Posted on 12/15/2012 7:00:04 AM PST by smoothsailing
Pay close attention to what gets blamed for the Newtown school shooting. Evil is to blame for these horrific murders and nothing else. Listen closely to the rhetoric over the coming weeks. How often will evil be named as the cause of the horror?
Not often, I suspect.
Some dispute the existence of conscious, deliberate, unseen evil. Perhaps that’s why blame for the murderous horror will fall elsewhere. Some consider the mention of evil in public discourse to be unseemly. Belief in pure deliberate evil can be inconvenient, because it includes other necessary beliefs.
Failing to name it evil lets evil flourish. If the sight of planes slamming into the World Trade Center towers wasn’t enough to comfortably believe in evil, maybe the horror in Connecticut will be.
Denial of conscious, deliberate evil makes it easier to deny the existence of conscious and deliberate good. If deliberate evil exists, then deliberate good must also. Otherwise human history would be one long ruinous loop of Stalin’s gulags and Pol Pot’s murder factories. Thankfully, those black times are broken up by goodness.
Evil seeks to destroy human life, human dignity, and even civilizations. Goodness and light offer an alternative. The sort of world we have is determined by what you and those around you choose. A man in Connecticut accepted evil.
Conditions, rough upbringings, or worldly objects are convenient explanations when evil manifests itself for all to see. Find any news account today and inventory what is being blamed for the mass killing of children.
But the systematic and deliberate slaughter of innocents is not a new story. It happened once before, after the arrival of an alternative way. It was also featured in the industrial scale eradication of European Jewry.
Spare no child of light, and usher in an age of darkness.
How vile that the evil in Connecticut arrived in this season of light and season of lights. All of those innocent smiles and joyous expectations destroyed by a black wretched thing.
We’ll hear lots of bluster about how to prevent more school house murders. Nearly all of it is meaningless. The only way to prevent such horror is to choose to love your neighbor as yourself, to respect the dignity of human life, and to follow familiar laws thousands of years old.
Easier said than done, right? How could the goodness in many prevent the evil in one?
A culture that values goodness is a necessary prerequisite to discouraging evil. A culture of light and life relegates evil to the diminishing margins. This is a story as old as time. A culture of violence toward life and toward the dignity of every human eventually produces violence toward life, period. What else would you expect to happen?
The Romans were dumbfounded by the strange stubborn Jewish sect that prayerfully martyred themselves to Roman savagery. The intoxicated and bloodthirsty roars of the coliseum could not overcome the transformational power of the new alternative. Rome crumbled while the philosophy of those martyrs transformed the world.
That’s the story of this Christmas, and that’s why the evil in Newtown must be called by its true name.
Bad brains and their access to the free world outside of being locked up for life before this happens is the reason.
But, who will lock these people away BEFORE they do something these days?
And a society that meets evil ONLY by martyring itself will also lose. Even Jesus Christ was content not simply to die, but to arise a conquering victor who would seem ruthless enough to His sworn enemies. And was it for naught that He told His disciples to get a sword too?
Many things failed to work as well as they had in decades past. But nobody thinks it’s possible to lock away every loon without also locking away those perceived as merely odd or eccentric.
This is NOT a problem with people's brains or brain chemistry. That is the point here. If it is a problem with a malfunctioning brain, then it is simply a disease and the person who does such an act is not guilty.
This is not a mental illness problem. It is a problem of the existence of EVIL. The bible often speaks of the heart and that the heart, not the brain, is where the real person is. People who do such despicable acts have dead hearts. They are either demon possessed or they lack the very essence of what makes human beings human beings.
ANTI-Depressants.............SSRI’s
http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/introduction.htm
http://www.antidepressantsfacts.com/casualties.htm
To liberals there is no such thing as evil, just misunderstood or mentally challenged people. And they can fix them.... That’s why we have streets filled with psychopaths,sociopaths,druggies,rapists, and thugs. The liberals fixed them therefore they are no longer a threat.
This is a failure of real men unable to protect the ones they love because liberals believe they know better than our founders.
I also believe that shooter in this case should have been evaluated much earlier in his life for mental health issues. There are likely many out there who could go off the deep end under specific circumstances. It sounds like the shooter got good grades in school, and therefore his withdrawn demeanor and behavioral abnormalities were ignored. We need to do a better job recognizing those at the fringes.
Well these NOT GUILTY people with bad brains are killing people in many places. Not their fault, but we still have to bury the dead they leave behind, right?
It is not basic evil, it is usually autism/schizophrenia. Add to that the access to porn on the net which gets these youths all sexually charged up.
They have their own sense of right and wrong and justice and when the outcome doesn’t fit their view they can go off.
When they get older and get hormones going they get much more aggressive and problematic.
Maybe castrate the mentally impaired youth for everyone’s protection which might stop all the hormones causing these rages? Who wants to judge doing that?
