I've thought a long time about what motivates behavior like that manifested at Columbine and at Sandy Hook and then of course most recently at Parkland.

Because of the Parkland event I thought that I would read a chapter from my book to everyone. It's chapter 6, rule 6.

Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world and it's an extended meditation on the kind of motivations that drive the people who wish to slaughter innocence as a form of revenge against God.

So I'm going to read it to you and you can let me know what you think.

Rule 6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. A religious problem.

It does not seem reasonable to describe the young man who shot 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut in 2012 as a religious person.

This is equally true for the Colorado Theatre gunman and the Columbine High School shooters.

But these murderous individuals had a problem with reality that existed at a religious depth.

As one of the members of the Columbine duo wrote, the human race isn't worth fighting for, only worth killing, give the earth back to the animals.

They deserve it infinitely more than we do. Nothing means anything anymore.

People who think such things view being itself as inequitable and harsh to the point of corruption and human being in particular as contemptible.

They appoint themselves supreme adjudicators of reality and find it wanting.

They're the ultimate critics. The deeply cynical writer continues.

If you recall your history, the Nazis came up with a final solution to the Jewish problem. Kill them all.

Well, in case you haven't figured it out, I say, kill mankind. No one should survive.

For such individuals, the world of experience is insufficient and evil, so to hell with everything.

What is happening when someone comes to think in this manner? A great German play, Faust, a tragedy written by Johann Wolfgang von Gertz.

Gertz addresses that issue. The play's main character, a scholar named Heinrich Faust, trades his immortal soul to the devil, Mephistopheles.

In return, he receives whatever he desires while still alive on earth. In Gertz's play, Mephistopheles is the eternal adversary of being.

He has a central defining credo. I am the spirit who negates, and rightly so, for all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly.

It were better nothing would begin. Thus everything that your term sin, destruction, evil represent, that is my proper element.

Gertz considered this hateful sentiment so important, so key to the central element of vengeful human destructiveness that he had Mephistopheles say it a second time phrased somewhat differently in part two of the play written many years later.

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