As long as it is the original series. :-) Don’t take this position up with me, though – take it up with the big three of a-theism: Dawkins, Provine, and Ruse. They are the ones who agree with me here.
I am sorry that you have suffered spousal abuse. It is a despicable crime perpetrated by despicable cowards – and lately more frequently by a-theistic feminists. It does not matter who is endorsing spousal abuse: it is objectively wrong. (But, not under a-theism, nope: the strong shall overpower the weak, all good under a-theism.)
If you can provide me with a studious Biblical hermeneutic as to why I should support spousal abuse within the Christian worldview, not what some people say, but an objective truth argument, then I will give up Christianity. (It’s the same offer I give to a-theists who attack the OT: when we start seeing orthodox Jews flying airliners into buildings and blowing themselves up in civilian marketplaces because the Tanach says to do so, I will get rid of my Bibles and just buy NT’s.) But, even the folks you cited were not in favor of abuse, they were merely in favor of enduring abuse. They still believe that abuse is wrong on some level, no matter how they sidestep it. And, their hermeneutics are wrong nevertheless. That’s the key point.
God bless you, ChildofRa!
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Um, i didn’t suffer spousal abuse. I probably forgot to put the ladys name i’m sorry. As for links i typed in christianity and violence and thats what popped up. Im sorry i didnt provide better sources
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Clearly this gentleman is deeply emotionally unhinged, with a highly emotional (or rather, emotion-fuelled) atheism flowing from it. I have no idea what influenced this man choose the path he has, but pray that something good comes out of this, for the families of his victims and for an extremely broken man.
“I would like to mention that most of the atheists and anti-theists mentioned advocate marginalizing Christianity (and other religions) rather than violence.”
I agree strongly with John Peters’ comment and would like to emphasize that this incident does not show that atheists are prone to violence per-se, but rather that the Left has their share of extremists and violent extremism is certainly not a peculiarly Right-wing or religious behaviour (as many on the Progressive Left would like to believe).
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I see a lot of “This has nothing to do with being an atheist. You can’t blame atheism because some atheist do stuff” type posts.
However, any violence done by a theist seems to be used to show that theism is dangerous and needs to be eradicated.
Double standard?
Was not Dawkins, yesterday, claiming that this was deplorable and was not religiously based? It was about a parking spot, in a location referred to as NRA-Land?
So there we have it. Theist kills==> religion at fault. Atheist kills ==> must be some unrelated reason.
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You said it, Trent!
It’s sad and curious that when tragic events like this happen, the beliefs of the individuals are seen as irrelevant. “He’s not of our denomination!” is the constant cry from the atheist camp. Then well-meaning Christian brothers and sisters come along and being the overly nice people we tend to be, we want to work hard to help atheists distance themselves from this tragedy. But as jmg123 so finely said above, the sick individual’s behavior is not contradictory to the very vocal atheism / anti-theism he espoused.
Yes, most atheists aren’t crazed murderers. Agreed. Yet those who aren’t such crazed murderers are not kind, friendly people because of their atheism, but in spite of it.
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Exactly! “Nice” a-theists are stealing from God in being “nice.” And WK proved it, in his all-time best blog posting ever: https://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/an-atheist-explains-the-real-consequences-of-adopting-an-atheistic-worldview/
Every a-theist needs to be confronted, in a loving manner, with the reality that WK has provided in that posting. It is precisely the biggest dilemma that I could never solve as an a-theist, and, therefore, that posting can provide a major milestone on the path to the Cross for many a-theists. The life of the a-theist is best exemplified by the position of the coyote hanging in mid-air after running off the cliff in an attempt to catch the roadrunner: no objective moral, truth, scientific, logical, mathematical, or philosophical foundation for the a-theistic worldview. But, to modify Kevin Costner’s (mythical, as it turns out) line in Waterworld, “Unshakable ground is NOT a myth.”
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