No "ululate!" for this joker: Pastor Fred Phelps of the Kansas-based, hate-spewing Westboro Baptist Church succumbs to the ravages of time and biology, dying at the age of 84. One of the world's great mysteries is precisely this: the unpleasant and toxic among us linger while the good are taken by the Reaper well before their time. In a just universe, Phelps would have been ripped from his mother's womb, tied by his umbilical to a pole, and used as a tetherball for hungry bears. It is decidedly unsatisfying to know that the man lived a long life and died a quiet death of "natural causes."
May he spend an eternity in hell being raped by horses that cum lava.
_
I was never too surprised about the things Phelps said and did, after all the world is full of whack jobs. What I could never get my mind around was he found so many like minded people to be his puppets. Then again, so did Hitler. Ah well, good riddance!
ReplyDeletere: like-minded people
ReplyDeleteThe Milgram Experiment comes to mind. Normal folks can be easily persuaded to do evil.
While I agree with the basic idea (that normal people can be persuaded to do evil), I think we're dealing with something on a very different level from the Milgram Experiment. Looking to other cults may offer more insight.
ReplyDeleteC,
ReplyDeleteIn my psych courses, the Milgram Experiment was always and inevitably connected with the depredations of the Third Reich. It provided scientists and other thinkers with a way to understand how it was that so many seemingly normal, seemingly innocent, seemingly upstanding people could be seduced by so horrifying an ideology. The "lesson" taken from the experiment was that all one needs is an authority structure, along with people submissive to that authority, for bad things to happen. The collusive, abusive dynamic that results is deadly. What made the experiment so scary was how easily everyone fell into their assigned roles (cf. the Stanford Prison Experiment as well).
So I mentioned Milgram, in my comment, as a response to John's remark about how mind-boggling it is that Phelps could find so many like-minded people. The implication of the Milgram Experiment is that we all have it within us to become these people, which in turn means we shouldn't be too surprised or boggled to find normal people saying, thinking, and doing awful things, often in the name of some lofty cause.
"that we all have it within us to become these people"
ReplyDeleteWell, said! It doesn't help that all of us start out brainwashed/indoctrinated as children by our parents into the cults (religions, political ideologies, social groups, etc. ) in which they were brainwashed into as children by their all-knowing parents. Too bad more people aren't rejecting many of these outrageous schools of totally ridiculous thoughts the way they are as accepting of the latest Apple and Samsung gizmos offered upon the alter of consumerism several times a year.
Too bad I won't be around to see the world in 10,000 years. It (and the cults we all believe in) ought to look a lot different than those of 10,000 years ago. I'm pretty sure that future beings will be calling our current era of so-called enlightenment some of the darkest of the Dark Ages.