I was lucky enough to be eating my lunch in front of the living room television when Rader was, in fine detail, pleading guilty to the ten first degree murder counts.  No joke, i wasn’t able to finish my lunch of white clamsauce over linguine. 

Like many a commentator that day, his calm demeanor and the cadence of his speech *immediately* reminded me of those 200 some German butcher-beasts (a.k.a., “defendants") at the UN WarCrimes Commission trials in Nuremburg; Like those savage Germans with their fine, learned tastes and proper families, he was overtly calm, methodical, and seemingly at peace with his own, inner insectile-like morality.

Whether this is all the mark of a “TrueBeliever”, i’m not as self-convinced as some.  (I’m not even sure the empirical evidence supports such self-concocted hyperbole.) Let’s remember, “church” in America (like so much today in the West) is really just about having fun and socializing—not really about improvement of community or self, or any single codified set of values.  That, i’m afraid, is far too substantative for most Westerners’ lifestyles or psyches.

In fact, Dennis Rader, the man who sexually self-pleased himself while standing in the presence of a strangled child, still-hanging with dead froth around the mouth, is very, very much like most Americans:  just trying to “have some fun.”

He provides a mesmerizing, albeit sickening, glimpse into the Western psyche, and all those pathologies our communities ignorantly foster and promote amidst our ever-constant decadence and increasingly unbridled pleasure-seeking impulses.  That’s far more a mark of an American than, say, any one subclass within, such as “TrueBelievers.” or other scape-goats identified.

Go ahead, embrace your desires, and scape-goats.
It’s probably a lot more fun than the truth, if that’s what you get into.

this story reminds me of a joke . . .

An atheist was walking through the woods.

“wow! what majestic trees! what powerful rivers! what beautiful animals!” he said to himself.

as he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. he turned to look. he saw a giant grizzly bear charge toward him. he ran as fast as he could up the path. he looked over his shoulder, and saw that the bear was closing in on him.

he looked over his shoulder again and, the bear was even closer. his heart was pumping frantically and he tried to run even faster. he tripped and fell on the ground. he rolled over to pick himself up, but saw the bear right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw to strike him. at that instant, the atheist cried out, “oh my god!”

time stopped, the bear froze, and the forest was silent. as a bright light shone upon the atheist, a voice came out of the sky.

“you deny my existence for all of these years, and you teach others that I don’t exist, and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? am i to count you as a believer?”

The atheist looked directly into the light, “it would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a christian now,” he said, “but perhaps, could you make the bear a christian?”

“very well,” said the voice. the light went out, and the sounds of the forest resumed. and then the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head, and spoke:

“lord, bless this food which i am about to receive and for which I am truly thankful.”

Rob: “He provides a mesmerizing, albeit sickening, glimpse into the Western psyche”

Oh, bullshit.  Torture and cruelty combined with perversion are hardly confined to Western culture.  They seem to be, er, human traits.

Security expert Gavin DeBecker says; any awful thing you can imagine, someone has probably done somewhere.  And the fact that you can imagine it means that on some level, you are not so different from those who do such things.  A rather famous psychological experiment shows that the comfort of imagining the torturer as “other” doesn’t hold up.

We have to be careful what road we’re on, and how far down it we’ve travelled.  It makes me think of how quick many people are to justify what is going on at Gitmo.  It’s the same road, we just have not travelled as far on it.

Oh, bullshit.  Torture and cruelty combined with perversion are hardly confined to Western culture.  They seem to be, er, human traits.

I’ve always been fascinated with, what i erroneously believed to be, the widely known statistic that serial killers, by and large, are a Western social pathology:
http://www.crimezzz.net/serialkiller_insight/geography_distribution.htm

# North America has produced some 80 percent of all known 20th-century serial killers, with the vast majority of those active in the United State.
# Europe runs a distant second with about 16 percent of the world’s total crop: the European leaders are:

* Great Britain (with 28 percent of the continent’s total)
* Germany (with 27 percent)
* France (trailing with 13 percent).

