As many Americans, and perhaps many overseas as well, continue to recoil at the carnage that swept through the idyllic outskirts of the town of Santa Barbara over the weekend, we hear renewed calls for gun control, tougher measures against gun wielding criminals, increased access for upright citizens to guns, and the like.  We also see various commentaries on the state of American society and much debate about why people like Elliot Rodger came to a point where their frustrations erupt in deadly anger.
     Either way, these awful events present a call, again, to look ever more closely at ourselves.  At one point in his "Retribution Video," Rodger claims that when he exacts revenge, he will be like God, judging and executing judgment.  Granted, not many of us express, at least consciously, similar inclinations, but in the highly individualistic and opportunistic society that America has become, we all fall, in many and variegated ways, prey to such temptations.  When we are told from birth that we should be everything we can be, when we are told that we have no boundaries or limits on what we ought to be able to do or become--and not that these encouragements are, in themselves, wrong:  I've told my kids similar things many times--yet do not provide a transcendent moral framework for doing so, we eventually digress into a state of mind in which we, unwittingly or not, elevate the "good" of ourselves above any defining and circumscribing meaning or purpose for doing so.  We do indeed become gods, our self and our world the only limit of whom we suppose we ought to be.
     "Without revelation [without input from a wisdom greater than our own]," as the Hebrew proverb (29:18) goes, "the people perish."