A Complex Argument

I took the American Thinker to task for a post suggesting the Academy was directly responsible for Seung-Hui Cho committing mass murder. As for Gingrich's comments, I don't believe he is saying quite the same thing, though perhaps neither he nor The American Thinker post clearly stated what they meant.

Joe Gandelman

Do you know what the REAL cause of the Virginia Tech Massacre was? It was liberalism …. according to Gingrich.

To be fair to Gingrich, one must take into account he was pointing to cultural trends which have been on going for some forty years.

We have removed any sense of morality, often based upon a concept of God, from our classrooms and as a result, we've been forced to replace it with metal detectors, instead. I don't see that as an arguable point.

Through the pushing of abortion as simply one more lifestyle choice, as opposed to the morally difficult unfortunate event it might reasonably sometimes have to be, we certainly have moved away from a culture of life, toward one that almost trivializes death. Also, having already had round one on euthanasia, we did little to celebrate a culture of life there.

While I am strongly opposed to linking one institution, or one professor to the cause for any one lunatics act, that should not mean we can't engage in a serious discussion around the degradation of our culture and what role it may have to play in the kinds of violence and social mayhem which we are seeing more and more in society today.

Comments

[Zifnab]

"We have removed any sense of morality, often based upon a concept of God, from our classrooms and as a result, we've been forced to replace it with metal detectors, instead. I don't see that as an arguable point."

Lizzy Bordon took an axe. Gave her mother forty wacks. When see saw what she had done. Gave her father forty-one.

Seriously, you act like freak acts of violence are something new or unique to this liberal hell our society has devolved into. Maybe you could have pointed to Charles Manson as some sort of child of the evil hippie left, but Cho was hardly a godless liberal. He repeatedly likened himself to Jesus. Misguided? No shit. Amoral? No kidding. But lacking a concept of God? I think just the opposite. He was clearly too fixated on God and the hereafter.

[Phoenix]

I don't know, Dan. I don't think there's an increase or decrease in freak acts of violence. It's just that we are surrounded by it when it happens by the bloodlust of the MSM. - Wall-papered by it so that it becomes larger than life. Psychopathology has no politics, and a civilized society is not immune to the evil in human nature. Putting morality/God, abortion, and politics into the picture to attach blame gets us nowhere. In fact, I think it just tilts the world more out of balance when we try to assign blame to events that go beyond our metric of comprehension. It makes us hate. We always hate evil because we can't understand it. Maybe we should just accept that there are some things beyond our ken.

I don't mean to sound defeatist or simple. It's just that the caterwauling from TV and from the blogs and the know-it-alls grew to a cacaphony almost more gruesome than the crime itself. We should have all just shut up and let grief have its way. At least grief leaves us humble and open to ways of ameliorating the next possible crime. There is no debating this because hate and blame take over and where are we then? What is there to debate anyway?... How to act the next time?

[Purple Avenger]

Loons with bad wiring have been around ever since there have been people. They just found out the ice man was murdered, and maybe 20 years ago the Brits found a preserved couple thousand year old body in a bog that had been murdered.

What we have now is more reporting of heinous murders than there was in the past.

[Steel]

Forget how this tradegy is being addressed in this country.

Look how at how it is being viewed elsewhere.

THAT'S where the trouble is.

http://steelturman.typepad.com/thesteeldeal/2007/04/twoons_plus_10.html

[Cindi]

I will tell you of the trouble. In my opinion anyway.

My sister married a guy back in the late 80's. He had two kids. On one of their visits with thier mother, who had lost custody, she managed to hide them from him for two years. Buy the time the kids were found.......through my brother in-law being a part of Delta Force, yeah, they found these kids and returned them. The stories these kids told at the age of 5 and 7 were so off the wall, most of you would not be able to comprehend. Much healing took place. My...errrr, not sure what to call her, other than my sisters step child, through some tough times, is now a rather successful in life, through her own determination and support from family. Her brother however is beyond help. This kid was a monster from the word go. Many a night I would lay awake wondering if he would kill not just my sister, but her husband. Last I heard, Jeremy was self medicating somewhere in San Antionio Texas. Sad, really fucking sad, when you try and help, and things remain the same. This kid could knock on my family door tomorrow and we would try to help. But reality is, he is evil. His mother took him beyond court authority is not to blame, nor is my sisers x husband. The kid is just evil.

[Steve J.]

"the degradation of our culture"

One sign of this is the barbarians who wish to either prohibit the teaching of evolutionary theory OR give equal footing to nonsense, such as Intelligent Design.

[David L]

The common element of both Columine and Blackburg was that in both cases the shooter(s) emphasised feeling good, read self-esteem, over actually being goog, i.e, the Golden Rule.