# Third World nations presently spawn 4 percent of the world’s known serial killers, but a recent upsurge from South African and Latin America threaten to alter those statistics in the new millennium.

(I did a google search on:
“serial killers” population percentage countries)

I think you’ll also start to see upsurges in Japan and also societies akin to Turkei and China with the advent of Western-style consumerism.  Japan, of course, is saturated with this psyche-destructive error—and probably shows other related problems too, like serial killers, in huge abundance.  (I’d point to the Aum Shinrikyo/AsimovFoundation sarin-gas-using cult as a particular example, but i think it was the result of mostly other historic factors unique to Japanese culture.) Serial killers are a symptom of the deeper, more pernicious disease of consumerism and the naturally accompanying fun-fun-more-fun!-dammit! mentality.

If you think the West has problems now (i do, of course), just wait till this present playstation-saturated-generation grows up to run our nursing homes, state hospitals, and prisons.  EG:  AbhuGraibv, i think, is more an issue of American culture than it is of any institution’s problems. Empathy med-development, anyone?  It should prove to be a huge market.

Maybe the West needs a collectivized form of group therapy before we dig deeper into sickness, like some nations before us.

I point all this out because I’m sometimes told by True Believers™ that the power of faith in God is so great that it can turn the worst of murderers into shining saints. Or that true evil of the sort that supposedly drives men such as Rader to do the terrible things they do can not survive in the light of God. Rader would seem to put the lie to those claims; he survived and prospered just fine for most of his life. The truly scary thing about him is that it didn’t take Satan for him to do the things he did, just a desire to see what it was like to emulate his God in a small fashion.

Hmmmmm.  I think the mistake many Christians make is thinking that simply believing in God will keep them on the straight and narrow and automatically make them good people.  Just like some of them think simply believing in God means they don’t need medical care. It’s childish and absurd.  But I also think the mistake many atheists make is assuming that just because a man says he believes in God, dresses in his SUNday best and carts the family off to church-it should somehow be shocking that he turns out to be not who he appears to be and somehow God can’t exist because of the man’s deception.  That line of thinking is childish in it’s own right.

To murder 10 innocent people for the sheer joy of it has an element of evil to it.  It may not be directly the work of HaSatan-since all men have choices to do good or evil. The bottom line is the man CHOSE to do evil. He CHOSE to align himself with evil.  Certainly no man can be truly choosing God and do evil.  Success and prosperity have NOTHING to do with choosing God or choosing evil.  Again, this thinking is naive at best.  Simply because you choose God doesn’t automatically mean you are a successful person. Many sincere believers live in poverty their whole lives. Many atheists are wealthy beyond measure.

And truly, Rader did what he did to play God.  But then who swore to be like God?

just wait till this present playstation-saturated-generation grows up to run our nursing homes, state hospitals, and prisons.

Oh geeeeeeeeeeeez. I am SO SICK of hearing people shift the blame to video games and movies.  Get over it already. Ted Bundy never picked up a Playstation in his life.  He had very real and very deep psychological problems stemming from his upbringing-and most likely some genetic predisposition towards violence.  Dahmer, I’m sure didn’t sit around playing Manhunt, either. Neither did Starkweather, Gacy or Speck for that matter.  With almost all of these men you find a pathology rooted in the hatred of women, particularly their mothers.  Had nothing to do with fantasy video games.  To place the blame there is to negate the social issues and problems that have spawned serial killers in the past.

Les’s point is that you can be a VERY good, WELL-respected Christian, yet still do stuff like this ... and even sleep well at night.

There is NO CORRELATION, zero, zip, nada, between being specifically a christian and being a good person.

Good people are simply people who habitually think good thoughts and do good things.

Any overlap of the set “christian” and the set “good person” is almost purely coincidental. The proof being that billions of people who are NOT christians are good people. 

I myself am an atheist, an anti-christian, yet the number of people I have personally strangled is very close to zero.

HOWEVER, I think Les might also be subtly considering, and I’d agree with it wholly, that the non-rational mindset that christianity, and most or all other religions, establishes in the mind of the person who accepts it, predisposes one to other irrational thoughts and acts.

