Too Much Evil

An Open Letter from God

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Too Much Evil Breaking Out In Society

By Rich Hood, Editorial Page Editor of The Kansas City Star

Seldom a week goes by without at least one sensational news report about graphic violence or cruelty engaged in by teenagers or pre-teens. A recent chilling example occurred in Brandon, Mass., where authorities went to court alleging a satanic cult of young people had engaged in murders and conspiracies to murder as well as setting off napalm fires while laying siege to a school.

The courtroom testimony followed a massacre at a nearby school in which a 16-year boy, Luke Woodham, was charged with killing two girls and wounding seven other students before being subdued by the assistant principal.

Woodham, who has now been identified as a member of the satanic cult, also charged with stabbing his 50-year-old mother to death earlier that day in the home they shared in Pearl, Mass.

In court, investigators read parts of a manuscript, ostensibly written by Woodham and labeled a manifesto by prosecutors. In the document the writer described the torture of Woodham's dog, Sparkle, by Woodham and an accomplice.

According to the document, two teenagers repeatedly beat the dog with a club, wrapped it in garbage bags, torched it with a lighter and flammable fluid, listened to it whimper and tossed it into a pond.

"On Saturday of last week, I made my first kill," the manuscript said. "The victim was a loved one, my dear dog Sparkle ...."

"I will never forget the howl she made. It sounded almost human. I'll never forget the sound of her breaking under my might. I hit her so hard I knocked the fur off her neck."

After describing the sight of the dog sinking beneath the surface of the pond, the author wrote: "It was true beauty."

No, that is quintessential evil.

And there is undeniably too much such evil breaking out in our society today.

It didn't use to be this way. Yes, there were instances of vicious cruelty and serial killings such as the cross-country murder spree that saw Charles Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate leave 11 bodies behind them in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958. But that case was so unusual at the time it riveted the nation for months. It wasn't the type of thing you could expect to see on the front page of your newspaper or the television newscast any day.

Now on any given day you are likely to read stories of cross-state murder rampages, teen-agers murdering parents and siblings, teenagers smothering their newborn babies or schoolyard fights that escalate into homicides. It's not just happening in the big cities; it's happening in suburbs and rural areas, as the Mississippi example demonstrates.

What went wrong?

How did we get into this mess?

We abandoned the standards on which this country was founded. We adopted the pernicious theory of moral relativism.

We bought into the destructive idea that it was somehow harmful to children's psyches to tell them no.

We listened when psychologists insisted it would cause permanent psychological scars if we were to insist that there are absolute rights and absolute wrongs.

We bowed to the supposedly intellectual elite who insisted that it was old-fashioned and terribly gauche to adhere to the moral codes laid down in Christian, Judaic and Islamic teachings.

We created entertainment garbage pits and piped their products into our living rooms where the champions of moral relativism paraded adultery, betrayal, rebellion against authority and the basest kind of self-worship as somehow admirable and much to be emulated.

We encourage families to break up at the first hint of discord and disagreement, leaving children hurt and wondering if there were any concepts or people with permanent, honorable values.

We encourage sexual permissiveness and approved the slaughter of millions of babies who were conceived as the result of that permissiveness.

We excuse those who sought to create a euthanasia industry.

In short, we stopped honoring and respecting life and the time-honored way our forefathers insisted on living life.

Is it any wonder, then, that we are witnessing such an explosion of hate and cruelty? Is it any wonder that too many young people have no moral compass?

Universal Light Institute