This time it was New Zealand. Quiet, unassuming, remote New Zealand – to most people, simply the location that Peter Jackson used as Middle Earth for his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nothing ever happens there.

Except now it’s ugly, too.

There is nothing remotely sane or excusable about what happened there; no justification whatsoever for the tragic loss of life. But is it a shock? Well, no, not really. If this is a shock to you, you’ve not been paying attention; it is – sadly – just another in a long, long string of pointless such attacks.

What’s different, this time, is the idiotic rhetoric that all white people are to blame, that the actions of a few white supremacists are somehow a burden on all white people. As an example, this driveling piece of pseudo-journalism: The Christchurch Shootings Should Implicate All White Australians. Yet, when a Muslim attacker commits an atrocity, everyone is quick on the draw with #NotAllMuslims. Well, here’s a newsflash: #NotAllWhites.

This asinine habit of painting large segments of populations based on the actions of a few is the result of identity politics. More recently, it has been the whole #MeToo movement, painting men as sexual predators, accompanied by plenty of talk about “toxic masculinity”; again, let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with bad behaviour coming to light; women need to stand up to this. What is reprehensible is how all men are made to bear the burden of a few, when in fact, most men are good.

(I am white, and I am male, so these days I am apparently everything that is wrong with society. There are days I think I should just take myself out of the equation and help save humanity.)

The New Zealand shooter left behind a manifesto, in which he uses race as a justification for his action; it is a dark, ugly diatribe of insanity. No one can deny that race issues divide humans and create conflict, stupidly and unnecessarily. What the “progressive” left ideology is coming up with, however, is absolute nonsense meant to divide further; it does nothing to bring people together to solve the issues.

For example, this interview with a (white) Morrocan-American author, where she argues with a white male in her audience, asking him to

“consider what your average newsroom in this country looks like…It is primarily white, it is primarily male and it is primarily straight, and every news story you read comes through that filter”.

Well, perhaps demographics come into play here: over 75% of the US population is white, and approximately 96% are straight. Could that have anything to do with it? If she had moved to India, would she be complaining that all the journalists and anchors are brown? (As an aside, I often travel to the US and turn on the local news; I disagree with her point, as I very often see female and African-American anchors and journalists, but I have no statistics on this.)

The larger battles, however, are more often drawn along religious grounds. Islam is a religion, practiced by many “races”; so is Christianity, or Judaism, or Buddhism, etc. All religions claim they are peaceful, yet here is A look at attacks on houses of worship over last decade.

It’s a wonderful chronology of beautiful human behaviour:

  • Muslims killing Christians.
  • Christians killing Muslims.
  • Christians killing Christians.
  • Muslims killing Muslims.

All in the name of “My imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend“, or even “I worship my imaginary friend better than you do“.

As horrible as the New Zealand attacks were, I do not find it necessary to prostrate ourselves to Islam, to see politicians and police officers donning headscarves (wait: do they take off their headscarves to show support when Islamists kill “infidels”?). The religious wars are far from over; just in the week since New Zealand, there have been more news:

But, yeah – “white supremacy” is the problem.

So, how do we get the insanity to stop? The killings, the blaming and shaming, the racist, tribal rhetoric?

In 1882’s “The Parable of the Madman“, Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead…And we have killed him!” We killed him with mind, reason, and science. Humans have made great strides in explaining the natural world around us; we no longer need the crutch that is God to explain what we don’t yet understand, to “fill the gaps”.

The tribalism that religion has provoked on mankind has been disastrous. In his 1930 essay “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?“, Bertrand Russell describes it as “a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race”. He goes on to describe his objections to religion:

“The objections to religion are of two sorts – intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.”

It is man’s mind that figured out how to build things, how to navigate the seas, how to understand and cure diseases, and how to make all the things that have improved our lives and our longevity (I’m using the word “man” here as in humanity, mankind, men and women). Ayn Rand, an author so despised by the leftist ideologists because of her advocacy of the individual (she came from communist Russia, where socialism trampled any kind of individualism and left millions of corpses) put it succinctly well in her book The Fountainhead:

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons – a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.”

Nietzsche’s madman understands that he has “come too early”, that “This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.” Humans cling to their dogmatic beliefs, instead of harnessing the power of Mind and Reason to work towards a common good for all of humanity.

There is, essentially, only one race: the Human Race, and until we bury God completely, until we adopt a more humanistic approach to life on this tiny planet, the religious wars and the killings will continue.