Who'll work my idle hands
In the hand wringing over why Cho Seung-Hui went on his murderuous rampage at Virginia Tech it seems some people are blaming the oldest of the usual suspects - Satan.
The Christian Newswire carried an opinion piece from a Michigan paper under the headline There's a Devil loose in America.
In it commentator James Sterling said Cho "was just acting like his daddy... Satan, who comes only to rob, kill and destroy."
What the killer's biological father thought about being fingered as the lord of the pit you can only imagine, but if it were me, I'd be looking at lawyers at dawn.
You could excuse the Christian media for dragging Beelzebub into things, after all he's their ultimate anti-hero and their whole existence relies on people freaking out about his influence.
However, even the mainstream albeit, right leaning, Fox News network gave the possession theory credence with a piece entitled Did the Devil make him do it?
They spoke to Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, who said that "there's no doubt that this act was satanic in origin."
If the devil's biggest achievement is making us believe he doesn?t exist then he seems to have blown his cover with this one.
Well he's only outed himself to people who would rather place the blame for bad things on some intangible dark force than face real issues such as mental illness, alienation and easy access to weapons.
The rest of us are with the author Joseph Conrad who said: "the belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
I don't think we need to invent bogey men when we have the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot and several of my ex-employers to use as yardsticks to measure badness by.
The Christian Newswire carried an opinion piece from a Michigan paper under the headline There's a Devil loose in America.
In it commentator James Sterling said Cho "was just acting like his daddy... Satan, who comes only to rob, kill and destroy."
What the killer's biological father thought about being fingered as the lord of the pit you can only imagine, but if it were me, I'd be looking at lawyers at dawn.
You could excuse the Christian media for dragging Beelzebub into things, after all he's their ultimate anti-hero and their whole existence relies on people freaking out about his influence.
However, even the mainstream albeit, right leaning, Fox News network gave the possession theory credence with a piece entitled Did the Devil make him do it?
They spoke to Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, who said that "there's no doubt that this act was satanic in origin."
If the devil's biggest achievement is making us believe he doesn?t exist then he seems to have blown his cover with this one.
Well he's only outed himself to people who would rather place the blame for bad things on some intangible dark force than face real issues such as mental illness, alienation and easy access to weapons.
The rest of us are with the author Joseph Conrad who said: "the belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
I don't think we need to invent bogey men when we have the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot and several of my ex-employers to use as yardsticks to measure badness by.