(Untitled)

[takeme2dsnyland]

This VT thing has left me with a weird feeling. I don't really like how the media is handling it, and especially how stupid people are handling it. The killer's actions are in NO way excusable. What he did was monstrous, but he himself wasn't. If anything, he truly needed serious help, and I am bothered by the fact that somehow no one was able to

Comments

[equivoke]

You're less heartless than me. I kinda don't care about the situation since it doesn't involve me directly. I would be sad if I knew someone or knew someone that knew someone, but I'm not going to talk about it forever. I would probably be coma-esque in my sadness if it was a close friend. But life goes on.

It happened, bad things happen to both bad and good people, you deal with it. Statistically speaking, these things happen and will continue to happen due to random chance if nothing else.

Here comes the heartless - I don't mind talking about it. I don't have some radical view that he was justified or that the administration and police shouldn't have taken different actions, like when they didn't find a murder weapon at the first crime scene. But all this support and prayers and blah just makes me want to tune people out. Not because it's religious or anything, but because it's fruitless. Take action to make the world a better place as best you can, deal with the bad stuff as you can in the way you want, I'm just meh about it.

It's gotten me out of some work I guess, since professors and students keep talking about it rather than coursework and the situation itself is... interesting to talk about.

Don't even get me started on people like Geraldo Rivera taking advantage of the situation.

[littlebit312]

Just in response to your knowing someone, a guy you graduated with was interviewed in the paper as going there and he actually hid in one of the classrooms in, I think, an adjacent building. Robert Stephens. Just thought I'd point that out.

[equivoke]

Oh damn, I forgot Robert Stephens goes to VT. Glad that crazy bastard is ok.

[equivoke]

Also, from my great big textbook on suicide:

"Even the Bible could be read with a chivalric eye. The Old Testament tells the story of several suicides without misgivings (those of Samson, Saul, the Achitophel, one of the Macabee brothers and his mother)

... in many ways Platonism redefined the view that man had no right to force the divine element out of his body's jail. Only God, already seen as the one ruling power, had the command over life and death. ... The Church Fathers who gave a definitive formulation tot he Christian doctrine all had undergone the influence of neo-Platonism.

In its early stages the Church had not been very outspoken on self-killing. Christians were exhorted to prevent their brethren from getting so desperate that they killed themselves. Thus the approach was pastoral rather than condemning. Martyrdom, however, roused serious moral and theological problems. The mainstream of Christianity held to the view that nobody should seek death, but in many a case the fervor to become a saint caused people to denounce themselves with the pagan authorities. In some cases Christians threw themselves upon the pyres on which their fellow believers were being burned at the stake. ...

In the 4th century, when the Church became dominant, the principled rejection of suicide took shape. Lactantius put self-killing on par with manslaughter: "For if homicide is abominable because he is a destructor of man, he falls under the same crime as one who kills himself, for he kills a man". Next Lactantius uses the neo-Platonist argument saying that God's revenge will be more severe as a self-killer is encroaching on God's rights over life and death.

The definitive doctrine was laid down by St. Augustine, who has always been the main authority for Christendom in the West. ... he ended his career as a bishop of Hippo in North Africa. There he encountered a heretic movement that venerated people who had thrown themselves from heights to go to heaven. To fight them effectively he appealed to their common authority, the Holy Bible. He is the first to explain (in The City of God) the commandment "thou shalt not kill" as meaning "neither another nor oneself". To endorse the biblical argument he refers to the New Testament story of Christ being tempted by Satan, who puts Him on the pinnacles of the temples in Jerusalem: If you are God's son, throw yourself. Christ's refusal is seen by St.Augustine and the legion of theologians who were to follow him, as complementary evidence that self-killing is the worst sin imaginable.

It is only in this context that Judas Iscariot gets a new significance. His end is told on two places in the New Testament. Mathew (27:5) describes how he tried in vain to return the 30 silver pieces, the premium of his betrayal, to the Jewish priests. "and he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself." The impure money was used by the priest to buy a field to bury the corpses of foreigners. The Acts of the Apostles (1:18) tell: "now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out." Medieval authors and artists combined both stories having Judas falling with noose and all, his bowels gushing out.

Judas's suicide was final proof that he completely rejected God's grace, whereas the robber whow as crucified next to Christ was redeemed and entered paradise togheter with the Savior. God's mercy is endless to those who are willing to accept it, but those who reject it, commit the terrible sin of Desperatio. hanging was therefore regarded as the most abominable way out because this type of death left one unable to call for mercy, because one was choked and was unable to express a last-minute repentance.