That has been the over arching objective of liberalism for the last few decades. to emphasis feeling good rather than being good. Newt really misplayed a easy pop-up here.

[Zifnab]

"One sign of this is the barbarians who wish to either prohibit the teaching of evolutionary theory OR give equal footing to nonsense, such as Intelligent Design."

I honestly don't think this has anything to do with the VT shooting.

[Zifnab]

David, the overarching theme of Columbine and Blackburg was that both times you had kids who were social parias who lost their grips on reality and went nuts. I don't see how liberalism has anything to do with picking up "social outcast" status, unless you want to run with the "liberal elites excluded me from their playgroup as a child" rationale.

Whatever may be said of these guys, they were not looking to "feel good". They were looking to vent their misery on others. And in both incidents they claimed to be "doing good" by killing people they believed deserved to die. On the countrary, they were as far away from the liberal live-and-let-live ideology as you can get. Tolerance and forgiveness for their fellow man had been reduced to nill. I don't know what tenents of liberalism you thought they were adhering to, but their reckless sprees had very little to do with income redistribution or universal health benefits. They certainly weren't trying to coddle anybody.

[Ron Mills]

Newt. Take us back to the good old days 40 years ago when there were no campus shootings....

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Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 – August 1, 1966) was a student at the University of Texas at Austin and a Marine, who is known for having ascended the University's 27-story tower on August 1, 1966 and shot at passersby in the city and on the campus below, having killed his mother and his wife the night before. In all Whitman killed 15 people and wounded 31 others before he was shot dead by Austin police. (Some accounts allege 16 or 17 victims, citing a later suicide stemming from the attacks, and a pregnant woman, Claire Wilson. The unborn child was delivered deceased by C-Section and found to have had its head crushed by the penetrating bullet.)

[Dan Riehl]

Charles Joseph Whitman

was found tohave a malignant brain tumor, likely causing his mental illness. You couldn't find a worse example for your point. Go get a real serial killer, there are plenty of them.

[seekeronos]

This is addressed primarily to the usual gang of lefties and their allies that want to reduce this to some random unhappy accident, or on some other intangible thing. But if it applies to any gentle reader here, I pray, consider it carefully.

"...So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee."

This verse repeats itself throughout much of the giving of the Law of Moses to the Israelites - it was an ending statement following after verses regarding the disposition of evil-doers, and was to be enforced by the government of the Israelites.

When said Israelites applied and practiced those laws, they did prosper, with regard to evil being controlled and reduced in their land. When they turned away from God... much evil did abound, and chaos best that land until eventually, God allowed Israel to be delivered up to the judgment of Gentile nations, to be scattered as dust throughout the earth.

In this age of grace, the dreadful weight of the Mosaic and Levitical laws do not hold us captive, yet they are still written for our instruction, both to point to our own state of sin and wicked rebellion against God. Those laws show us the depth of the depravity of our hearts, and the wickedness of human nature itself: for there are none righteous, not even one (Romans 3:23).

That said, Cho Seung-Hui is not terribly different from any of us, most of us who have turned away from the True God and His Christ by false teachings and devilish doctrines of so-called "rationalism" and "humanism", which are like a poisoned honeycomb - they do seem to taste good, but therein are only lies and deceptions to blind us to the snare which verily is dragging the unsaved men and women of this doomed world into fiery hell.

Consider even that the post on American Thinker (by James Lewis) might even have a grain of truth to it, where he wrote:

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Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells.

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Those children - tens of millions of them - are indeed LOST. Not to some abstract thing as suffering as "latchkey kids" or the horrors of violent video games, or even a total lack of responsible parenting by their parents (who are in many cases themselves no less mentally unbalanced than the thousands of potential Chos or Klebolds or Harrises walking the campuses of American secondary and post-secondary schools. Nor is it exclusively the fault of the self-aggrandizing "wise" men and women who perfidiously propagate their wicked anti-God, anti-Christian, and anti-American agendas, with which so many of us have been inoculated against the Gospel of Salvation.

Those people - kids, parents, civic leaders, and crazed narcissistic "professors" of evil are but symptoms of a far greater issue.

They are LOST: lost to the clutches of that wicked serpent, that ancient foe of God and Man from of old, and en route to a enternity of gnashing of teeth and wailing in Hell.

Someday, every knee will bow and confess Christ as Lord... whether it be in the hell of the Lake of Fire, or at the right hand of God's Son.

Remember well: the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man. BOTH are believers - one saved, and the other eternally lost.

I know the usual gang of scoffers will scoff, but Christ's mercy is to everyone that will turn to Him and seek him diligently.

Repent, and seek Him soon, in a time when He may be found. After you're dead... you will have no other hope.

[tally]

according to the boy's aunt, he has always been messed up. i doubt our culture had anything to do with it.