Should you pray or reason in times of tragedy?

Many people disagree on what really works when others need help or healing.

Virginia Tech sophomore Danny Raynes lost two close friends in Monday's mass killing on the Blacksburg campus, yet he sounded hopeful on the phone Wednesday as he explained that everything happens for a reason.

"My friends say I am a pretty upbeat person," said Raynes, 20, a Baptist from Montclair, Va.

For that he credits his Christian faith, which through prayer and Scripture has sustained him in the days since Cho Seung-Hui gunned down 32 people and took his own life.

"You have to turn to your faith," Raynes said. "We can't just turn to ourselves but to the creator who really loves us."

While the publicity surrounding massacre-related prayer vigils certainly backs that view, atheists and agnostics disagree.

Those who live without belief in a supreme being say it is other people - and human reason - that offer the best help in the wake of tragedy.

Prayer may provide comfort but not answers, said Heather Wellman, a Jacksonville resident and executive director of the Humanists of Florida Association.

"Sometimes a lot of people believe God will intercede and provide a solution, and that's not going to happen," Wellman said. "People are going to provide those solutions."

People volunteering as grief counselors, donating money or participating in rational debates on how to prevent more killings will make a true difference, Wellman said.

Praying about incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings has been proved not to work, said Wilhelmina Walton, a Jacksonville atheist and founding member of the First Coast Freethought Society.

Jacksonville's high homicide rate in 2006 is an example of that, she said.

About 6,000 people worshiped, prayed and sang hymns during the city-financed Day of Faith anti-violence rally in August. Yet the killings continued, Walton said.

Smarter public policies and gun laws - not prayer vigils - have the best chance of preventing future school shootings, she said.

"I don't see how anything that's going to solve these problems is going to come out of prayer," Walton said.

But human action without God's help is ultimately futile, said Katherine Kiernan Fries, a Jacksonville mom whose son, Dylan Kiernan, is a Virginia Tech sophomore not injured in the shootings.

Faith transforms merely surviving a tragedy to emerging victorious over it, she said.

Relying on God can remove the anger and confusion that otherwise could prolong the grieving process, said Kiernan Fries, author of The Red Words, a collection of Jesus' sayings from the New Testament.

"The important thing is for people to keep their faith in the face of adversity and turn to God," she said.

In fact, there's really no other choice, said the Rev. Tony Hansberry, pastor at Greater Grant Memorial AME Church on the Northside.

Shootings like the Virginia Tech massacre demonstrate that the nation's embrace of secularism - rejecting God and relying instead on human reason and actions - has failed.

"The truth of the matter is you've done everything else and still we find ourselves looking for help and assistance," Hansberry said.

That answer, in good times and bad, is God, he said.

"Who else you going to turn to?"

Vatican panel condemns limbo to eternal dustbin

ROME — Limbo has been in limbo for quite some time, but is now on its way to extinction.

A Vatican committee that spent years examining the medieval concept published a much-anticipated report Friday, concluding that unbaptized babies who die may go to heaven.

That could reverse centuries of Roman Catholic traditional belief that the souls of unbaptized babies are condemned to eternity in limbo, a place that is neither heaven nor hell. Limbo is not unpleasant, but it is not a seat alongside God.

Catholic doctrine states that because all humans are tainted by original sin, thanks to Adam and Eve, baptism is essential for salvation. But the idea of limbo has fallen out of favor for many Catholics, who see it as harsh and not befitting a merciful God.

The Vatican's International Theological Commission issued its findings — with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI — in a document published by the Catholic News Service, the news agency of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The commission is advisory, but the pope's endorsement of the document appears to indicate his acceptance of its findings.

Limbo, the commission said, "reflects an unduly restrictive view of salvation."

"Our conclusion," the panel said in its 41-page report, is that there are "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and brought into eternal happiness." The committee added that although this is not "sure knowledge," it comes in the context of a loving and just God who "wants all human beings to be saved."

Never formal doctrine

A church decision to abolish limbo has long been expected. Benedict and his predecessor, the late Pope John Paul II, expressed misgivings about the concept. Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the church's top enforcer of dogma, said he viewed limbo as a mere "theological hypothesis." Never part of formal doctrine because it does not appear in Scripture, limbo was removed from the Catholic catechism 15 years ago.

From the Latin "limbus," for hem or edge, limbo refers to a "state of natural happiness" outside heaven, a destination for the souls of babies who were not baptized and certain virtuous people, such as faithful Jews who lived before the time of Christ.

