What did you think of the commentary on today’s Eagle Opinion pages by psychiatrist Michael Welner? (It is available here.) He suggested that Rader might have killed even more people had he not been involved in a church. “Religion can reach morally empty psychopaths where psychiatry and incarceration cannot,” Welner wrote. “To someone who believes himself to be clever enough to fool all of the people all of the time — including his psychiatrist — a higher authority may be the only entity to whom he is capable of feeling accountable.”
Perhaps. But we certainly haven’t seen any remorse from Rader or other signs that he is concerned about what God thinks.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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2 Comments
I don’t know about Michael Welner assessment. I mean, Rader described how he took one of his victims in a church and photographed her there. That’s messed up! I don’t think he feels a church is a sancuarity of God.
He probably stopped killing because he was getting old.
My deepest sympathy to the members of Rader’s church. Suddenly, the man they knew and trusted enough to elect president of their congregation was revealed to be the vicious, unrepentant serial killer that they had feared for thirty years!
That’s a nearly impossible thing to deal with, yet they must.
Normally, they would try to separate the sin from the sinner, but Rader’s cold and remorseless confession, if you could call it that, has made him inseparable from his many crimes. He, the man, IS evil personified. Is he sick? Probably. Look for a reason if you care to, but nothing can justify those ten horribly slaughtered people, the grief of their families and friends and the thirty years of sheer terror his fantasies inflicted on this city.
Yet, here is a man, a pillar of the community, father, husband, church leader, city official, someone loved and trusted. How do you resolve the two? You can’t! One is real and the other phony, and after his confession, we now know which.
As painful as it is, members of his congregation now have to admit that they were manipulated and made fools of by one of their own, and move on. Not what they thought they were about! Again, my deepest sympathy to them.