Rewind- Darwin, Death and Dahmer.
Recently my wife pointed out to me that my blog posts were so long that people were not reading them all the way through. Guess a bit of shortening and some reposting is due.
Darwin is the universal acid that affects everything
A review of The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed
Politics by Dennis Sewell
Picador, London, 2009
According to evolutionist Daniel Dennett, Darwinism is the universal acid that affects everything.1
Dennis Sewell does an excellent job documenting this claim. Sewell, a journalist and broadcaster, has assembled a well-written review of the political uses and abuses of Darwinism. He has documented how often—and how easily—Darwinism has been harnessed for sinister political ends by a wide assortment of persons and movements laboring under a variety of political persuasions from radical right to extreme left. The history of Darwinism’s critical role in eugenics and Nazism is told in an engaging way that reads like a novel. He shows that, although racism existed before Darwin, Darwinism gave the human inferior-superior racial hierarchy theory the respectability and authority of science, increasing the problem of racism by an order of magnitude.
This authority inspired the eugenics movement that swept the world for parts of the last two centuries. Sewell focuses on the practical and political results of Darwinism, not its validity. For example, in researching eugenics his focus is not on the theoretical but on understanding
Stressing that he is not a creationist apologist but a journalist (p. xiiii), Sewell details the enormous harm Darwin has caused society and he carefully documents his conclusions with 25 pages of notes and references, almost ten percent of the book. The references and quotes alone are worth the price of the book.
Many scholarly tomes cover the influence of Darwinism on society, but
few resources in this area are as readable, hard hitting, well
documented, and as effective in making the connection
of eugenics to Darwin. Sewell documents that there is “no doubt about
the lineage of eugenics itself”, noting that in the “years leading up to
the First World War, the
eugenics movement looked like a Darwin family business.” Specifically,
Sewell shows that, for some, evolution even explains and justifies rape. Evolution teaches that nature selects those organisms that leave more offspring, and the more sexually aggressive a person is, the more offspring he will usually produce, leaving the genes that cause sexual aggression to a disproportionate number of offspring. As a result, this trait will become more common in the population.
Sewell adds that although Richard Dawkins has convinced many persons that he has a “slam-dunk case for giving up any search for meaning, purpose or direction in human affairs” (p. 8), Sewell is not so confident of the validity of Dawkins’ case. Furthermore, Sewell notes that evolution does give meaning and direction to its academic believers, but this meaning and direction is now recognized, for example, as strongly influencing the acceptance of the now infamous eugenics movement:
Sewell opens chapter one with the story of Ota Benga, the pygmy put
on display in the Bronx Zoo in a locked cage with an orangutan named
Dohung. They were about the same height and even
their grin was similar. No doubt many of the more then 40,000 visitors
who saw the exhibit on the second day alone got the point. The secretary
of the zoo was an “enthusiastic champion of
eugenics”, and he hoped to use the display to proselytize his evolution
views to the public (p. 3). The display caused the crowd to ask
questions such as “Was Ota Benga a monkey or
a man?” (p. 1). The zookeeper answered that Ota was “a transitional form
between man and monkey, the missing link.” Ota Benga, in other words,
was transitional animal between
a monkey and a man, the “famously elusive missing link” (p. 1).
Some African American Baptist pastors, though, were not very impressed either with the display or with evolution (p. 3). Actually, about the only opposition to the display was from African American ministers who did not believe in evolution (p. 6). The evolutionists defended the display by noting that evolution is taught in the school textbooks and “is no more debatable than the multiplication table” (p. 6).
Furthermore, one supporter of the exhibit, Heney Fairfield Osborn “one of the most esteemed American anthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century, seemingly could not bring himself to include the African as a member of the human race at all” (p. 19). Sewell adds that a century later, American Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin took the side of the African American ministers on evolution, and, he concludes, this was a significant factor as to why she was treated so poorly by the left, the media, and academia (pp. 6–7).
The exhibit designed to teach the “public that the human is just another primate” (p. 12) was repeated almost a century later when 3 men and 5 women put on “fig leaves” and were put in a cage to frolic with apes “to demonstrate the basic nature of man” is an animal, and that we are “not that special” (p. 12). Sewell then asks, “have things changed much?”
Although the once almost universal conclusion by scientists “that black people were closer in the evolutionary scale to apes than white people is seen by scientists today as a ghastly mistake,” scientists “are not taking any responsibility for [this mistake] … yet its traces linger in the minds of millions, infecting attitudes to race everywhere” (p. 20). As evidence, Sewell noted that Nobel Laureate James Watson “explained his gloomy prognosis for Africa’s social and economic development” by arguing that we could not expect that “the intellectual capacities of people graphically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically” to the level of the higher evolved technologically sophisticated whites (p. 19).
Sewell documents the jump of eugenics from theory to politics and control, by noting that
Sewell noted that Auvinen carefully had thought through the philosophical implications of Darwin’s argument and concluded that humans, like every other animal, have no special value because life was without purpose, the result of a long process of survival-of-the-fittest evolution (p. 45). His special plea was he hoped his actions would result in the role of social Darwinism to be taken more seriously.
Auvinen stressed that movies, computer games, TV, and music were not the source of his motivation to murder those he judged as inferior persons, but rather Darwinism (p. 46). He chose his victims with care, “trying to weed out those who were, in his judgment, the unfit” (p. 46). To those of us not intoxicated with Darwinism, he was psychotic or, at the least simply an evil, misguided person.
These modern examples show how easily Darwin’s writings can lead to,
or at least influence, very disturbed ways of thinking and behaving.
Their behavior is, on a small scale, not
unlike the attitudes once common in Nazi Germany. The explosion in
evolutionary psychology that attempts to describe every type of human
behavior including religion, sexual orientation,
occupational interests, and work ethic as genetically determined is
another example.
Sewell also discusses issues such as the use of abortion to produce fitter humans and government programs to control medical decisions based on modern soft eugenics. In short, he does not feel comfortable with leaving such judgments to scientists or politicians.