In the 5th century, St. Augustine declared that all unbaptized babies went to hell upon death. By the Middle Ages, the idea was softened to suggest a less severe fate, limbo.

In his Divine Comedy, Dante characterized limbo as the first circle of hell and populated it with the great thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as leading Islamic philosophers.

The document published Friday said the question of limbo had become a "matter of pastoral urgency" because of the growing number of babies who do not receive the baptismal rite. Especially in Africa and other parts of the world where Catholicism is growing but has competition from other faiths such as Islam, high infant mortality rates mean many families live with a church teaching them that their babies could not go to heaven.

Father Thomas Weinandy, executive director for doctrine at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the document "addresses the issue from a whole new perspective — if we are now hoping these children get to heaven, there is no longer any point in worrying about limbo."

"Although it doesn't actually dismiss limbo altogether," Weinandy added, "it argues for other ways of dealing with salvation for infants who died unbaptized."

Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center, praised a shift in policy as "pastoral and sensitive."

"It shows that Benedict is not afraid to look at something that has been taught in the church for centuries and say it is not at the core of Catholic belief," Reese said in an e-mail statement.

Father Thomas Rausch, a theologian at Loyola Marymount University, said the document "puts the Catholic Church in a different position than Protestant evangelicals, who teach if you do not have a conscious explicit relationship with Christ — born again — you cannot be saved."

He said Roman Catholic theologians of earlier generations had a Latin phrase for it, "Extra ecclesia nulla salus, meaning outside the church there is no salvation, or baptism is necessary for salvation."

Rausch said "most young Catholics are probably not even aware of limbo" because of its removal from the catechism. "So I don't see this document as terribly earthshaking. But it is an interesting example of the doctrinal development going on in a church that is alive and responding to new questions."

Conservatives skeptical

Catholic conservatives criticized any effort to relegate limbo to oblivion.

Removing the concept from church teaching would lessen baptism's importance and discourage the christening of infants, said Kenneth J. Wolfe, a Washington-based columnist for the traditionalist Catholic newspaper the Remnant.

"It makes baptism a formality, a party, instead of a necessity," Wolfe said. "There would be no reason for infant baptisms. It would put the Catholic Church on par with the Protestants."

It would also deprive Catholic leaders of a tool in their fight against abortion, he added. Priests have long told women that their aborted fetuses cannot go to heaven, which in theory was another argument against ending pregnancy. Without limbo, those fetuses presumably would no longer be denied communion with God.

Baptism with water remains a fundamental step to salvation in Catholic doctrine, and the new document urges parents to continue to baptize their children.

"There is no salvation which is not from Christ and ecclesial by its very nature," the report said.

An atheist at Virginia Tech

I am an atheist and a professor at Virginia Tech. Dinesh D’Souza says that I don’t exist, that I have nothing to say, that I am nowhere to be found.

But I am here.

Mr D'Souza writes that according to atheists,

the main characteristic of the universe is pitiless indifference … What this tells me is that if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil simply do not exist … Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way: molecules acting upon molecules.

I thought it worthwhile to say something in response, not because most people would put the point in the same morally reptilian manner as D’Souza, but because there is at least some vague sense amongst people that we atheists don’t quite grasp the enormity of Monday’s events, that we tend towards a cold-hearted manner of thinking, that we condescend to expressions of community, meaning, or bereavement.
So I will tell you, Mr D’Souza, what I grasp and where I am to be found.

I understand why my wife was frantic on Monday morning, trying to contact me through jammed phone lines. I can still feel the tenor of her voice resonating in my veins when she got through to me, how she shook with relief and tears. I remember how my mother looked the last time she thought she might have lost a son, so I have a vivid image of her and a thousand other mothers that hasn’t quite left my mind yet.

I am to be found in Lane Stadium, looking out over a sea of maroon and orange, trying not to break down when someone mentions the inviolability of the classroom and the bond between a teacher and his students. That is my classroom, Mr D’Souza, my students, my chosen responsibility in this godless life, my small office in the care of humanity and its youth.

I know that brutal death can come unannounced into any life, but that we should aspire to look at our approaching death with equanimity, with a sense that it completes a well-walked trail, that it is a privilege to have our stories run through to their proper end. I don’t need to live forever to live once and to live completely. It is precisely because I don’t believe there is an afterlife that I am so horrified by the stabbing and slashing and tattering of so many lives around me this week, the despoliation and ruination of the only thing each of us will ever have.