Another thought follows: That it is LESS EFFICIENT to focus on teaching christianity as the path to good thoughts and deeds, rather than teaching good thoughts and deeds directly. A society which teaches christianity, or any religion, would therefore produce statistically fewer good people than a society which focused on goodness itself.

In other words, if your overt test for goodness is which children know the lord’s prayer by heart, and recite it out loud every day, and not those who most often share toys on the playground, help little old ladies across the street, and rescue abandoned kittens, (assuming you value those things as part of the set of “good�) then you’re shaping for christianity, and not goodness.

As to serial killers being a largely western phenomenon, I can believe it. And certainly, taken by itself, it doesn’t reflect well on western society.

However, it may well be that the cultural icons of freedom and imagination that more wholly characterize western cultures simply has a downside. Some people become researchers, explorers and inventors, and some (a MUCH smaller number, we should note), become serial killers.

While you’re beating up on western culture for producing psychopaths, you should be careful to give it credit for producing almost all modern medicine and technology ... and even most of the world’s food.

I’m not a complete cheerleader for all things western. For instance, I think tobacco industry executives should be dragged through the streets behind horses, and then beaten with shovels by the family members of people who have suffered and died from the glamorous addiction of smoking.

People who work for corporations which make land mines and other munitions should be forced, along with their loved ones, to play Survivor: Land Mine Maze on national television.

And George W. Bush and his whole cadre of vicious liars and extreme psychopaths – after all, they’ve killed thousands of times more INNOCENT victims than Rader ever thought about killing, and they’re gleefully destroying America itself for their own private aggrandizement and gain – should all end up in prison for long, long years.

Certainly no man can be truly choosing God and do evil.

Oh, Karen ... deep, disappointed sigh.

And heartfelt “Argh.”

Serial killers are too rare to draw much of a conclusion about a “culture” as a whole.  Maybe our culture causes serial killers!  Or maybe the loose screws that lend themselves to serial killing find other outlets in other cultures.  Or, other cultures may have taboos against discussion of such things and serial killing is underreported there.

But if I did have to point at some aspect of Western culture as tied to psychosexual serial killers, it would be the Puritan/Victorian abhorrance of all things sexual.  It’s custom-made to produce the kind of self-hating, twisted fascination that serial killers seem to exhibit.

Les is spot-on about the correlation of Christianity to morality.

# North America has produced some 80 percent of all known 20th-century serial killers, with the vast majority of those active in the United State.
# Europe runs a distant second with about 16 percent of the world’s total crop: the European leaders are:
* Great Britain (with 28 percent of the continent’s total)
* Germany (with 27 percent)
* France (trailing with 13 percent).

# Third World nations presently spawn 4 percent of the world’s known serial killers, but a recent upsurge from South African and Latin America threaten to alter those statistics in the new millennium.

Rob, although the stats you quoted are interesting, I would point out that they are misleading for several reasons:

First, you’re talking about numbers of the world’s “known” serial killers. This number is likely to be an underestimation of the number of actual serial killers—not all serial killers are caught.

Second, in 3rd world countries, record-keeping and tracking such things is considerably more hit-and-miss. So, the data available is particularly likely to underestimate the numbers in 3rd world and (former/present) communist countries.

Third, 3rd world and (former/present) communist countries are far less likely to have access to much in the line of historical (early 20th century) data.

(As an aside, I would also point out that the apparent upsurge in serial killers in South African and Latin American countries could be nothing more than a reflection of improved recording and tracking.)

Fourth, you might need to consider that the definition of the term, “serial killer” may differ in various parts of the world (for both political and social reasons) causing either overinclusion or underinclusion of data.

Fifth, it almost goes without saying that not all countries would be as forthcoming with this kind of information as we are in North America, and this seems likely to create an underestimation of the population for some nations.

To suggest that North America(n lifestyle) leads to an increase in serial killers is not at all supported by the numbers you’ve produced.

