(November 21, 2015)

In the sturm and drang over the Syrian refugees, I keep seeing Timothy McVeigh come up which is not surprising being that he was such a scary dangerous mass murdering terrorist creep and an All American white boy at that. However, Timothy McVeigh was not a Christian. I’ve seen this meme I don’t know how many times these past couple days, but bad news for us secular humanists….Timothy McVeigh was an atheist. An ardent one, at that. Science, he proclaimed, was his religion. He’d been raised a good Catholic kid, but as an adult he was a committed atheist. It happens. Being a committed atheist myself (and raised Catholic at that) I am not completely surprised, as we’ve had our share of mass murderers, including two of the big three (Stalin and Mao–Hitler was a believer of some kind of religion, apparently.) As the end drew nigh McVeigh hedged his epistemological bets somewhat and described himself as agnostic, and finally, just to be safe, he had Last Rites with his last meal. But as a working terrorist he was absolutely not a Christian. Now there is a lot of wordy delusional nonsense by micro-offended atheists trying to show McVeigh wasn’t an atheist (or that any bad guys ever were atheists, being that we are intellectually incapable of being anything but pure as the driven snow), but that is a load of philosophical crap. McVeigh was an atheist. And I can only imagine just how offended he’d be if he knew he would one day become the poster child for white Christian domestic terrorists. After all, it took a rationalist, if psychopathically ideological mind to devise such an extraordinarily powerful bomb from items you could find in a barn (well, several barns). Obviously Tim paid attention in science class. And it really was some bomb. 168 dead (and hundreds more wounded) is quite an achievement in the annals of terrorism. In fact despite the endless litany of car and truck bombs that have numbed us almost to the point of not caring (there were several in the past couple days, in fact), Timothy McVeigh’s Ryder truck full of fertilizer ranks as eighth deadliest motor vehicle bomb ever. That’s right, of all the car and truck bombs ever–many of which involve several vehicles and drivers who blew up with them–McVeigh’s remains one of the very worst ever. Indeed, it ties for thirtieth (with the Chechens) in the deadliest terrorist attacks of all time. Which is quite an achievement, you have to admit. Of course Osama’s 9/11 is still the most horrific act of terrorism ever, by far, thus giving Republican politicians their initial excuse to wallow in nativist religious bigotry and paranoia. Not that paranoia itself is entirely a bad thing in an age of terrorism, and certainly we on the left have our own cherished paranoias. But it was Timothy McVeigh, the All American Atheist, who committed the second worst terrorist act in American history. Indeed, one that even beats out most jihadis, even the recently martyred crew in Paris. Which shows that despite of the memes, and in spite of the incessant ghastly attacks by fanatical jihadists (the vast majority of them upon Muslims, actually) you don’t need to be religious to be a truly inventive dangerous person. You don’t need to be a Muslim, you don’t need God or gods at all. You don’t even need ideology. All you need is your thinking cap. Which is why there should be a government registry of atheists. Has Ben Carson proposed this yet? I know I’d sign up.

Alas, he was a white American atheist. Bull is bull.