News-Record.com

As one might expect, the on-line world has been buzzing pretty much non-stop since the news came out of the trouble at Blacksburg, VA.

I sampled a few items last night and found an interesting thing. The few folks who had made statements about the identity of the shooter seemed quite certain that it would turn out to be a member of the group they hated (or feared) the most. One Christian posted to alt.atheism that he was certain that the shooter would turn out to be one of those poor godless heathens who was finally giving in to his evil nature. An atheist hothead posted that he was dead certain that it had to be some fundy, Republican gun nut gone wild.

As is too often the case, everyone jumped to the most natural conclusion that their prejudices provided them. Myself, I have done my best to keep my prejudices in check and am determined to simply wait on the investigation to run its course and tell us what the facts are. There will be plenty of time to analyze those and seek lessons to be learned when they're finally released.

The above was posted by me. Seems the blog software being used these days has a fair number of odd bugs in it still...

And what's more amazing is that even from the grave, this loser is still getting his way. NBC gets a video from him and can't BEAR the idea that they have something that people will be morbidly curious to see, so they show it to the nation.

Obviously, this will encourage other sick, warped nuts to make their own videos and send them in so that their fame as "scary people" will last longer than their pathetic, useless lives. How stupid...

I just read an interesting article on the psychology of mass killers. I think it helps folks to deal with this sort of thing if they can get a handle on why this stuff happens. I mean, beyond the "it's caused by sin" explanation...

Eric: “I mean, beyond the "it's caused by sin" explanation...” It IS caused by sin!

The problem is that atheists and humanists have caricatured “sin” as a concept throughout the media (Elmer Gantry et al.) and educational system - psychology deals constantly with sin, but won’t dare call it such, because of systemic prejudice against Biblical truth. Just because they have developed their own jargon, they feel they can dismiss biblical terminologies out of hand, rather than honestly trying to see the clear connections.

The technical observations and therapies of psychiatry can be immensely helpful in certain cases. In other instances they utterly FAIL to help people. Criminals often have numerous encounters with psychiatric personnel and institutions, but it fails to prevent their crimes or cure their maladies. It also does poorly at providing a comprehensive life. Individual and group therapy sessions, as helpful as they sometimes are, cannot build an ongoing community of relationships (a life) the way a Church can, with its highly developed concepts of the Body of Christ, teachings about interpersonal dynamics, pastoral counseling, and the Eucharist.

At the ROOT of all evil is sin. The media and intellectual humanists attempt to caricature sin as not drinking or sleeping around, or of not cussing or wearing bikinis, etc. But the sin concept has been highly explored and developed by both Christians and others. The biblical picture of sin is extremely comprehensive; and deals not only with superficial behaviors, often conditioned by disparate cultural norms, but also with deep-seated motivations and mental aberrations – called the “noetic” effects of sin.

Sin can be defined as simply as the biblical phrase “Sin is the transgression of the Law” – stealing, murdering, adulterous acts, etc - which is essential and complete. But it can also be understood by contrasting it with the good. God created homo sapiens to be happy and fulfilled, holy and righteous: in the image of God. This is the “summum bonum,” the pinnacle of human existence – to know the personal Creator and to live with others in harmony, peace and love in His holy presence. “The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink (law-keeping) but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

In other words, the intrinsic impulse to rebel against the Creator’s ways (LawWord) becomes highly convoluted and complex as it develops in a person’s psyche over time, and generations. A sinful and broken home can produce all kinds of aberrant mental conditions and behavior. We live in a sin-permeated environment and sin (anti-life) manifests its negative effects in both simple and complicated ways. These conflicting impulses and latent effects of sin can also produce mental illness, neurosis and psychosis. Cho Seung-hui was obviously at the late stages of such noetic effects.

Being separated from God’s love and life inevitably produces the evil that exists around us and within us. The Gospel is God’s powerful remedy for the sin problem. It annuls the guilt of sin, restores the God-connection and ACTUALLY IMBUES people with the very life of the Spirit. Although human error, ignorance and imperfection often distort and impede the Gospel’s healing effects, it stands by itself and has proven itself over the centuries, when rightly understood and applied, as doing precisely what it is intended to do.

Sometimes people are so far gone down the road of spiritual confusion and darkness that they cannot extricate themselves from their dilemma. At such times, drug and psychiatric triage can at least relieve symptoms, and prevent them from hurting others or themselves. Oh that Cho had been apprehended before his dark rampage. The psychiatric system obviously failed here.

As I have said in many entries before, the answer is building a sane, righteous, healthy, and loving culture where evil is eliminated and suppressed. It is times like this, and the concurrent rampage of evil and darkness in Iraq, that should drive us to God and the Gospel. But the noetic effects of sin blind the mind and heart of man to this reality, and we arrogantly continue to trust in our own resources alone. If man could have figured the spiritual dilemma out on his own, God would not have had to reveal His LawWord and the wisdom of Messiah - and provide his gracious atonement.

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

By "sin" if you mean "desire", as in the 10th commandment's prohibitions, I am reading a fellow named René Girard now who would say you are right. The cycle of desire (also central to Buddhist warnings) leads to envy and often violence, by Girard's account. I beg to differ with him when he says only the Bible is credible in its teachings about this; he discounts everything else as mythical stories, with a small kernel of "truth", but ultimately siding with the morality of the crowd, whereas he claims the Bible shows the innocence of victims and Jesus' power coming from being the ultimate victim. He says the Hobbesian "all against all" becomes the "all against one" in an act of supreme scapegoating.

I imagine many shooters like this troubled young man become over-identified as victims, bearing the brunt of bullying and ostracization, until their warped sense of justice snaps. We ahev abandoned the mentally ill by and large in our culture, unless there's a simple little pill to sell them on TV.