He also questions the extent of practical benefits for humanity that the theory of evolution has contributed, concluding that Darwinism hardly occupies a high position compared to the discovery of DNA and antibiotics, the invention of the transistor and MRI, or even the World Wide Web revolution. Sewell then argues that Darwinism has been put at the pinnacle of media and scientific esteem, not by scientific fact or history, but rather by a vast expensive public relations program paid for by tax dollars.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Before you close your eyes and minds to the truth, consider the beginning of the 20th Century in the USA, where Eugenicists had people sterilized (mostly poor and "colored" folks) and President Woodrow Wilson had the military segregated and promoted "Jim Crow Laws" in the South. While Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves, Darwin began putting them back "in their place" in American society, particularly in the South. Meanwhile Wilson sought to begin forming a one world government system (The League of Nations) and many Eastern Elitists began to applaud the work of a German leader named Adolf Hitler including the Rockefellers in particular but many others. Eugenics was dealt a fearsome blow by the revelations of the Holocaust at the end of World War II and many whisperings that had been going on about what Germany was doing became shouts.
Margaret Sanger and her organization had to go underground and convert themselves into Planned Parenthood and have since promoted Eugenics on the sly by positioning most abortion clinics near poor and minority neighborhoods. But the goal remains the same - weed out the poor and "less-evolved" so that more superior races can dominate. How anti-God this entire concept is! How evil and miserable a way of thinking AND YET it cannot be separated from Darwinism because Darwinism was joined at the hip to racism from the very beginning.
Everyone of every race on Earth should be insulted by the very existence of Darwinism. We were made by God in His image, not descended from primates! It is a nasty, ugly, mean, grotesque worldview of the filthiest possible mindset. You cannot clean it off with time and marketing. What about the aborigines caught, killed, skinned and put on display in museums? It was Darwinism that encouraged such acts and Darwinism lived out in real life was Jeff Dahmer's excuse for his macabre habit of tormenting and killing and preserving and...well, most folks know what he did. How many realize he was simply living out the Darwinist mantra?
Here is some evidence concerning Dahmer's adherence to Darwinism, notice that YouTube has censored the content?
What, in the Darwinist morality, is the difference between Dahmer raping and killing and eating one of his victims and a leopard chasing down, playing with, killing and eating a young baboon? If we all came from nothing for no reason and will wind up just dying and being gone, who determines right and wrong? In my last post I presented Determinism as a bankrupt and disastrous worldview and it just so happens that it is the default worldview of Darwinism. No matter how many millions of dollars you give to charity, no matter how many people you give jobs with your company, there is indeed a real morality and God has declared it in the Bible. All who teach others to cast aside God have a part in every atrocity they commit! You are part of the problem OR you are part of the solution. There is no middle ground.
When someone murders another human with a knife or axe, blood is spattered everywhere. The murderer will probably try to wash away the bloodstains. But forensic investigation can use special lighting and/or reagents to detect bloodstains that murderers have tried in vain to hide. I will put an ad for a very efficient reagent below my final remarks. The bottom line is that Darwinism has helped butcher millions upon millions of people and degraded "races" other than white as inferior or "less evolved" when in fact all people are human and the skin color is a matter of the way in which melanin is displayed in our skin. Read and learn a simple set of articles here. Actually some researchers believe it is the way melanin is displayed rather than the amount, but that is not germane to the issue. Adam and Eve were given a rich set of genetic information, with which all skin and eye and hair colors could be produced. That is truth. Darwinism? Wicked and harmful lies!
available at Amazon - Dahmer on evolution and faith
Here Dahmer puts in all into perspective, below. Dahmer believed in Christ after he was caught, sentenced and incarcerated and then believed he should have been put to death by the State. It may be that since the State would not kill him and he believed that his crimes deserved death that he was not afraid that a fellow inmate might kill him and possibly welcomed the event as something he would have done himself if not for God. Yes, someone as terrible as Dahmer can become a Christian and someone seemingly as wonderful as your next-door neighbor could be heading straight to Hell. Because we all sin and we all are destined for Hell if we do not repent. So Darwinism is perhaps the most harmful influence in modern society today. Worse than Neo-Nazis, worse than Black Muslims, worse than Islamo-terrorists, worse than the self-named Westboro Baptists, worse then the Ku Klux Klan. At least the groups of people who promote hatred and death openly are easily indentifiable. Darwinism sneaks up on you as science and sends you to Hell with eyes wide open.
"Some people wonder how baptism might have benefited Jeff in terms of his stature with the prison system. The answer is that it had absolutely no effect on his life sentences. He still had 15 life sentences to serve in Wisconsin and one in Ohio, if he was ever released from the Wisconsin prison. But being released never would have happened. He had accepted the fact that he would die in prison.
Jeff had nothing to gain in this life by being baptized; he had everything to gain in the next life. He was baptized for the same reason anyone else is baptized. In the light of the Bible, he surveyed his life and concluded that he needed to be saved."
Was Dahmer an actual convert? Apparently so. Is it unusual for a serial killer to become a Christian? Yes, remarkably so! Most serial killers fall into the category of "sociopaths" who do not recognize value in other persons or beings but only themselves. Rather like a wild animal. Darwinism would assert that we are all just animals and humans are the most evolved in spite of evidence to the contrary. One question that hangs in the air is this: Are sociopaths born or made?
Does
it bother you that many modern societies are tending towards this kind
of morality? Abortion is legal on demand, homosexuals and
transgendered people are demanding to be "married" (which is not
possible) and pedophilia and bestiality are following on their heels.
While Dahmer was simply being a good Darwinist, Ted Bundy was apparently drawn into aberrant behavior step-by-step within the context of a society that has been straying away from the basic Judeo-Christian morality upon which the nation was founded. Is it surprising that, when movies and television display graphic violence and perversion, then we have people acting out in criminal and deadly ways? Ted Bundy certainly had no impulse control over his perverse desires, which itself would be a character flaw, but would he have had such desires without the pornography? Had we as a society not allowed the normalization of pornography then maybe Bundy's impulses would have been acted out by a proclivity to purchase cars he could not afford rather than slaughter young women.
When you agree with organizations like Planned Parenthood or LGBT or NAMBLA, then you should not be surprised when a Ted Bundy or a Jeff Dahmer pops up.
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For more information about Ted Bundy's anniversary interview with Dr. Dobson, visit CitizenLink.com for news reports, expert analysis and excerpts from the interview.
The Interview (online video here)
Ted Bundy, an infamous serial killer, granted an interview to psychologist James Dobson just before he was executed on January 24, 1989. In that interview, he described the agony of his addiction to pornography. Bundy goes back to his roots, explaining the development of his compulsive behavior. He reveals his addiction to hard-core pornography and how it fueled the terrible crimes he committed.
