VA Tech. shooter was an anti-theist.
Offline Great. Here we go.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070417/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_shooting
(excerpt)
Cho — who arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., where his parents worked at a dry cleaners — left a note in his dorm room that was found after the bloodbath.
A law enforcement official who read Cho's note described it Tuesday as a typed, eight-page rant against rich kids and religion. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
"You caused me to do this," the official quoted the note as saying.
Cho indicated in his letter that the end was near and that there was a deed to be done, the official said. He also expressed disappointment in his own religion, and made several references to Christianity, the official said.
"You are 'atheist' simply you are PSYCHO or IGNORANCE. That's why even youself feel like not EXIST on this world."
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Not a valid source. This person was NOT an 'official' unless authorized. AP has been questioned about this. No answer as of 8:04 CST. I miss UPI some days.
Currently, newspapers across america are scrambling for anything. Many have placed an 'embargo' on stories through the wire because no one wants this bullshit 'coal-mine' journalism to be perpetuated.
Let the officials do their job and then get the facts.
I'm constantly listening to people bitch about the media skewing facts and we don't even give the investigators time to realize the facts. If one wants to know why the media seems biased all of the time then look in the mirror.
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I agree. Besides, having disappointment in one's religion does not make and anti-theist. It makes him sad and I wish he could have reached out to someone to talk before deciding to commit this horrendous act. I am sure that both sides will be slinging insults at each other based on hindsight wisdom before this is all forgotten by the press next week, but the families will still have to deal with the loss.
Maybe if he'd been raised atheist he wouldn't have shorted out? No matter though, the BTK killer was a highly respected member of his Chistian church. Case studies just don't hold any weight.
On another note, this excerpt from the Yahoo article shows how the media shamelessly distorts news to make it more intriguing-
"Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him."
The quote came from an interview with 1 of the killers fellow students. I just heard it not more than an hour ago on NPR. What was actually said was "If you greeted him sometimes he wouldn't even respond." There's a big difference between the 2.
By making it sound like he'd never respond the killer looks even more mysterious. It makes me sick to think about the AP and their cronies smacking their lips and licking their chops over so much blood shed, then fabricating bits and pieces of the story to make it more marketable. Whatever it takes to sell the news.I didn't read that as being atheist but rather being a Christian and expressing discontent with the religion. While he may have been irritated and asking questions of the religion... to make the connection that lacking religion made him do it is just false though I'm sure someone will make it because there are a lot of idiots with microphones but any person with a shred of knowledge in psychology knows otherwise. College makes people think and question what they've always been taught but it doesn't cause people to go slaughter others. Sounds like the kid had a lot of problems for a while.
Flemming Rose: “When [christians] say you are not showing respect, I would say: you are not asking for my respect, you are asking for my submission….”
Yep, technically he was a disgruntled Christian.
Read the whole paragraph:
"Cho indicated in his letter that the end was near and that there was a deed to be done, the official said. He also expressed disappointment in his own religion, and made several references to Christianity, the official said."
Cho felt "the end was near." A religious belief in the end of the world. His rampage was partially motivated by religion.
The last sentence is ambiguous. We don't know if he was a Christian or not, or if his references to Christianity were positive or negative. We could speculate that, coming from South Korea, he was raised Buddhist or Confuscian, became disappointed by those non-apocalyptic religions, and turned to christianity, finding its promise of a blood-soaked ending to the world to be attractive. Given the other things we know about his personality and his fantasies, I'd say that's a likely scenario.
Whatever the specific details, it now appears from this statement that Cho had religion on the brain. I'm sure that we will soon be able to add the body count from VT to the millions of others killed by the religious mind-virus. Everybody brush up on your rebuttals to the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, because we're going to be hearing a lot of them from theists over the next while.
Lazy is a word we use when someone isn't doing what we want them to do.
- Dr. Joy Brown
Leave it to an asshat to emply that by not believing somehow we'd do what this sicko did. Thats like saying all Catholic preists molest children.
Who gives a shit even if he was an atheist. A human is still subject to mental defect be they believer or non-believer. No one should try to spin this bullshit to demonize non-believers.
Just another prick quote mining and trolling to make the atheist out to be genocidal maniacs. Nothing new or suprising about this tactic.
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It will be interesting to see, as more information comes out about this guy and his writings, exactly to what extent religion informed his worldview. There's no doubt that he was mentally unstable, but I don't want to give religion a pass if it provided the framework for his justification for doing what he did. After all, I'm sure there are a lot of people with the same disorder(s) that HAVEN'T gone on a shooting rampage. This is where religious moderates are at their most dangerous: they will urge us all to consider his mental disorder to be the prime cause of this and ignore the possibility that if he didn't have religious delusions he might have found it harder to justify his violent desires and sought help.
