Seung Hui Cho, Video Games, Sorcery, & Babylon.

Category: Applied,Articles
Author: John Malone
Date: 21st April, 2007 @ 05:00:30 PM


Suddenly, our mind-share is diverted to the grizzly and gory meditation of a non-virtual, first-person shooter named Cho Sueng Hui, in a life-is-just-like-animation scenario.

Cho demonstrated a many features of demented – let’s call it depraved – human nature. Extreme violence, “religious preoccupations,” a Messiah complex, obsession, schizophrenia, mania, withdrawal, flat affect.
This guy exhibited, apparently, all sorts of behavior that we have come to categorize as pathology with various labels.

There was a certain knowable – even predictable – psychology about this fellow, and that knowledge on the part of others will no doubt be the stuff of lawsuits in and around Blacksburg Virginia for some years to come.

I actually don’t have much to say to add to this discussion, and I won’t boor you with regurgitations of the obvious, or for matters not directly observable by me.

However, there are three matters about this fellow that disturb me that I haven’t read or heard much about.

First, there is an aspect of the video that raises an obvious – but largely unasked – question. In a portion of Cho’s tape, he talks about his motivation for his ensuing rampage. he begins this portion by saying, “I didn’t have to do this.” he claims he’s doing it for others. This section lasts about 20 seconds. What makes it different than the rest of what I saw is that the video is jiggling around as if the camera was hand held.

If so, I’d like to know who was holding that camera! It’s not unreasonable to desire reassurance that Cho was truly acting alone, and did not have a “handler,” or other accomplice.

Second, it has been reported some that Cho’s rampage is eerily like a video game gone live. Cho carried on as if a cutout from “Quake (Doom)” or one of it’s descendant first-person shooter games. This is increasingly a common observation by those trying to make rhyme or reason of Cho’s nightmare. Many dismiss this as a potent influence because, after all, how many college students HAVEN’T played a first-person shooter game?

I have personally played them, and find them incredibly interesting, albeit not profitable. In fact, they are so intense that I forbid my grandchildren from playing them, commending instead, grudgingly, third person games.

There is some truth to the argument that virtually every youth is playing these games, and virtually none of them “go postal” as Chi did. But perhaps that begs the point that the excessive gore and replication of murder represented by these games panders to the base nature of all. Such pandering may not overcome the character of everyone, but there must be a sizable number who do not have sufficient moral and psychological defense to ward off the attack.

I am reminded of a report some years ago (December 1997) whereby an episode of Pokemon that featured lightning bolts sent a large number of Japanese children into epileptic-like seizures.

The fissures of character produced by a guilty conscience under these kind of duress are likely unfathomable.

This brings us back to revealed truth in the Scriptures concerning the nature of man as a fallen and depraved creature. We are intrinsic, not merely forensic, sinners.

But the Christian doctrine of man’s depravity does not say that every man achieves the desperate wickedness of which we are each one capable. It is about capability, not achievement. So, while something like video games or other forms of video can reach otherwise unexposed fountains of evil, we will have to look further into these matters to come to the depths of Cho’s behavior.

There is a third factor here, which is even more powerful, and which enables other factors bearing down on Cho to be more effective. We do not rightly understand sorcery, because we fail to connect it to the underlying Greek word used in Scriptures: pharmakeia. That factor is, in Bible terms, “sorcery,” also known as “witchcraft.” This is a distinct evil from “magic,” which is performed by someone. “Sorcery” is produced IN someone.

{Sorceries (witchcraft)|Gal 5:20} is first found in Scripture in {Isaiah 47|Is 47:9-12} where the Septuagint version uses the same word found in Galatians, and is found again {in Revelation.|Rev 9:21; Rev 18:23} when we read pharmakeia we immediately begin to understand what it means: it’s about substances designed to alter our mental state.

Some missionaries in the 1900’s had a clear understanding of how systematic spiritual obsession – demonization – was produced in animist societies. It involved three phases: a weakened hold by the human spirit on the body, a fearful shock to the weakened body, and a subsequent obsession by a spirit as the former shock caused the weakened human spirit’s hold on the body to allow the obsession.

The techniques traditionally used in these societies to weaken the spirit’s hold were sleep deprivation, certain nutritional deprivation, especially the nutrition provided uniquely by meat-eating, and, if possible, certain naturally occurring drugs such as peyote, amanita muscaria mushrooms, marijuana, miraa, and probably a pharmacopoeia of stuff I don’t know about. In fact, knowledge of such “potions” is considered forbidden knowledge in many societies, and thus we have the term “witchcraft” in the Bible describing the very same thing.

Such techniques can turn an ordinary youth into a fighting machine: a “brave.”

In our day, and in our society, we are {too intelligent to be wise.|Rom 1:22} We think we can design psychoactive drugs with impunity, simply because they are extremely profitable, and people like (lust for) them. People ask me why, as a youth, I smoked marijuana and imbibed in other illegal drugs. The answer is “because I liked them.” This is the same reason people continue to take Prozac, painkillers, amphetamines, and other prescription drugs. They LIKE them, and do not appreciate the real dangers of them.

The impact of amphetamine use on Cho should not be ignored. He demonstrated many of the characteristics of a spiritually obsessed person, of course including the homicidal disposition.

The “medical profession” is far less knowledgeable of pharmakeia than their investments. Psychoactive drugs – unknown in my youth – are the order of the day today. They – along with blood thinners – have already saturated the senior market. They are in the process of saturating the youth market. We are now drugging the most physically vigorous among us! We are drugging to produce or reduce a mentality. And then we are setting such people loose on society, available to who-knows-whom for who-knows-what.

There is a very large penalty to be paid by our nation for dismissing the Scriptures. we will pay it numerous ways, especially including the loss of our freedom, for where there is ignorance of the grace of God, there is bondage.

I would be remiss to fail to warn that the coming “Babylon,” to be rebuilt physically, and to be represented universally, will be a complete system of things: religious, political, and economic. It will be marked by {“sorceries,”|Rev 9:21;Rev 18:23} which will have the effect of global deceit, until the Lord Jesus Christ comes back to sort things out correctly.


© John Malone, 2007