A road that leads to nowhere
When Ted Bundy was thirteen years old, he discovered “dirty magazines” in a dump near his home. He was instantly captivated by them. In time, Bundy became more and more addicted to violent images in magazines and videos. He got his kicks from seeing women being tortured and murdered. When he tired of that, there was only one place his addiction could go - from fantasy to reality.
Bundy, a good-looking, intelligent law student, learned to lure women into his car by various forms of deception. He would put a cast on his arm or leg, then walk across a university campus carrying several books. When he saw an interesting coed standing or walking alone, he’d “accidentally” drop the books near her. The girl would help him gather them and take them to his car. Then he would entice her or push her into the vehicle where she was taken captive. After he had molested the girl and the rage of passion had passed, she would be killed and Bundy would dump her body in a region where it would not be found for months. This went on for years.
By the time he was apprehended, Bundy had killed at least twenty-eight young women and girls in acts too horrible to contemplate. He was finally convicted and sentenced to death for killing a twelve-year-old girl and dumping her body in a pigsty. After more than ten years of appeals and legal maneuvering, a judge gave the order for Bundy’s execution. That week, he asked an attorney to call me and request that I come to Florida State Prison for a final interview.
When I arrived, I discovered a circus-like atmosphere outside the prison. Teenagers carried signs saying “Burn, Bundy, Burn,” and “You’re Dead, Ted.” Also in the crowd were more than 300 reporters who had come to get a story on the killer’s last hours, but Bundy wouldn’t talk to them. He had something important to say, and he believed the media couldn’t be trusted to report it accurately. Therefore, I was invited to bring a camera crew to record his last comments from death.
I’ll never forget that experience. I went through seven steel doors and metal detectors so sensitive that my tie tack and the nails in my shoes were enough to set off an alarm. Finally, I reached an inner chamber where Bundy and I were to meet. He was brought in, strip-searched, and then surrounded by six prison guards while he talked to me. Midway through our conversation, the lights suddenly went dim.
Ted said, “Just wait a moment, and they will come back on.”
I didn’t realize until later what had happened. The prisoner knew that his executioners were testing the electric chair that would take his life the next morning.
Ted Bundy wanted to tell the world about pornography
What was it that Ted Bundy was so anxious to say? He felt he owed it to society to warn of the dangers of hard-core pornography and to explain how it had led him to murder so many innocent women and girls. With tears in his eyes, he described the monster that took possession of him when he had been drinking. His craze to kill was always inflamed by violent pornography. Quoted below is an edited transcript of the conversation that occurred just seventeen hours before Ted was led to the electric chair.
James C. Dobson: It is about 2:30 in the afternoon. You are scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning at 7:00, if you don’t receive another stay. What is going through your mind? What thoughts have you had in these last few days?
Ted: I won’t kid you to say it is something I feel I’m in control of or have come to terms with. It’s a moment-by-moment thing. Sometimes I feel very tranquil and other times I don’t feel tranquil at all. What’s going through my mind right now is to use the minutes and hours I have left as fruitfully as possible. It helps to live in the moment, in the essence that we use it productively. Right now I’m feeling calm, in large part because I’m here with you.
JCD: For the record, you are guilty of killing many women and girls.
Ted: Yes, that’s true.
JCD: How did it happen? Take me back. What are the antecedents of the behavior that we’ve seen? You were raised in what you consider to be a healthy home. You were not physically, sexually or emotionally abused.
Ted: No. And that’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation. I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving parents, as one of 5 brothers and sisters. We, as children, were the focus of my parent’s lives. We regularly attended church. My parents did not drink or smoke or gamble. There was no physical abuse or fighting in the home. I’m not saying it was “Leave it to Beaver”, but it was a fine, solid Christian home. I hope no one will try to take the easy way out of this and accuse my family of contributing to this. I know, and I’m trying to tell you as honestly as I know how, what happened.
As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature - more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography - and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience - is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces - as I know only too well - brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.
JCD: Walk me through that. What was going on in your mind at that time?
Ted: Before we go any further, it is important to me that people believe what I’m saying. I’m not blaming pornography. I’m not saying it caused me to go out and do certain things. I take full responsibility for all the things that I’ve done. That’s not the question here. The issue is how this kind of literature contributed and helped mold and shape the kinds of violent behavior.
JCD: It fueled your fantasies.
Ted: In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in crystallizing it, making it into something that is almost a separate entity inside.
JCD: You had gone about as far as you could go in your own fantasy life, with printed material, photos, videos, etc., and then there was the urge to take that step over to a physical event. Ted: Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far - that jumping off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it.
JCD: How long did you stay at that point before you actually assaulted someone?
Ted: A couple of years. I was dealing with very strong inhibitions against criminal and violent behavior. That had been conditioned and bred into me from my neighborhood, environment, church, and schools.
I knew it was wrong to think about it, and certainly, to do it was wrong. I was on the edge, and the last vestiges of restraint were being tested constantly, and assailed through the kind of fantasy life that was fueled, largely, by pornography.
JCD: Do you remember what pushed you over that edge? Do you remember the decision to “go for it”? Do you remember where you decided to throw caution to the wind?
Ted: It’s a very difficult thing to describe - the sensation of reaching that point where I knew I couldn’t control it anymore. The barriers I had learned as a child were not enough to hold me back from seeking out and harming somebody.
JCD: Would it be accurate to call that a sexual frenzy?
Ted: That’s one way to describe it - a compulsion, a building up of this destructive energy. Another fact I haven’t mentioned is the use of alcohol. In conjunction with my exposure to pornography, alcohol reduced my inhibitions and pornography eroded them further.
JCD: After you committed your first murder, what was the emotional effect? What happened in the days after that?
Ted: Even all these years later, it is difficult to talk about. Reliving it through talking about it is difficult to say the least, but I want you to understand what happened. It was like coming out of some horrible trance or dream. I can only liken it to (and I don’t want to overdramatize it) being possessed by something so awful and alien, and the next morning waking up and remembering what happened and realizing that in the eyes of the law, and certainly in the eyes of God, you’re responsible. To wake up in the morning and realize what I had done with a clear mind, with all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact, absolutely horrified me.
JCD: You hadn’t known you were capable of that before?