I’d point out to you that we know that sociopathy likely has a genetic/biological basis and we (scientists) are actually pretty good at identifying some of the early markers for sociopathy in kids.

You need to remember that while most serial killers are sociopaths, not all sociopaths turn into serial killers—some are highly productive citizens whose victims are primarily the people closest to them: close family and friends who suffer tremendous personal and psychological damage. 

Sorry, Rob. It ain’t the playstation that causes it and quoting those numbers doesn’t make your argument.

I myself am an atheist, an anti-christian, yet the number of people I have personally strangled is very close to zero.

First of all, Hank, spare me your “disappointed sigh”. I am not here to win your approval or disappoint you.  I stated an opinion. That opinion being no man who is TRULY (and I mean that word) choosing to be close to God can then turn around and commit evil. Case in point, the MAN (not the god/man) Yahshua. The messiah (again my humble opinion) chose to walk with God his entire life and he did NO evil-hence why he was without blemish and sufficient to be sacrifice for the sins of man. That is if you believe he existed and believe what is written about it. I choose to. My choice. Not yours and that’s FINE.

Secondly, why do you HAVE to be “anti-Christian” per se?  Why not just be atheist and move on with life?  I consider most of the “christian” religion to be the religion of Paul and therefore discount most of it-through my studies-as pagan based and erroneous in doctrine and theology. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “anti-Christian” when describing myself. I certainly don’t focus my energies on being “anti” anything. What’s the point?

That it is LESS EFFICIENT to focus on teaching christianity as the path to good thoughts and deeds,

Why can’t one teach their children to believe in God and ALSO be a good person?

Another common misconception about today’s Christianity, Hank: They teach good works AND faith.  The majority of church trekking Christians believe all they need is faith and that the “law” is dead, aging, past, etc.  They behave much like this (some do all of these and some do only a few): Monday through Saturday they back bite, gossip, form jealousies over their neighbors and friends and family, cheat mentally as well as physically on their spouses, abuse their children, drink and drug to excess, slobber over porn, lie to their bosses, steal from others and generally behave like jerks to their fellow man...but come SUNday they are right there in the pew, singing, listening as attentively as they can appear to be and basically love showing off their best clothes and truly believing in their hearts that they are saved (and anyone else who doesn’t believe as they do is NOT) because they have “faith”.  They have been saved!  They have salvation through Jeeezus Christ simply because they believe he was God in the flesh who came down and died for them-so they can behave the way they want and still reach heaven someday. Making the messiah “god” has relieved them of all responsibility to NOT sin. After all, they have original sin and can’t help but sin!  Jeeeezus was capable of not sinning because he was god!

This is all a far, far cry from the true, original faith of the earliest believers who vehemently argued that faith without works is dead. That being a good person is just as important as believing in God...obeying the law was just as important as having faith. Mind you, these early believers did not subscribe to the false teachings of those that followed and corrupted the original faith converting it to “mystery Babylon”.

Any argument that Christianity should be discounted simply because from time to time we see a psychopath emerge from it’s ranks is at best worthless.  Christianity should be judged on it’s merits, or lack of, intellectually and intelligently and with a clear understanding of it’s history...not based on one serial killer who lived his life outwardly as a “christian”.

That opinion being no man who is TRULY (and I mean that word) choosing to be close to God can then turn around and commit evil.

Ahh… the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.  What a simple way to explain away the inability of Christianity to effect moral change.  Simple, but wrong.  You can’t get off that easy.

That opinion being no man who is TRULY (and I mean that word) choosing to be close to God can then turn around and commit evil.

Well, folks, I was going to gently debate the above quotation (No true Scotsman ...), but 1. decrepit-old-fool beat me to it, and 2. after seeing another Karen post elsewhere here on SEB, I did a little research on the ‘net, and decided debating her would be at best, tossing pearls before swine.

Incidentally Karen, do you live in rural Michigan?  Are you on the Atkins diet?  Or is that another Karen?

--Joe

Les’s point is that you can be a VERY good, WELL-respected Christian, yet still do stuff like this ... and even sleep well at night.

