{"id":182,"date":"2011-10-05T14:19:07","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T18:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/?p=182"},"modified":"2011-12-18T13:30:06","modified_gmt":"2011-12-18T18:30:06","slug":"serial-killers-are-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2011\/10\/serial-killers-are-boring.html","title":{"rendered":"Serial Killers Are Boring"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><strong>O<\/strong>ur world is in the pitifully awkward position of informing us that our gravest sins are\u00a0not\u00a0sinful at all, while damning the most modest and the most innocent of our vices.\u00a0Thus we have it that abortion and euthanasia are in and with-it, masturbation\u00a0is healthy, pornography is good for your marriage, sodomy is an old-fashioned, oppressive term\u2026and it is illegal to smoke in a bar.\u00a0(I mean, my dear man! We do have<em style=\"border-width: initial; border-color: initial;\"> standards<\/em>, you know.)\u00a0\u00a0The daring and exciting \u2013 Kinky Sex OMG! \u2013 is toted as normal, while boring, old, human vice \u2013 smoking, drinking and punching other men \u2013 is outlawed, banned, damned for ever existing. There is no shame in killing babies, but you better be sure you follow the sign: \u2019employees are legally required to wash their hands before returning to work.\u2019<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sonofthesouth.net\/uncle-sam\/images\/funny-no-smoking-sign.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"496\" height=\"663\"><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The problem with this atitude is that when the most unnatural, audacious of sins are entirely allowed and accepted they do not become a satisfying, natural part of our culture; they become\u00a0excruciatingly\u00a0boring. Think about it. If you entirely objectify women through pornography, well then, she is no more exciting than an object. If you make sex a biological act that need no moral scruples\u00a0attached\u00a0to it, then it is as exciting as a biological act, and should be performed with as much vigor as is appropriated to similar acts, like sweating and creating mucus. If you\u00a0masturbate\u00a0every night, then\u00a0masturbation is as much a rebellious, pleasure-seeking act as going to sleep; a\u00a0similar\u00a0nightly routine.\u00a0Our world, by it\u2019s lack of virtue, makes sin boring. And when sin is boring there are only two possible actions: A man might convert, and leave the sin behind, and become a saint, or he might move on to a greater sin. <strong>For men do not desire boredom.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This I maintain, that the most bored man in the world is not an obese aristocrat with an inherited fortune and nothing to do. He is not the prisoner in a cell, nor the teenager with 7000 video games and no friends, nor the patient confined to the bed, nor you \u2013 sitting at your computer, trying to find a way to make the hours go away. No, the most bored man in the world is the serial killer.<\/p>\n<p>A quote from our man Walker Percy would be helpful here.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">\u201cThe word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff [\u2026] Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Likewise, the phenomenon of the serial killer \u2013 in actuality as in literature \u2013 is a modern phenomenon. To be sure, there were a few mass murderers and pre-cursors to the depraved nihilists we have this misfortune of knowing today \u2013 but they were few, and small potatoes compared to the evil of the 20th century. I do not believe that these two phenomenons \u2013 the development of the concept of boredom and the rise of the serial killer \u2013 are unrrelated. They both result from the fact that our modern world has made sin boring.<\/p>\n<p>To be clear, I do not speak of \u2018natural\u2019 psychopaths, that is to say, of individuals with utterly no concept of morality from the moment of their birth. Whether they actually exist is beyond me, because we only test for psychopathy after a few, vital years of child-rearing and environmental conditioning, in which the world and the family have the breath-stopping opportunity to make whole or crush their child. No, I am speaking of Ted Bundy.<\/p>\n<p>A man who as a child, looked at softcore pornography. When that could no longer thrill him, he moved to hardcore pornography. When that could no longer thrill him; onwards to violent pornography. And when that sin could no longer thrill, he moved to his crimes that need no mention here. The point is that his heinous crimes were not daring, they were not boldly, satanically evil; they were not even insane. <strong>They were the cowardly, cringing acts of a bored man.<\/strong> The illicit excitement one man could\u00a0achieve\u00a0by simply viewing a naked woman, he had to commit inhuman atrocities to obtain. \u00a0He is the man who grew bored and moved on to the next big thing. He \u2013 not a society of peace, tolerance and freedom \u2013 is the child of a world that says that truly inhuman sins are normal.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s the point. People often get up in arms in this country, crying out that \u201cyou can\u2019t legislate morality!\u201d and \u201cwe have the right to freedom from religion!\u201d and other rallying cries made up in the last couple of years. And there\u2019s some truth to all this. No one\u2019s going to burst into your bedroom and confiscate your\u00a0pornography. But when we make serious sin legal, tolerated, widespread and accepted, we make it boring. We invite greater evils that make even the most tolerating, accepting New-Ager shudder. When we legalize pornography, we invite boredom with pornography, and thus we invite child-pornography.<\/p>\n<p>So the world is faced with a choice. Boredom or Sainthood? These seem to me the only options, though one can choose to move slowly in either direction. So why not Sainthood? Because the implication is this; if sin is boring, than Sainthood is exciting. Because Sainthood is seeing everything as it is \u2013 whether it be the Holy Mass or\u00a0pornography. Sainthood seeing everything for the first time, every time. The Saint is never bored.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/img252.imageshack.us\/img252\/9223\/dolknu4xa1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"455\">But for you who are already-saints: There\u2019s a common trend within the Church to fear evil men. We should fear evil, I agree, but never evil men. The proper response to the fact of a serial killer is never one of baffled fear, but one of disgust. These are The Bored. Let us see them and be warned against our sins.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our world is in the pitifully awkward position of informing us that our gravest sins are\u00a0not\u00a0sinful at all, while damning the most modest and the most innocent of our vices.\u00a0Thus we have it that abortion and euthanasia are in and with-it, masturbation\u00a0is healthy, pornography is good for your marriage, sodomy is an old-fashioned, oppressive term\u2026and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":194,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[9,8,10],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-another-look","tag-pornography","tag-sin","tag-subverting-the-dominant-paradigm"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - 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