Ted: There is no way to describe the brutal urge to do that, and once it has been satisfied, or spent, and that energy level recedes, I became myself again. Basically, I was a normal person. Ted: I wasn’t some guy hanging out in bars, or a bum. I wasn’t a pervert in the sense that people look at somebody and say, “I know there’s something wrong with him.” I was a normal person. I had good friends. I led a normal life, except for this one, small but very potent and destructive segment that I kept very secret and close to myself. Those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media, particularly pornographic violence, are not some kind of inherent monsters. We are your sons and husbands. We grew up in regular families. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home 20 or 30 years ago. As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children, and as good a Christian home as we had, there is no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates....
JCD: Outside these walls, there are several hundred reporters that wanted to talk to you, and you asked me to come because you had something you wanted to say. You feel that hardcore pornography, and the door to it, softcore pornography, is doing untold damage to other people and causing other women to be abused and killed the way you did.
Ted: I’m no social scientist, and I don’t pretend to believe what John Q. Citizen thinks about this, but I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography - deeply consumed by the addiction. The F.B.I.’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornographers. It’s true.
JCD: What would your life have been like without that influence?
Ted: I know it would have been far better, not just for me, but for a lot of other people - victims and families. There’s no question that it would have been a better life. I’m absolutely certain it would not have involved this kind of violence.
JCD: If I were able to ask the kind of questions that are being asked, one would be, “Are you thinking about all those victims and their families that are so wounded? Years later, their lives aren’t normal. They will never be normal. Is there remorse?”
Ted: I know people will accuse me of being self-serving, but through God’s help, I have been able to come to the point, much too late, where I can feel the hurt and the pain I am responsible for. Yes. Absolutely! During the past few days, myself and a number of investigators have been talking about unsolved cases - murders I was involved in. It’s hard to talk about all these years later, because it revives all the terrible feelings and thoughts that I have steadfastly and diligently dealt with - I think successfully. It has been reopened and I have felt the pain and the horror of that.
I hope that those who I have caused so much grief, even if they don’t believe my expression of sorrow, will believe what I’m saying now; there are those loose in their towns and communities, like me, whose dangerous impulses are being fueled, day in and day out, by violence in the media in its various forms - particularly sexualized violence. What scares me is when I see what’s on cable T.V. Some of the violence in the movies that come into homes today is stuff they wouldn’t show in X-rated adult theatres 30 years ago.
JCD: The slasher movies?
Ted: That is the most graphic violence on screen, especially when children are unattended or unaware that they could be a Ted Bundy; that they could have a predisposition to that kind of behavior.
JCD: One of the final murders you committed was 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. I think the public outcry is greater there because an innocent child was taken from a playground. What did you feel after that? Were they the normal emotions after that?
Ted: I can’t really talk about that right now. It’s too painful. I would like to be able to convey to you what that experience is like, but I won’t be able to talk about that. I can’t begin to understand the pain that the parents of these children and young women that I have harmed feel. And I can’t restore much to them, if anything. I won’t pretend to, and I don’t even expect them to forgive me. I’m not asking for it. That kind of forgiveness is of God; if they have it, they have it, and if they don’t, maybe they’ll find it someday.
JCD: Do you deserve the punishment the state has inflicted upon you?
Ted: That’s a very good question. I don’t want to die; I won’t kid you. I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has. And I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me. That’s for sure. What I hope will come of our discussion is that I think society deserves to be protected from itself. As we have been talking, there are forces at loose in this country, especially this kind of violent pornography, where, on one hand, well-meaning people will condemn the behavior of a Ted Bundy while they’re walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to being Ted Bundys. That’s the irony.
I’m talking about going beyond retribution, which is what people want with me. There is no way in the world that killing me is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and correct and soothe the pain. But there are lots of other kids playing in streets around the country today who are going to be dead tomorrow, and the next day, because other young people are reading and seeing the kinds of things that are available in the media today.
JCD: There is tremendous cynicism about you on the outside, I suppose, for good reason. I’m not sure there’s anything you could say that people would believe, yet you told me (and I have heard this through our mutual friend, John Tanner) that you have accepted the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and are a follower and believer in Him. Do you draw strength from that as you approach these final hours?
Ted: I do. I can’t say that being in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is something I’ve become all that accustomed to, and that I’m strong and nothing’s bothering me. It’s no fun. It gets kind of lonely, yet I have to remind myself that every one of us will go through this someday in one way or another.
JCD: It’s appointed unto man.
Ted: Countless millions who have walked this earth before us have gone through this, so this is just an experience we all share.
Ted Bundy was executed at 7:15 am the day after this conversation was recorded.
Endnotes
Life on the Edge, Dr. James Dobson, Copyright © 1995 Word Publishing, Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved.
Ted Bundy granted an interview to James Dobson just before he was executed on January 24, 1989.
Darwin is the universal acid that affects everything
A review of The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed
Politics by Dennis Sewell
Picador, London, 2009
According to evolutionist Daniel Dennett, Darwinism is the universal acid that affects everything.1
Dennis Sewell does an excellent job documenting this claim. Sewell, a journalist and broadcaster, has assembled a well-written review of the political uses and abuses of Darwinism. He has documented how often—and how easily—Darwinism has been harnessed for sinister political ends by a wide assortment of persons and movements laboring under a variety of political persuasions from radical right to extreme left. The history of Darwinism’s critical role in eugenics and Nazism is told in an engaging way that reads like a novel. He shows that, although racism existed before Darwin, Darwinism gave the human inferior-superior racial hierarchy theory the respectability and authority of science, increasing the problem of racism by an order of magnitude.
This authority inspired the eugenics movement that swept the world for parts of the last two centuries. Sewell focuses on the practical and political results of Darwinism, not its validity. For example, in researching eugenics his focus is not on the theoretical but on understanding
“ … how a tightly knit group of scientists (and most of the main actors in this story were scientists—biologists, zoologists, psychologists and doctors) went about trying to sell an esoteric idea to the general public; how they organized, mobilized, and influenced politicians; and how they succeeded in getting laws enacted to suit their ideological purposes” (pp. xi–xii).
Stressing that he is not a creationist apologist but a journalist (p. xiiii), Sewell details the enormous harm Darwin has caused society and he carefully documents his conclusions with 25 pages of notes and references, almost ten percent of the book. The references and quotes alone are worth the price of the book.
Accessible review of the effects of Darwinism on society
Sewell documents that there is ‘no doubt about the lineage of
eugenics itself’, noting that in the ‘years leading up to the First
World War, the eugenics movement looked
like a Darwin family business.’