There is NO CORRELATION, zero, zip, nada, between being specifically a christian and being a good person.

Well, it all depends, I suppose, on how one defines “Christian.” A Christian, properly speaking (which is certainly not congruent with simply being a regular church-goer) should be striving toward doing good, should be aware of their own failings, and should be trying to obey the commandments Jesus laid down (love of God, love of one’s neighbor).

A real Christian will not claim perfection.  As much as I utterly despise the bumper sticker “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” the small kernal of truth within it is that Christians seek to not need forgiveness, take comfort in the forgiveness they perceive, but acknowledge that part of that forgiveness is tied to further striving to do better.  Forgiveness from God is, to a Christian, both freely given and very expensive to accept.

Any overlap of the set “christian� and the set “good person� is almost purely coincidental. The proof being that billions of people who are NOT christians are good people.

I would more than glad to concede that there are good people who are not Christian (and I hope that they number in the billions), just as I am willing to concede that there are people who are ostensibly Christian who are by no means good.

I do think that following a Christian life, though, to the extent that one tries to do so, will, *un*coincidentally, mean trying to be a good person.

N.B. I, of course, have my own definition of what a “good person” is, and my own definition of what a good “Christian” is, and also concede that neither definition is universally accepted.

Christianity should be judged on it’s merits, or lack of, intellectually and intelligently and with a clear understanding of it’s history...not based on one serial killer who lived his life outwardly as a “christian�.

Past:
destruction of the Library of Alexandria
Malleus maleficarum and related Papal Bulls resulting in the slaughtering of thousands of “witches”
loss of women’s rights
Spanish Inquisition
The Crusades
rationale for imperialism
Salem Witch Trials

Present:
missionaries destroying other cultures
intolerance
radical Pro-Lifers engaging in domestic terrorism
homophobia
zealotry
attempting to impose their morality on others

Let’s not forget Christian support for slavery and Christian… opposition against slavery.  Along with Christian support for and opposition against racism, lynching, Jim Crow laws, intermarriage, freedom of speech, and so on.  Christianity does not seem to be a determinate variable there.

Think of any good person you know.  I bet that same person would be a good person no matter where they were raised (US, India, Africa, China, or a future atheistic culture as yet uninvented).  Yet where they are raised is strongly predictive as to what they believe, religion-wise.

Funny that you would mention slavery, DOF.

Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are Good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.—1 Peter 2: 18-20

On the same page I found some more interesting information:

The pro-Christian bias that mars so many of our history texts today can be seen in the way the abolitionist movement is treated. The Second Great Awakening, beginning around 1800, is usually cited as an important causative factor in the abolitionist movement that followed. However, this is revisionist history. The implication here is that Christianity was at the heart of the movement to free the slaves. Nothing could be further from the truth. The eradication of human bondage is in fact a by-product of the Enlightenment and the Age of Rationalism, secular reactions against the 1500-year-old stranglehold Christianity had on the throat of Europe. This movement, which swept across Europe at the end of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, profoundly affected the men who founded this nation. They founded the first governmental system in history entirely free from the shackles of religion. Thus did the secular realm enter American lives. Only then did the abolitionists come on the scene. By no stretch of the imagination can religious impulses or devotion be cited as causative factors. If so, why didn’t the abolitionist movement begin after the first Great Awakening? Did that movement’s leaders, George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards, cry out in indignation against human bondage? They did not. Was the anti-slavery banner raised in the colonies as a result of this re-awakening of Christian sentiment? IT was not. Slavery was not eliminated in this country until secularism had attained an ideological foothold. Certainly, many of the leaders of the abolitionist movement were religious. But, although they most likely were not aware of it, they were acting on humanistic, rather than religious impulses./quote]

If we’re going to consider Les’ argument that there is no correlation between being religious and being a “good person,” I think it is worthwhile defining our terms a little because there is a difference between having an intrinsic or an extrinsic religious orientation.

For those with an extrinsic orientation (utilitarian—useful for social standing, personal solace) toward religion, there is no increase in altruistic and helping behaviours.

