My point was that by saying “good riddance”, you are in effect damning him. Not religiously, perhaps, but morally and philosophically.
You don’t seem to care about his death, you don’t seem to feel any pity, all you seem to feel is base, vengeful vindication, as if the terrible things he did are in any way changed by his death. It seems as though in your mind, he had lost all humanity, all potential for further good, all hope of ever being anything other than filth and refuse. If that’s not damning someone, I don’t know what is.
But I sense I’m not going to change your mind. You seem staunchly convinced that you are right and justified in your views, and you seem utterly disinclined to pity the man, horrible and wretched as he was. You seem content merely to judge him, self assured and untroubled by your negativity and your condemnations.
Long ago, a certain galilean carpenter once said some interesting things about not judging others. How odd that people today forget those words of forgiveness and humility, but remember ones thousands of years older concerning judgement and condemnation.
I can only assume you’re the sort of person who would favor the philosophies of James Earl Ray over Martin Luther King, Nathuram Godse over Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Mehmet Ali Ağca over Karol Józef Wojtyła.
The way I see it is criminals either need rehabilitation or psychiatric treatment (or both).
As I don’t believe in the death sentence this news brings no satisfaction - and skipping his sentence is unlikely to bring any satisfaction to his victims either.
People don’t exist in voids. “No man is an island”.
I am a part of humanity, what happens within and to humanity affects me. I am not entirely removed from these events, distant as I am compared to those directly involved.
I’m not asking people to mourn. I am asking them to reflect on their willingness to condemn others, even “deservedly” so. I’m asking them to pity others, rather than to despise and hate. I’m asking them to let go of anger and vengefulness, to stop clinging to feelings of superioirity, to try to be more humble, and to replace negativity with positivity.
Hatred is a cycle that we will only ever break through pity, compassion, and forgiveness.
I’m not a death penalty proponent, although there are times when I wonder with serial killers if it isn’t more humane to put them out of the misery they live and create like we would with rabid animals .But then I always return to the question of whether I could sentence someone to death and the answer is “no”. It might be different if that person murdered my own loved one, I can’t say. I think that you can’t go through life, however, believing that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say something at all. It is okay and normal for people to feel anger and resentment toward someone who caused great harm. Again, I won’t be sparing too much time thinking about him today. But I won’t spend too much thinking about or lamenting what a great guy Hitler or Hussein would have been either, if only things were different.
Indeed. Some kind of world where we try and explore, examine and understand why people do this stuff, and maybe get THEM to understand it too (and maybe repent, nad so forth), would be much more pleasant. You never know, it might be the kind of world where people give enough of a fuck about each other that a guy can’t kidnap three women and keep them prisoner for years without the neighbours caring enough to notice.
Feeling anger is okay and normal, as you say, but at the end of the day, you have to overcome that anger.
Otherwise is eats away at you from the inside: slowly, quietly, compounding with each new source of negativity, building over time into a monstrous taint upon our psyches. Ultimately, it explodes, typically to harmful effect to ourselves and those around us.
Honestly, I truly believe anger and resentment are the root of almost all our evils.
He had a daughter who loved him. He had musical talent and shared the company of musicians. He lived in a house. There are many wonderful things in life that he enjoyed that many others don’t. He wasn’t alone. Sure anger and hatred isn’t healthy long term, but it is normal to experience those feelings toward those who have harmed others. To simplify the equation by stating that his acts were the result of a cycle of hatred is naive, when science is learning that some personality disorders may not even be a result of environment.
Surely “some” personality disorders are physiological, rather than environmental. But surely not all are.
Moreover, given how much of an impact environment does have, wouldn’t it be best to create an environment in which even people who have physiological problems receive the care and attention needed to help them not be destructive and harmful?
Basically I’m saying I’d rather live in a world where people get help before things go bad, compared to one where they get put down after the fact. And I think the key to helping bring about that world is in fostering humanity, humility, compassion, and forgiveness.
At this point, it appears that he killed himself as to not meet with justice. So the anger may be a response to his sociopathic control until the very end. Again, not worth more than a shrug, but maybe some sympathy for the girls who will never get to see him being handed down a sentence for the wrongs he did to them. I feel sorry for them and maybe his family who might feel a loss.
More importantly, most of them are. To pretend otherwise is naive, true?
Our media is part of the cycle as well, as is our lifetime training. The idea of thinking it’s morally acceptable to wish for the suffering of another or even to begrudge their happiness is a far greater form of insanity. Having several homes for every homeless person is completely mad. When talking about helping people in other places sending boxes of explosions should never have been on the table.
It’s not just him that’s broken, it’s all of us, most of us are broken before we turn ten. What you see here and around you. . that should be the LOW bar.
And if the world was less mad, then we’d have less madness, and what little is dangerous becomes much easier to identify.
Or maybe he was killed by a fellow prisoner or guard who decided anyone who commits the crimes he did doesn’t deserve even the possibility of a sentence other than death?
Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to verify the official story independently, not least of all because very few people care enough about the possible breach of Justice to investigate it, especially in the face of resistance from those who feel the death was “deserved”.