“Darwin’s son Leonard replaced his cousin Galton as chairman of the national Eugenics Society in 1911. In the same year an offshoot of the society was formed in Cambridge. Among its leading members were three more of Charles Darwin’s sons, Horace, Francis and George. The group’s treasurer was a young economics lecturer at the university, John Maynard Keynes, whose younger brother Geoffrey would later marry Darwin’s granddaughter Margaret. Meanwhile, Keynes’s mother, Florence, and Horace Darwin’s daughter Ruth, sat together on the committee of the Cambridge Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded … a front organization for eugenics” (p. 54).To set the theme of the book, Sewell quoted from Daniel Dennett who wrote that evolution is a “universal acid that dissolves every ethical and moral system it encounters” (p. 8). The extent that evolution is a universal acid that affects, and even explains, societal decay, is covered in detail.
Sewell shows that, for some, evolution even explains and justifies rape. Evolution teaches that nature selects those organisms that leave more offspring, and the more sexually aggressive a person is, the more offspring he will usually produce, leaving the genes that cause sexual aggression to a disproportionate number of offspring. As a result, this trait will become more common in the population.
Sewell adds that although Richard Dawkins has convinced many persons that he has a “slam-dunk case for giving up any search for meaning, purpose or direction in human affairs” (p. 8), Sewell is not so confident of the validity of Dawkins’ case. Furthermore, Sewell notes that evolution does give meaning and direction to its academic believers, but this meaning and direction is now recognized, for example, as strongly influencing the acceptance of the now infamous eugenics movement:
“Eugenics might have remained where it began, on the margins of British political life, something to be discussed in draughty temperance halls at meetings of the Rationalist Association (for the Darwinist/atheist axis had already become well established). However, unlike many other esoteric theories of the day … the eugenics movement could count on the support not only of cranks, but of Cambridge academics, fellows of the Royal Society and large numbers of the medical profession itself” (p. 55).He then concludes:
“Together they were capable of launching what would prove to be an impressive political lobbying campaign. In a remarkably short space of time, the vocabulary and basic principles of eugenics spread through the middle class, becoming almost the rule rather than the exception. This rapid mainstreaming of what began as a quirky set of ideas is rather like the way that the environmental movement developed in our own times” (p. 55).
The case of Ota Benga
Photograph courtesy of www.wikipedia.org
Figure 1. Evolutionary belief was the
motivation for forcing Ota Benga into a monkey’s cage as an exhibit in a
zoo. Photo taken in the fall of 1906.
Some African American Baptist pastors, though, were not very impressed either with the display or with evolution (p. 3). Actually, about the only opposition to the display was from African American ministers who did not believe in evolution (p. 6). The evolutionists defended the display by noting that evolution is taught in the school textbooks and “is no more debatable than the multiplication table” (p. 6).
Furthermore, one supporter of the exhibit, Heney Fairfield Osborn “one of the most esteemed American anthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century, seemingly could not bring himself to include the African as a member of the human race at all” (p. 19). Sewell adds that a century later, American Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin took the side of the African American ministers on evolution, and, he concludes, this was a significant factor as to why she was treated so poorly by the left, the media, and academia (pp. 6–7).
The exhibit designed to teach the “public that the human is just another primate” (p. 12) was repeated almost a century later when 3 men and 5 women put on “fig leaves” and were put in a cage to frolic with apes “to demonstrate the basic nature of man” is an animal, and that we are “not that special” (p. 12). Sewell then asks, “have things changed much?”
Although the once almost universal conclusion by scientists “that black people were closer in the evolutionary scale to apes than white people is seen by scientists today as a ghastly mistake,” scientists “are not taking any responsibility for [this mistake] … yet its traces linger in the minds of millions, infecting attitudes to race everywhere” (p. 20). As evidence, Sewell noted that Nobel Laureate James Watson “explained his gloomy prognosis for Africa’s social and economic development” by arguing that we could not expect that “the intellectual capacities of people graphically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically” to the level of the higher evolved technologically sophisticated whites (p. 19).
Sewell documents the jump of eugenics from theory to politics and control, by noting that
“ … the eugenics movement required an expansion of state agencies and an expansion of their scope for prying into—and ultimately directing—the lives of the poor. ‘A system will also be established for the examination of the family history of all those placed on the register as being unquestionably mentally abnormal,’ said Leonard Darwin, ‘especially as regards the criminality, insanity, ill health and pauperism of their relatives … If all this were done, it can hardly be doubted that many strains would be discovered which no one could deny ought to be made to die out in the interests of the nation [in what in Germany became a short step to the holocaust]’” (pp. 54–55).A theme Sewell stressed in much of the book is that eugenics is not dead, just more subtle today. Sewell gives several examples to support his conclusion that the thinking behind eugenics is still very much with us today. One example he noted was the case of the self-proclaimed Social Darwinist Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finnish high school student who murdered eight people, including the school’s head teacher, on November 7, 2007. Auvinen was concerned that humans had slowed, or even reversed, evolution in Western society (p. 45). He wrote on his blog that the “stupid, weak-minded people reproduce … faster than intelligent, strong-minded” persons like himself (p. 45).
Sewell noted that Auvinen carefully had thought through the philosophical implications of Darwin’s argument and concluded that humans, like every other animal, have no special value because life was without purpose, the result of a long process of survival-of-the-fittest evolution (p. 45). His special plea was he hoped his actions would result in the role of social Darwinism to be taken more seriously.
Auvinen stressed that movies, computer games, TV, and music were not the source of his motivation to murder those he judged as inferior persons, but rather Darwinism (p. 46). He chose his victims with care, “trying to weed out those who were, in his judgment, the unfit” (p. 46). To those of us not intoxicated with Darwinism, he was psychotic or, at the least simply an evil, misguided person.
An example: the American Columbine killers
The Columbine killers—“two amateur social Darwinists”—made similar arguments as Auvinen (p. 47). Columbine killer Eric Harris wore a “Natural Selection” T-shirt on the day of the massacre, and both killers made remarks on video about helping natural selection along by eliminating the weak (p. 47). They also made frequent references to evolution, all ignored by the press.
Sewell then argues that Darwinism has been put at the pinnacle of
media and scientific esteem, not by scientific fact or history, but
rather by a vast expensive public relations program paid
for by tax dollars.
