Envy & Cho Seung-Hui

We mourn with the families of those who were killed at Virginia Tech on Monday. I am sorry that the darkness took away your young relatives, before they had an opportunity to begin careers and homes of their own. I also offer my sympathies to the Korean-American community - Cho does not represent you.

While there were many destructive forces at work in Cho's life, I am convinced envy - one of the seven deadly sins, in old Christian thought - was one of the more powerful ones. If you have the stomach, read this story about Cho's writings.

Notice what he says at one point:

"You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac weren't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything," MSNBC.com quoted Cho as saying.

But Cho is not a self-righteous moralizer, a wacked-out fundamentalist. No, he wanted in on the action, as the first page of his "manifesto" makes clear:

"Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, if only you didn't {edited} out of me... You could have been great. I could have been great."

And that's really just a quick sifting of his writings - the day of the shooting. Yes, he was a psychopath. Yes, he hated and his anger consumed him. Where did at least some of that come from? From being picked on as a kid? Yeah, some. Being picked on is a painful experience, and particularly if you feel like you'll never "fit in". But Cho stoked the fire of envy, and it became a roaring bonfire that fed his violent psychosis.

Envy, carefully defined, is "pain at the good fortune of others." (Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk II, Chapter 10, from the entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

This too: "[Envy] aims, at least in terms of one's wishes, at destroying others' good fortune." (Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals 6:459, from the entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

At least in part, it appears that Cho allowed society to tell him that "the good life" is money, alcohol, and sexual promiscuity. His sense of rejection, of being denied that "good life", fueled a violent psychosis.

How sad, how tragic that he did not (and could not) understand the unconditional love and compassion of God in Jesus Christ. The Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages believed kindness was the Good that could fix envy. Had Cho been transformed by God's love, and had he opened himself to RECEIVING and then GIVING kindness, then...

...well, then, this horrible tragedy would not have happened.