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.
free society bump for later.....
Exactly! And according to Him, it will only get worse. I believe we have just begun to feel the pangs and distress of what is about to come.
At least the officials in charge claimed to be able to tell eccentric from dangerous loon.
God or not (and infinitely better with, but that is beside the immediate point) it is not within the purview of mortals to read all other mortals’ minds. Not every possible dangerous loon went to an asylum (many of which weren’t all that humane for the Godliness that was being trumpeted at the time, which is not to God’s shame but to man’s) and not every possible one can. So back-up procedures are necessary in a sane society.
Insane people can act off impulse and can act not knowing what they are doing. But to kill dozens of helpless people including more than a dozen little children is not the act of some crazy person but the act of a heartless monster.
The Nazi Guards who killed thousands or perhaps millions of Jewish Children in WWII, were they at all insane, or were they all just plain Evil? Was it chemical imbalance that drove them to commit unspeakable evil acts or was it that they had surrendered themselves over to the powers of darkness?
I think only the latter explanation can account for their acts.
C. S. Lewis said that about the devil, not about evil. Do not ignore, but neither be entranced.
I think some people with some form of mental illness are adopting the mantra from Obama that Islam is cool, that the OWS was about the future, that progressive leftist views are the future because nobody is fighting hard enough, so these folks adopt what they perceive as the stronger impetous or culture shift.
Thanks to Obama we have a love Islam or be incarcerated culture.
Islam is evil, and it is contagious to weak willed people.
As long as Islam is pushed down our throats there will always be some fanatical followers.
Personally I think this guy went off the deep end because he experienced sheer hopelessness, absolute futility, he believes all will die and he will contribute his name to history.
But its the cult of islam that supports these actions.
Ban Islam.
I have an 11 year old autistic son, so this is really hitting home. Although kids with autism can seem sort of “off” or eccentric, there IS a way to raise these kids to be kind, peaceful, and non-aggressive. We routinely show our son tons of affection, we do Scouts, spend as much time as we can with him, lock up our guns, and we stay close as a family. We also do not medicate him, but use firm behavioral techniques and we set boundaries. I do believe my son is a kind and peaceful person at heart, although perhaps at times could lack in judgement and executive functioning. We believe in actually getting off our butts and sticking our heads inside the doors of both our sons, to MONITOR what is going on ...what is going on in their rooms? In the basement? It is not acceptable to let them just be alone for hours at a time, with no supervision!
What was going on with THIS family? Who was spending time with this young man? Was he on medication? What were the family dynamics? Was the boy gainfully employed in any way, or was he just allowed to rot away plugged into the computer all day playing violent video games? A LOT OF autistic and other developmentally delayed young people do NOT have any sort of empoloyment once they leave the school systems. Something was terribly amiss within this family ....it’s time to get to the bottom of this and many other families, where kids like this are being ignored, because someone doesn’t make the time for them.
Evil is, of course, true.
However, marginal sanity is also a reality.
There is nothing that prevents both from simultaneously occurring in one person. Nor does that fact negate the reality that pure evil people exist and commit evil acts.
I’m looking for those who are manipulable, and those with marginal intellect/sanity fit the description for which I seek.
I’ve been thinking about this too, and I can’t help but notice that random and ruthless aggression is found amongst animals too. Attacking the young of the same species, or preying on the weak of other species (sometimes just for amusement) is common. I begin to suspect that this is the basic nature of living things, and it’s the goodness and empathy that are anomalous. Of course, that means we have to encourage it strenuously, but I’m no longer surprised at random acts of violence.
The media causes the psycho or idiot to shoot.
The mainstream media causes these shootings.
These psychos seek the fame the media will give them.
These shootings didn’t happen in the decades past before the media started glorifying all these shootings and making the shooters world famous.
The media (democrats) want to take away our guns.
In Norway they had always banned guns but a psycho got a gun on the black market and killed 70+ kids and no security guard etc. had a gun to defend against that cause guns were banned long ago.
This never happened in the past (in past decades before massive media coverage or any "mass shooting". Now it is happening regularly BECAUSE of the media saturation coverage.
Some loser who no one ever paid attention to , who never succeeded at any thing now is on ever tv screen in the world and ever paper and the media evil cretins are talking about every thing about this cretin. who cares about “why” it did it ? we know why , the media caused it because this NEVER or hardly ever used to happen in the many decades before the media intense coverage. the media know what they are doing and their goal is to take away our guns so that the government is empowered in relation to us. The media are democrats/socialists and that's why they do everything to empower the government and to enslave us or the individual, fake global warming hoax, fake gun hoax, obamacare etc etc.
The liberals have politically corrected us to the point of death and destruction.
You have to be careful about talking about evil...even here on Free Republic. I had the misfortune of knowing a serial rapist/murderer. His name was Wayne Nance. They keep finding his victims. In the small city of Missoula, Montana. It’s a long story, but I confronted Wayne in our high school because he frightened my girl friend. I looked in his eyes. The only thing I know to call it is evil. So, I wrote that here on Free Republic and a couple of people made fun of me. One guy suggested I take up palm reading. That was pretty funny. Wayne was dabbling in the occult. He was sacrificing cats to Satan. There is evil. Make fun of it all you want, it’s still there. Some of us have seen it.
Same here.
The day we were told we would not be saying prayer in class anymore is a day I well remember. What was wrong if we couldn't say a prayer...and later, the Pledge. Why was it OK one day and not the next?
Some things you still remember that happened a long time ago - like no Prayer or Pledge in class anymore - stick with you all the years later.
Maybe it seemed to me, a little kid, that something was going to go wrong. It felt...wrong.
Very accurate and true post. I have seen evil people in my life. Makes the hair stand on your neck.
One faily innocuous example:
As a young person, I remember a woman trying tto steal my suitcase while I was talking to my family, while we were standing in an airport. I saw this person out of the corner of my eye. She was bending over, reaching toward the handle. I looked her square in the eye and simply nodded my head ‘no.’ She pulled her arm away like a retreating snake.
I remember many details, but I remember her eyes most of all. There was something about them.
That’s just a fairly routine story.
As I've said, I don't doubt it. I think the biggest reason for skepticism is that I don't know any way to distinguish people who recognize actual evil in people and say so, from those who would claim to recognize evil in people but don't. If someone's claim that they can tell a person is evil is considered to be sufficient basis for action against the latter person, the amount of damage evil people could do by making false claims against good people who might otherwise expose them would likely outweigh the harm prevented by such action.
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