Sewell also discusses issues such as the use of abortion to produce fitter humans and government programs to control medical decisions based on modern soft eugenics. In short, he does not feel comfortable with leaving such judgments to scientists or politicians.
He also questions the extent of practical benefits for humanity that the theory of evolution has contributed, concluding that Darwinism hardly occupies a high position compared to the discovery of DNA and antibiotics, the invention of the transistor and MRI, or even the World Wide Web revolution. Sewell then argues that Darwinism has been put at the pinnacle of media and scientific esteem, not by scientific fact or history, but rather by a vast expensive public relations program paid for by tax dollars.
Conclusions
Sewell’s overriding concern, as the book documents, is that Darwinism has caused dehumanization and has misled us in the past and in the present—and will likely continue to do so in the future as a result of the genetics revolution and the ability to select fitter children by techniques such as DNA sequencing and in vitro fertilization. The example he gives is a woman who aborted her first two children due to fact that the sonogram of each showed an extra finger. The doctor in the case investigated and found the mother had the same condition, which in her case was dealt with by a fairly minor operation. Yet the doctor reported that she chose to abort two children who had inherited her minor flaw, one that had few, if any, adverse consequences in her life.
Related articles
Further reading
References
Dennett, D.C., Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Before you close your eyes and minds to the truth, consider the beginning of the 20th Century in the USA, where Eugenicists had people sterilized (mostly poor and "colored" folks) and President Woodrow Wilson had the military segregated and promoted "Jim Crow Laws" in the South. While Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves, Darwin began putting them back "in their place" in American society, particularly in the South. Meanwhile Wilson sought to begin forming a one world government system (The League of Nations) and many Eastern Elitists began to applaud the work of a German leader named Adolf Hitler including the Rockefellers in particular but many others. Eugenics was dealt a fearsome blow by the revelations of the Holocaust at the end of World War II and many whisperings that had been going on about what Germany was doing became shouts.
Margaret Sanger and her organization had to go underground and convert themselves into Planned Parenthood and have since promoted Eugenics on the sly by positioning most abortion clinics near poor and minority neighborhoods. But the goal remains the same - weed out the poor and "less-evolved" so that more superior races can dominate. How anti-God this entire concept is! How evil and miserable a way of thinking AND YET it cannot be separated from Darwinism because Darwinism was joined at the hip to racism from the very beginning.
Everyone of every race on Earth should be insulted by the very existence of Darwinism. We were made by God in His image, not descended from primates! It is a nasty, ugly, mean, grotesque worldview of the filthiest possible mindset. You cannot clean it off with time and marketing. What about the aborigines caught, killed, skinned and put on display in museums? It was Darwinism that encouraged such acts and Darwinism lived out in real life was Jeff Dahmer's excuse for his macabre habit of tormenting and killing and preserving and...well, most folks know what he did. How many realize he was simply living out the Darwinist mantra?
Here is some evidence concerning Dahmer's adherence to Darwinism, notice that YouTube has censored the content?
What, in the Darwinist morality, is the difference between Dahmer raping and killing and eating one of his victims and a leopard chasing down, playing with, killing and eating a young baboon? If we all came from nothing for no reason and will wind up just dying and being gone, who determines right and wrong? In my last post I presented Determinism as a bankrupt and disastrous worldview and it just so happens that it is the default worldview of Darwinism. No matter how many millions of dollars you give to charity, no matter how many people you give jobs with your company, there is indeed a real morality and God has declared it in the Bible. All who teach others to cast aside God have a part in every atrocity they commit! You are part of the problem OR you are part of the solution. There is no middle ground.
When someone murders another human with a knife or axe, blood is spattered everywhere. The murderer will probably try to wash away the bloodstains. But forensic investigation can use special lighting and/or reagents to detect bloodstains that murderers have tried in vain to hide. I will put an ad for a very efficient reagent below my final remarks. The bottom line is that Darwinism has helped butcher millions upon millions of people and degraded "races" other than white as inferior or "less evolved" when in fact all people are human and the skin color is a matter of the way in which melanin is displayed in our skin. Read and learn a simple set of articles here. Actually some researchers believe it is the way melanin is displayed rather than the amount, but that is not germane to the issue. Adam and Eve were given a rich set of genetic information, with which all skin and eye and hair colors could be produced. That is truth. Darwinism? Wicked and harmful lies!
available at Amazon - Dahmer on evolution and faith
Here Dahmer puts in all into perspective, below. Dahmer believed in Christ after he was caught, sentenced and incarcerated and then believed he should have been put to death by the State. It may be that since the State would not kill him and he believed that his crimes deserved death that he was not afraid that a fellow inmate might kill him and possibly welcomed the event as something he would have done himself if not for God. Yes, someone as terrible as Dahmer can become a Christian and someone seemingly as wonderful as your next-door neighbor could be heading straight to Hell. Because we all sin and we all are destined for Hell if we do not repent. So Darwinism is perhaps the most harmful influence in modern society today. Worse than Neo-Nazis, worse than Black Muslims, worse than Islamo-terrorists, worse than the self-named Westboro Baptists, worse then the Ku Klux Klan. At least the groups of people who promote hatred and death openly are easily indentifiable. Darwinism sneaks up on you as science and sends you to Hell with eyes wide open.
"Some people wonder how baptism might have benefited Jeff in terms of his stature with the prison system. The answer is that it had absolutely no effect on his life sentences. He still had 15 life sentences to serve in Wisconsin and one in Ohio, if he was ever released from the Wisconsin prison. But being released never would have happened. He had accepted the fact that he would die in prison.
Jeff had nothing to gain in this life by being baptized; he had everything to gain in the next life. He was baptized for the same reason anyone else is baptized. In the light of the Bible, he surveyed his life and concluded that he needed to be saved."
Was Dahmer an actual convert? Apparently so. Is it unusual for a serial killer to become a Christian? Yes, remarkably so! Most serial killers fall into the category of "sociopaths" who do not recognize value in other persons or beings but only themselves. Rather like a wild animal. Darwinism would assert that we are all just animals and humans are the most evolved in spite of evidence to the contrary. One question that hangs in the air is this: Are sociopaths born or made?
Ted
Bundy was a handsome and intelligent individual who was aware that he
was fully responsible for what he had done. Bundy is to some extent a
product of his environment in that there was sin available and he
decided to follow one particular kind of sin to extremes. People who
criticize God for ordering the Children of Israel to wipe out the
inhabitants of Canaan (who would not repent or run off) are missing the
point in that Canaan was a society of Ted Bundys. People sacrificed
their children on altars, burned them in fires and incorporated
prostitution and sodomy into so-called "worship: of false pagan gods.