We atheists do not believe in gods, or angels, or demons, or souls that endure, or a meeting place after all is said and done where more can be said and done and the point of it all revealed. We don’t believe in the possibility of redemption after our lives, but the necessity of compassion in our lives. We believe in people, in their joys and pains, in their good ideas and their wit and wisdom. We believe in human rights and dignity, and we know what it is for those to be trampled on by brutes and vandals. We may believe that the universe is pitilessly indifferent but we know that friends and strangers alike most certainly are not. We despise atrocity, not because a god tells us that it is wrong, but because if not massacre then nothing could be wrong.

I am to be found on the drillfield with a candle in my hand. “Amazing Grace” is a beautiful song, and I can sing it for its beauty and its peacefulness. I don’t believe in any god, but I do believe in those people who have struggled through pain and found some solace in their religion. I am not at odds with them any more than I am at odds with Americans when we sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” just because I am not American.

I know that the theory of natural selection is the best explanation for the emergence and development of human beings and other species. I know that our bodies are composed of flesh, bone, and blood, and cells, and molecules. I also know that this does not account for all aspects of our lives, but I know no-one who ever thought it did. That is why we have science, and novels, and friendships, and poetry, and practical jokes, and photography, and a sense of awe at the immensity of time and the planet’s natural history, and walks with loved ones along the Huckleberry Trail, and atheist friends who keep kosher because, well just because, and passionate reverence for both those heroes who believed and those who did not, and have all this without needing a god to stitch together the tapestry of life.

I believe this young man was both sick and vicious, that his actions were both heinous and the result of a phenomenon that we must try to understand precisely so that we can prevent it in future. I have no sympathy for him. Given what he has done, I am not particularly sorry he has spared the world his continued existence; there was no possibility of redemption for him. You think we atheists have difficulty with the concept of evil. Quite the contrary. We can accept a description of this man as evil. We just don’t think that is an explanation. That is why we are exasperated at your mindless demonology.

Mr D'Souza writes that

atheism has nothing to offer in the face of tragedy except C'est la vie. Deal with it. Get over it. This is why the ceremonies were suffused with religious rhetoric. Only the language of religion seems appropriate to the magnitude of tragedy. Only God seems to have the power to heal hearts in such circumstances.

We think the pain is complete and absolute. We know it is.

We think that nothing can heal these hearts, that time can only take the sharpness off the agony, that only in time can beauty be wholeheartedly seen again or laughter felt deep inside.

We insist there is no sense or meaning to be made of this massacre. There was only sense and meaning to be created within the lives of each person gunned down. That is why we are horrified by it. That is precisely why it is so horrific.

We don't believe these people have died for anything: God's plan, as a beacon to the rest of us, to be a vivid memento mori for all. We just believe they have died, brutally and without mercy. We refuse to lie to grieving mothers out of some patronising sense that a pleasant myth is more respectful than a terrible truth.

Those of us with the slightest shred of decency do not tell widows to deal with it, to get over it. That the world can be callous is no reason to be so myself. I know that no family could ever get over this loss, that no family should ever be expected to get over this loss -- either by themselves, by religious rhetoricians bearing false platitudes, or by inane political pundits -- but that not getting over the loss does not preclude some other kind of happiness, some other source of joy, at some other time. Not now, not in this moment, not when they have moved on, but only when it comes to them one day, like light dawning slowly.

We know the world is cold, and that only people can make it warmer. We believe we can live in this imperfection, like a child can live without fulfilling her desperate wish for wings. We rail against injustice and tragedy, not the absence of deeper guarantees.

Some of us are those grieving mothers and wives and friends and colleagues. Some of us are inconsolable, but dignified for all that.

There is no language appropriate to the magnitude of the tragedy. Not stories about a poor man nailed to a cross, not fine words about a time for healing and a time for dying, not even the lines of the poet who, in the midst of his own horror, struggles to ask:

How can I embellish this carnival of slaughter, 
How decorate the massacre?

I feel humbled by the sense of composure of a family who lost someone on Monday. I will not insult that dignity by pretending there is sense to be made of this senselessness, or that there is some greater consolation to be found in the loss of a husband and son.

I know my students are now more than students.

You can find us next week in the bloodied classrooms of a violated campus, trying to piece our thoughts and lives and studies back together.

With or without a belief in a god, with or without your asinine bigotry, we will make progress, we will breathe life back into our university, I will succeed in explaining this or that point, slowly, eventually, in a ham-handed way, at risk of tears half-way through, my students will come to feel comfortable again in a classroom with no windows or escape route, and hell yes we will prevail.

You see Mr D’Souza, I am an atheist professor at Virginia Tech and a man of great faith. Not faith in your god. Faith in my people.