Evil exists, I read we have 30,000 people a year go missing in the United States without a trace, but these “mass” killings seem often to be the mental.
They’ve taken God out of the classroom. They’ve taken nativity scenes from the public square. They’ve taken the Ten Commandments from court houses and public buildings. They’ve taken prayer from high school football games and graduation addresses. The list of these deliberate acts seems endless.
They continue to do everything they can to diminish God and rip him from the fabric of our culture. They wish to destroy whatever is left of our Judeo-Christian tradition.
In such an environment, is it any surprise that evil is emboldened to enter?
If J Christian Adams “Evil Is To Blame” essay really wanted to “channel” this he’d attribute the actions of this perp to the disintegration of family values under the withering attacks on religion by the demo-coms and not necessarilly to “evil” . Which of course will get ridiculed by some of our “conservative” talkies.
I agree with you that we are discussing evil. I am concerned, however, of the manipulation of the insane depraved individual by sane depraved forces seeking to subvert our freedoms.
A person can be BOTH depraved/evil AND insane. And that makes many of them pliable.
I’ve known crazy people. I haven’t known any that I would think capable of this kind of evil.
However there is one group of people who are this evil. The followers of Islam... This sort of thing is precisely their MO.
Nothing much has been said about the shooters friends or family. Statements made so far seem to be fluid. Almost like a cover up of some sort.
It’s my guess that this kid was a Muslim or a Muslim convert, and it is being downplayed by the official line.
School bombings etc. are not only their MO, but was threatened in some of the communications that have been reported over the last year or so.
Does anyone think this would not be hidden from the public if true?
It is true that there has been a great desensitizing to hurting others and death in the last few decades.
Cable showing the violence Hollywood provides.
Abortion, killing the innocent for conveniance.
All cultures being touted as equal.
Distancing the family from Church and God.
All play a part as well.
Cable showing the violence Hollywood provides.
Abortion, killing the innocent for convenience.
All cultures being touted as equal.
Distancing the family from Church and God.
All play a part as well.
> But nobody thinks it’s possible to lock away every loon
> without also locking away those perceived as merely odd
> or eccentric.
I grew up in a city, attending elementary school in the 1950s. There were plenty of “eccentric” folks in the neighborhood. However, the authorities were able to distinguish the “eccentric” from the “lunatic”. Lunatics were locked away in asylums and sanitariums. Child molesters, kidnappers and murderers were routinely and swiftly executed. In my state, it was the electric chair.
We started every elementary school day with the 23rd Psalm, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a little song, “Good Morning to You”. We had Jews, Catholics and Protestants in the classrooms. Nobody complained.
We played in the playgrounds for hours on end. Went skating on the various swamps and ponds after school. None of us had any way to communicate with our parents while we were outside of the home. If we were invited to eat supper at a friend’s house, we had to go home first and clear it with our parents.
Nobody ever approached us to harm us, except to chase us off where we were trespassing. Our school crossing policeman was armed.
Yeah, we had bullies. We called each other names, often based on ethnicity or religion. We had fist fights after school sometimes. Nobody ever flashed a knife or a gun. Ever. Many of us had guns in the home. Some were prominently displayed on racks in the parlor. In all my youth, I never heard of a burglary in our neighborhood. Never.
What changed?
Well, the war against God changed it all.
If you don’t have an objective, transcendent, external standard, a Truth that is true whether you like it or not, whether you believe it or not, whether you even know it or not, then you have no basis upon which to judge evil and acknowledge good.
I tried telling people at work the same thing yesterday. I received eyerolls....and other excuses.
They think I’m a “Jesus freak”. I guess I am, but it hasn’t stopped me from speaking about it and Him.
Exactly so. Moral relativism does not allow people to even utter the word “evil.” But that is what this is, whether the shooter was autistic, bipolar, or schizophrenic - pure evil preying on innocence and good. That’s our world - evil is allowed to run rampant. Thankfully, there is Good as well, and Good will triumph. I feel sorry for those who don’t know that, and cannot even think in terms of “good” and “evil.” C.S. Lewis said that there are two mistakes you can make with respect to evil; one is not taking it seriously, and the other is being too preoccupied with it. In our secular society it is bad taste to even say the word - so arrogant!
Evil bump
I’ve known crazy people. I haven’t known any that I would think capable of this kind of evil.
However there is one group of people who are this evil. The followers of Islam... This sort of thing is precisely their MO.
Nothing much has been said about the shooters friends or family. Statements made so far seem to be fluid. Almost like a cover up of some sort.
It’s my guess that this kid was a Muslim or a Muslim convert, and it is being downplayed by the official line.
School bombings etc. are not only their MO, but was threatened in some of the communications that have been reported over the last year or so.
Does anyone think this would not be hidden from the public if true?
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