God knew the hearts and minds of the people who had moved into the land
previously given to Abraham and Jacob and their descendents, people who
resembled those who were prevalent before the Flood, people much like
the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, people who wanted to murder
babies and indulge in every sexual sin imaginable.
While Dahmer was simply being a good Darwinist, Ted Bundy was apparently drawn into aberrant behavior step-by-step within the context of a society that has been straying away from the basic Judeo-Christian morality upon which the nation was founded. Is it surprising that, when movies and television display graphic violence and perversion, then we have people acting out in criminal and deadly ways? Ted Bundy certainly had no impulse control over his perverse desires, which itself would be a character flaw, but would he have had such desires without the pornography? Had we as a society not allowed the normalization of pornography then maybe Bundy's impulses would have been acted out by a proclivity to purchase cars he could not afford rather than slaughter young women.
When you agree with organizations like Planned Parenthood or LGBT or NAMBLA, then you should not be surprised when a Ted Bundy or a Jeff Dahmer pops up.
For more information about Ted Bundy's anniversary interview with Dr. Dobson, visit CitizenLink.com for news reports, expert analysis and excerpts from the interview.
The Interview (online video here)
Ted Bundy, an infamous serial killer, granted an interview to psychologist James Dobson just before he was executed on January 24, 1989. In that interview, he described the agony of his addiction to pornography. Bundy goes back to his roots, explaining the development of his compulsive behavior. He reveals his addiction to hard-core pornography and how it fueled the terrible crimes he committed.
A road that leads to nowhere
When Ted Bundy was thirteen years old, he discovered “dirty magazines” in a dump near his home. He was instantly captivated by them. In time, Bundy became more and more addicted to violent images in magazines and videos. He got his kicks from seeing women being tortured and murdered. When he tired of that, there was only one place his addiction could go - from fantasy to reality.
Bundy, a good-looking, intelligent law student, learned to lure women into his car by various forms of deception. He would put a cast on his arm or leg, then walk across a university campus carrying several books. When he saw an interesting coed standing or walking alone, he’d “accidentally” drop the books near her. The girl would help him gather them and take them to his car. Then he would entice her or push her into the vehicle where she was taken captive. After he had molested the girl and the rage of passion had passed, she would be killed and Bundy would dump her body in a region where it would not be found for months. This went on for years.
By the time he was apprehended, Bundy had killed at least twenty-eight young women and girls in acts too horrible to contemplate. He was finally convicted and sentenced to death for killing a twelve-year-old girl and dumping her body in a pigsty. After more than ten years of appeals and legal maneuvering, a judge gave the order for Bundy’s execution. That week, he asked an attorney to call me and request that I come to Florida State Prison for a final interview.
When I arrived, I discovered a circus-like atmosphere outside the prison. Teenagers carried signs saying “Burn, Bundy, Burn,” and “You’re Dead, Ted.” Also in the crowd were more than 300 reporters who had come to get a story on the killer’s last hours, but Bundy wouldn’t talk to them. He had something important to say, and he believed the media couldn’t be trusted to report it accurately. Therefore, I was invited to bring a camera crew to record his last comments from death.
I’ll never forget that experience. I went through seven steel doors and metal detectors so sensitive that my tie tack and the nails in my shoes were enough to set off an alarm. Finally, I reached an inner chamber where Bundy and I were to meet. He was brought in, strip-searched, and then surrounded by six prison guards while he talked to me. Midway through our conversation, the lights suddenly went dim.
Ted said, “Just wait a moment, and they will come back on.”
I didn’t realize until later what had happened. The prisoner knew that his executioners were testing the electric chair that would take his life the next morning.
Ted Bundy wanted to tell the world about pornography
What was it that Ted Bundy was so anxious to say? He felt he owed it to society to warn of the dangers of hard-core pornography and to explain how it had led him to murder so many innocent women and girls. With tears in his eyes, he described the monster that took possession of him when he had been drinking. His craze to kill was always inflamed by violent pornography. Quoted below is an edited transcript of the conversation that occurred just seventeen hours before Ted was led to the electric chair.
James C. Dobson: It is about 2:30 in the afternoon. You are scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning at 7:00, if you don’t receive another stay. What is going through your mind? What thoughts have you had in these last few days?
Ted: I won’t kid you to say it is something I feel I’m in control of or have come to terms with. It’s a moment-by-moment thing. Sometimes I feel very tranquil and other times I don’t feel tranquil at all. What’s going through my mind right now is to use the minutes and hours I have left as fruitfully as possible. It helps to live in the moment, in the essence that we use it productively. Right now I’m feeling calm, in large part because I’m here with you.
JCD: For the record, you are guilty of killing many women and girls.
Ted: Yes, that’s true.
JCD: How did it happen? Take me back. What are the antecedents of the behavior that we’ve seen? You were raised in what you consider to be a healthy home. You were not physically, sexually or emotionally abused.
Ted: No. And that’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation. I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving parents, as one of 5 brothers and sisters. We, as children, were the focus of my parent’s lives. We regularly attended church. My parents did not drink or smoke or gamble. There was no physical abuse or fighting in the home. I’m not saying it was “Leave it to Beaver”, but it was a fine, solid Christian home. I hope no one will try to take the easy way out of this and accuse my family of contributing to this. I know, and I’m trying to tell you as honestly as I know how, what happened.
As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature - more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography - and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience - is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces - as I know only too well - brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.
JCD: Walk me through that. What was going on in your mind at that time?
Ted: Before we go any further, it is important to me that people believe what I’m saying. I’m not blaming pornography. I’m not saying it caused me to go out and do certain things. I take full responsibility for all the things that I’ve done. That’s not the question here. The issue is how this kind of literature contributed and helped mold and shape the kinds of violent behavior.
JCD: It fueled your fantasies.
Ted: In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in crystallizing it, making it into something that is almost a separate entity inside.
JCD: You had gone about as far as you could go in your own fantasy life, with printed material, photos, videos, etc., and then there was the urge to take that step over to a physical event. Ted: Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far - that jumping off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it.
JCD: How long did you stay at that point before you actually assaulted someone?
Ted: A couple of years. I was dealing with very strong inhibitions against criminal and violent behavior. That had been conditioned and bred into me from my neighborhood, environment, church, and schools.
