The terrible report of the Finnish teenager who killed five boys, two girls and an adult woman has been haunting my thoughts. For those of you who have missed the news a teenager named Pekka-Eric Auvinen posted on the video website YouTube explaining his actions and then went on a murderous rampage in his own school before ending his life by putting the gun to his head.

Apart from the murders taking place the most disturbing thing for me was the reason behind the killings. In his video before the murders he said he was an "antisocial social Darwinist", "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection." Usually in the news we hear of religious extremism such as the events of 9/11 but here we have a possible atheistic reason behind the killings.

As a teenager around the similar age of Pekka-Eric Auvinen it astounds me how a person could bring himself to commit such a chaotic act. We could always dismiss this 18 year old as being psychologically unstable and perhaps didn’t understand what he was doing behind the acts. Although doesn’t the mere fact he turned the gun on himself in the end show he understood the terrible crime he had just caused?

Yesterday a couple of my friends returned from Poland after visiting Auschwitz. The Nazi slaughter of around 1.1 million Jews at Auschwitz is such an evil and immoral act in modern history that it’s almost impossible to imagine. My friends who returned found it difficult placing words on what the place was like simply because of the horrendous acts which took place there. The only way they could describe it was the lack of life which surrounded the area, may that be plants, trees or birds, the place was deserted.

Like Pekka-Eric Auvinen the Nazis saw through a twisted Darwinist lens and saw survival of the fittest a reason behind murder. The scale of damage caused by Pekka-Eric Auvinen seems almost insignificant compared to the approximate 6 million Jewish deaths which took place in concentration camps. However forgetting about the numbers we have two events, with similar reasons which resulted in murder.

So many events have been committed throughout history because of fellow humans harbouring grudges against each other which eventually forms into hate. Although I won’t ever know the minds behind the countless murders which have taken place or suicide bombings which occur daily all around the world I know one thing, we must learn to forgive and remember.