Who’s responsible in the Benoit case?

September 4th, 2007 · No Comments · General, Kingdom Living, Theology

Today I overheard someone pondering whether the pressures of the wrestling industry were what “got to” Chris Benoit and caused the atrocities he committed. I just shook my head.

Wrestling industries don’t kill people. Wrestlers kill people.

I’m not trying to be funny here. People blame the desperation of poverty when poor people commit murder, the corruption of wealth when rich people commit murder, the rat-race of middle class life when the bourgeoisie commit murder. The only real common denominator is that we have disturbed people committing the murder in each situation. And even this doesn’t appear to be particularly helpful, given that there are plenty of disturbed people who are poor, rich, or middle-class and yet somehow not murdering people. Obviously, there is more than one factor causing people to fly off the handle and do the unthinkable. Not only are the situations of each individual who makes those wrong sorts of choices infinitely more complex than one or two social factors, in the end I think that the primary blame cannot be placed anywhere but on the person whose internal moral composition does not respond correctly to the external stimuli that so many people cite as the chief factors in immoral behavior.

Ok, so let’s blame the murderer’s “internal moral composition”. What factors are responsible for defects in that? As far as I can tell, the largest single determining factor for the formation of one’s morality is parenthood. Nothing but chemically unstable mental conditions can account for a child growing up to be a murderer when the child’s moral and loving parents both effectively communicate a healthy view of ethics to the child.

Yet parenting is not completely determinative, because there have been plenty of children with awful parents who have made their own decisions when they got older and ended up being adults of outstanding character. I still say that culpability comes down to the individual’s in-born aptitude for morality. Only the Kingdom is able to compensate for such dangerous variation.