I knew it was wrong to think about it, and certainly, to do it was wrong. I was on the edge, and the last vestiges of restraint were being tested constantly, and assailed through the kind of fantasy life that was fueled, largely, by pornography.
JCD: Do you remember what pushed you over that edge? Do you remember the decision to “go for it”? Do you remember where you decided to throw caution to the wind?
Ted: It’s a very difficult thing to describe - the sensation of reaching that point where I knew I couldn’t control it anymore. The barriers I had learned as a child were not enough to hold me back from seeking out and harming somebody.
JCD: Would it be accurate to call that a sexual frenzy?
Ted: That’s one way to describe it - a compulsion, a building up of this destructive energy. Another fact I haven’t mentioned is the use of alcohol. In conjunction with my exposure to pornography, alcohol reduced my inhibitions and pornography eroded them further.
JCD: After you committed your first murder, what was the emotional effect? What happened in the days after that?
Ted: Even all these years later, it is difficult to talk about. Reliving it through talking about it is difficult to say the least, but I want you to understand what happened. It was like coming out of some horrible trance or dream. I can only liken it to (and I don’t want to overdramatize it) being possessed by something so awful and alien, and the next morning waking up and remembering what happened and realizing that in the eyes of the law, and certainly in the eyes of God, you’re responsible. To wake up in the morning and realize what I had done with a clear mind, with all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact, absolutely horrified me.
JCD: You hadn’t known you were capable of that before?
Ted: There is no way to describe the brutal urge to do that, and once it has been satisfied, or spent, and that energy level recedes, I became myself again. Basically, I was a normal person. Ted: I wasn’t some guy hanging out in bars, or a bum. I wasn’t a pervert in the sense that people look at somebody and say, “I know there’s something wrong with him.” I was a normal person. I had good friends. I led a normal life, except for this one, small but very potent and destructive segment that I kept very secret and close to myself. Those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media, particularly pornographic violence, are not some kind of inherent monsters. We are your sons and husbands. We grew up in regular families. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home 20 or 30 years ago. As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children, and as good a Christian home as we had, there is no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates....
JCD: Outside these walls, there are several hundred reporters that wanted to talk to you, and you asked me to come because you had something you wanted to say. You feel that hardcore pornography, and the door to it, softcore pornography, is doing untold damage to other people and causing other women to be abused and killed the way you did.
Ted: I’m no social scientist, and I don’t pretend to believe what John Q. Citizen thinks about this, but I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography - deeply consumed by the addiction. The F.B.I.’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornographers. It’s true.
JCD: What would your life have been like without that influence?
Ted: I know it would have been far better, not just for me, but for a lot of other people - victims and families. There’s no question that it would have been a better life. I’m absolutely certain it would not have involved this kind of violence.
JCD: If I were able to ask the kind of questions that are being asked, one would be, “Are you thinking about all those victims and their families that are so wounded? Years later, their lives aren’t normal. They will never be normal. Is there remorse?”
Ted: I know people will accuse me of being self-serving, but through God’s help, I have been able to come to the point, much too late, where I can feel the hurt and the pain I am responsible for. Yes. Absolutely! During the past few days, myself and a number of investigators have been talking about unsolved cases - murders I was involved in. It’s hard to talk about all these years later, because it revives all the terrible feelings and thoughts that I have steadfastly and diligently dealt with - I think successfully. It has been reopened and I have felt the pain and the horror of that.
I hope that those who I have caused so much grief, even if they don’t believe my expression of sorrow, will believe what I’m saying now; there are those loose in their towns and communities, like me, whose dangerous impulses are being fueled, day in and day out, by violence in the media in its various forms - particularly sexualized violence. What scares me is when I see what’s on cable T.V. Some of the violence in the movies that come into homes today is stuff they wouldn’t show in X-rated adult theatres 30 years ago.
JCD: The slasher movies?
Ted: That is the most graphic violence on screen, especially when children are unattended or unaware that they could be a Ted Bundy; that they could have a predisposition to that kind of behavior.
JCD: One of the final murders you committed was 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. I think the public outcry is greater there because an innocent child was taken from a playground. What did you feel after that? Were they the normal emotions after that?
Ted: I can’t really talk about that right now. It’s too painful. I would like to be able to convey to you what that experience is like, but I won’t be able to talk about that. I can’t begin to understand the pain that the parents of these children and young women that I have harmed feel. And I can’t restore much to them, if anything. I won’t pretend to, and I don’t even expect them to forgive me. I’m not asking for it. That kind of forgiveness is of God; if they have it, they have it, and if they don’t, maybe they’ll find it someday.
JCD: Do you deserve the punishment the state has inflicted upon you?
Ted: That’s a very good question. I don’t want to die; I won’t kid you. I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has. And I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me. That’s for sure. What I hope will come of our discussion is that I think society deserves to be protected from itself. As we have been talking, there are forces at loose in this country, especially this kind of violent pornography, where, on one hand, well-meaning people will condemn the behavior of a Ted Bundy while they’re walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to being Ted Bundys. That’s the irony.
I’m talking about going beyond retribution, which is what people want with me. There is no way in the world that killing me is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and correct and soothe the pain. But there are lots of other kids playing in streets around the country today who are going to be dead tomorrow, and the next day, because other young people are reading and seeing the kinds of things that are available in the media today.
JCD: There is tremendous cynicism about you on the outside, I suppose, for good reason. I’m not sure there’s anything you could say that people would believe, yet you told me (and I have heard this through our mutual friend, John Tanner) that you have accepted the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and are a follower and believer in Him. Do you draw strength from that as you approach these final hours?
Ted: I do. I can’t say that being in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is something I’ve become all that accustomed to, and that I’m strong and nothing’s bothering me. It’s no fun. It gets kind of lonely, yet I have to remind myself that every one of us will go through this someday in one way or another.
JCD: It’s appointed unto man.
Ted: Countless millions who have walked this earth before us have gone through this, so this is just an experience we all share.
Ted Bundy was executed at 7:15 am the day after this conversation was recorded.
Endnotes
Life on the Edge, Dr. James Dobson, Copyright © 1995 Word Publishing, Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved.
Ted Bundy granted an interview to James Dobson just before he was executed on January 24, 1989.
The video is on the Focus on the Family website.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Romans 6:23
English Standard Version (ESV)
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.