Anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock the past few days is aware of the shooting rampage at VA Tech recently. Even if you don’t read the news, you know about it, because it’s plastered all over your friends’ xangas, blogs, and facebook notes, each entry dripping with honest sentiments of shock and horror.

Which leads me to provoke the question: are we really that naïve? First, let me say that I am not trying to trivialize what happened, though I may end up doing exactly that. Any way you look at it, the event was a tragedy.

I’m interested in the psychology of why people, myself included, find it so easy to unite under such circumstances as “shooting at Columbine” or “terrorist attacks subway station in NYC”—isolated incidents which have a direct effect on relatively few people—while turning a blind eye to daily, recurring atrocities that destroy hundreds or thousands of lives every day. Consider the following statistics:

Malaria kills 1-3 million people each year, making the most conservative casualty count roughly 3,000 people per day.

2.8 million people died of starvation in North Korea’s three-year famine. This was 1998. Today it’s arguably hardly any better.

Approximately 110 people in the U.S. commit suicide every day. Some people will excuse this by saying that it’s self-inflicted, when the truth is that there’s always something someone could have done to help.

In the most developed country in the world, the United States, there are 744,000 chronically homeless people (those with repeated episodes or who have been homeless for long periods), many of which ultimately die of starvation, diseases wrought by living in unsanitary conditions, or of sheer cold. Again, easily preventable should we provide them with a fraction of our disposable income.

And on and on and on it goes…

This begs two questions. First, why are some of us suddenly afraid of going to school because of a remote shooting in Virginia when statistically, you have a better chance of committing suicide or of asphyxiation by choking? Second, why does it so rattle us when news like this hits our radar? I’m talking about news that we can’t prevent without taking irrational measures, while we ignore the preventable atrocities that occur on a much larger scale around the world. Homicides happen every day, to people in a generally much closer vicinity to you than the students in VA. Are 32 homicides in one campus worse than 32 homicides distributed around the world? Is it about vicinity? Or about numbers?

Or maybe it’s just shocking to some of you that people can be so cruel. How can someone volunteer to discharge bullets and shrapnel into a live human being as a carpenter would fire a nail into furniture? For those of you who resonate with this, I must ask if you’ve ever read the newspaper (not counting the comics or sports sections). 50% of newspaper articles are about people dying. The front page is about the highly politicized ones (see top headline of the drudge report: “Campus Killer is native of S. Korea”… like that really has to do with anything), while the rest is about some homeless black guy in Idaho getting lynched. I’m not trying to be crude, but this is reality.

Moreover, how can someone be surprised that these happen when it’s in all of our natures to do the same thing under the right contexts? I’d rather not speak for anyone but myself, but I dare to say that I’m not the only one. I don’t think about taking a gun to anyone’s head, but I grew up in a loving family with nice dogs and have everything I could pretty much ever want.

When you or I examine our own human nature, can we honestly say that mankind is truly inherently good? Is the solution to life's problems really more of me? I hope not.

I hope I don’t come off as cynical or jaded. At least that’s not all I hope to come across as. After all, if my perception of the world ultimately fits reality, hence my not being surprised at such tragedies happening, it’s a pretty good start.

Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail was a response to eight clergymen who published an article denouncing King's methods and motives. I have rarely if ever come across a work so insightful and prophetic, page after page and word after word. In this excerpt, he deals with the topic of the Church. I encourage you all to read the letter in its entirity here.

I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful -- in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey Gad rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent -- and often even vocal -- sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world.

This is all so true. 43 years later, has anything changed? Have we progressed? Have we regressed? Do we as a church simply submit to the status quo, or do we push it towards godliness? Have we confused culture for what is truly Christianity? Why do you think the church is more often than not seen as inauthentic, irrelevant, and ineffective?