However, for those with an intrinsic orientation toward religion (unification of being, brotherhood, a desire to trancend self-serving needs), there is an increased level of helping others. This probably sounds good to the religious among us and born-agains might want to be counted among the intrinsics.

For those with an intrinsic religious orientation, however, helping others is NOT associated with greater altruism. In fact, “pattern of results suggested that the prosocial motivation associated with an intrinsic end orientation to religion was directed toward an egoistic goal — either gaining social and self-rewards or avoiding social and self-punishments . . . It appears that the highly moral self-image associated with this way of being religious does not reflect selfless concern for the welfare of others; instead, it reflects a more self-centered desire to obtain social or self-rewards for being a good person.”

(See Religious prosocial motivation: Is it altruistic or egoistic?
By Batson, C. Daniel; Oleson, Kathryn C.; Weeks, Joy L.; Healy, Sean P.; et al
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. 57(5), Nov 1989, 873-884.)

So . . . Though those with an intrinsic religious orientation are perhaps more likely to help others, they do so for rather selfish and self-serving reasons. Are they nicer persons? I wouldn’t be too sure about that.

LOL Thank you for proving my point, warbi.

radical Pro-Lifers engaging in domestic terrorism

While I agree that there are a few fanatical pro-lifers out there that seem to think they can take the law in their own hands-I don’t see how you can blame only Christianity for this.  There are MANY religions (Islam, Hinduism, Judaism) opposed to abortion, all of which play a role in the pro-life organizations.

I might also add that the death and destruction of millions of human beings can also be considered domestic terrorism.  But then the secular argument would be they don’t count because they are still inside their mother-whose sole job, if I may, is to protect them, not erase them from existence.  I won’t argue abortion from a biblical standpoint or as a fanatical Christian (which I am not).  I only argue it as a woman and a mother who believes the end result of any abortion is always the same no matter how you slice it or spin it: the woman is left the murderer of her own offspring and must live with that knowlege for the rest of her life.  Is it a choice? Yes, it certainly is. But NEVER one that should have been made fodder for insensitive men, politicians or bloggers to take lightly and try to use to discredit an entire religious sect of people.

Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are Good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.—1 Peter 2: 18-20

This really is a tired argument, warbi.  Simply because the bible ( an historical document) speaks of slaves and masters (written during a time when slaves were common and merely a fact of life) does not mean the whole of Christendom supports slavery.  I mean honestly, how can you insinuate that with a straight face? Is your drive to discredit Christianity (using weak arguments I might add) stronger than your common sense?

There are so many valid arguments for discrediting Christianity, one need not pull out the old, immature ones that don’t hold water.  Do some research on Christianity and within moments you will see where it’s real Achilles heel is. Trust me, it doesn’t lie with pointing to verses within the historical text that simply characterize the time in which it was written. There are far more jucier contradictions-especially within the “new testament”.

I’d have to say the the verse Warbi quoted clearly places God’s endorsement on slavery.

Funny the Christians who insist on the most literal reading of the good book are those who seem least able to relinquish various bigotries and regrograde social practices.  Those who are willing to distinguish “the times in which it was written” and do a little interpretation, were often the reformers who brought about great social good.

Literalism and social absolutism seem not to be such a good thing…

Imagine if this guy had run for office, as a conservative republican christian.  How many ministers/priests/pastors/shamans would have backed him from the pulpit because he is such a great ‘christian’? Religion and politics…
- Matt

I’d have to say the the verse Warbi quoted clearly places God’s endorsement on slavery.

Please. God’s endorsement?  So you have spoken directly with Him and have heard His endorsement?

And for the record, I am the last to espouse literal reading of the “good book”. I stand behind the contention that the “good book” has been corrupted by the hand of man and is more a reflection of man’s endorsements and guidelines than it is of God’s.

Please. God’s endorsement?  So you have spoken directly with Him and have heard His endorsement?

Yes, we have all spoken to God, haven’t you?  Oh, and she says that you, Karen, are wrong on all of your points, and you should go sit down and be quiet.

- Matt