And I do make a distinction between religious beliefs and violent games/movies. Consumers of violent games/movies are not encouraged, at all, to relate their messages to real life or to believe the action they are seeing is real. Consumers of religious myths are strongly encouraged, even brainwashed, to do just that.
Lazy is a word we use when someone isn't doing what we want them to do.
- Dr. Joy Brown
He was still a theist at the time this happened, not an atheist. He was a theist having difficulties with his own religion. It says more about the problems with religion than anything else. Something one is brought up with from the day they are born, told is true and cannot possibly be wrong, yet when someone does open their eyes and actually start seeing everything that's wrong for it, their whole life can go in to a spin and cause many many issues with them. A lot of internal conflicts about the whole essense of their being, their life, and existance in general.
This is part of what the Rational Responders is here for, to help people through those difficult times when they start having questions. To answer them and show them that this doubt does NOT mean all is lost, that this doubt does NOT mean life (theirs and other peoples) is meaningless, that this doubt does NOT mean anarchy and chaos.
Organised religion is the ultimate form of blasphemy.
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Well, guys, I think they're right. I think he was an atheist, and murdered all those people because he didn't believe in god.
I'm going to pack up my League of Atheists Badge and my Logic textbooks and break out the crosses and portraits of Jesus. Clearly the existence of a mentally disturbed man who didn't believe in Jesus and killed lots of people proves conclusively that God exists and that Jesus is his only begotten son, and that if I only believe in him, I'll inherit eternal life and won't have to spend eternity in hell rotting with all the other atheist mass murderers.
Can I take my tongue out of my cheek now?
Why does this question even matter? Who cares what he believed?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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So much talk about an official unofficially reading a letter, but now much much worse.
NBC were sent some video statements from this guy. You can read it all here. Very VERY fucking disturbing.
Organised religion is the ultimate form of blasphemy.
Censored and blacked out for internet access in ANZ!
AU: http://nocleanfeed.com/ | NZ: http://nzblackout.org/
Though we don't have all the information to make a fully informed diagnosis, it's pretty clear that he had classical messianic, persecution and martyr delusions.
Given that these 3 things are all central to our dominant messianic monotheistic religions, but not normally considered delusional, I would say he was operating from inside the Muslim/Christian camp and not outside or in opposition to it.
After watching the killer's own video footage, it's quite clear he sees himself as a martyr and compares himself to Jesus. Atheist, I think not.
I think there's 33 dead people at VT that would care quite a bit about what this guy believed if they could care about anything at all. Beliefs inform our actions. Those people are dead because of this guy's sick beliefs, and those beliefs were, it appears, influenced by religions.
I think that, as a society, we are going to have to start paying a lot more attention to mental health than we have so far. There were a lot of people wondering about this guy, but they had no avenue to express their concerns. Maybe universities and workplaces need access to professional interveners who can investigate and try to help people that appear to be spiraling out of control. Just an idea.
Lazy is a word we use when someone isn't doing what we want them to do.
- Dr. Joy Brown
Tilberian,
Let me put it another way. We care if a sane person is told that leading Jews into the "showers" at concentration camps is a good and virtuous thing to do. That's using propaganda to make a good person do bad things. I know, it's an extreme example, but you see what I'm saying, right?
This guy, by all preliminary accounts, was a nut job. You feed truth, lies, religion, atheism, communism, fascism, anarchism, whatever... into his head, and he's going to come up with delusions. There is a certain portion of the population that are psychopaths, and it's been pretty well established that in the worst cases, any and all information will be twisted in their heads to match their delusions.
Here's another bad analogy that might get my point across anyway. Have you ever dated someone who, no matter what you said, would take it the worst possible way? Who assumed that if you brought her flowers that you had done something wrong? If you told her she looked beautiful in that dress, would ask, "What, I don't look beautiful in jeans?"
That's what goes on in the psycopath's mind. Anything you tell them will be twisted. If media reports are not exaggerated *cough, cough* then this guy would have eventually flown off the handle over something.
My point was, even if this guy was a raging atheist (which I doubt) it has no bearing on anything because he was dip-shit crazy! There is no way to make any valid statements about the worth of his beliefs to a functional society, or the damage that "normal" beliefs might have caused to him.
Sometimes psycopaths kill people. If anything, we should be asking about the state of a social welfare system that spotted a problem with a potential psychopath, and then did little or nothing to see that he was properly evaluated, and at the least, put on some meds and kept away from the gun stores.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism