Cho, Death and Magic....
June 15, 2007
Apparently, I missed this article about Seung Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, when it came out last month. The article wasn't all that surprising, painting a common portrait of a young man exhibiting an ever escalating symptomology of Chronic Mental Illness over many many years.
What pisses me off in reading the details of his derangement is that, instead of seeking out the medical and mental health professionals best equipped to deal with Cho's worsening situation, his mother, full of desperation and maternal concern, sought help from fucking witchdoctors:
Hyang In Cho was so desperate to find help for her silent, angry son that she sought out some members of One Mind Church in Woodbridge to heal him of what the church's head pastor called "demonic power."For the love of Cthulhu.
While there are a host of cultural idiosyncrasies that must have come into play, Cho's mother was still from South Korea, an advanced and prosperous nation offering health care services roughly on par with the United States. Modern medicine is common in Seoul. She, her husband and her daughter didn't grow up on Mars. Instead of seeking help from social service organizations, instead of petitioning the Courts for conservatorship of her son, she chatts up a wacko by the name of Rev. Dong Cheol Lee, of the One Mind Church in Woodbridge, VA who tells her
"[Cho's] problem needed to be solved by spiritual power," said Lee, whose church members met with Cho and his mother. "That's why she came to our church -- because we were helping several people like him." Those churchgoers told Hyang In Cho that her son was afflicted by demonic power and needed deliverance, Lee said.This man's magic has done nothing but make his own ego and the coffers of his church less empty.
Superstition, kids, kills.
Posted by Jody at June 15, 2007 05:09 PM
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Comments
Well, I might suggest that there are still many ways in which the attitudes behind physical health and mental health still differ greatly. Only Europe has really achieved a standard of treating mental health worth looking at, and even that's not saying all THAT much.
In addition, many christian korean churches in this country have, through lack of maintaining a support and education structure with the anglican and catholic churches that brought christianity to korea in the first place (long before the war), turned increasingly to fundamentalist evangelism and pseudo-scientific woo in their own way, merely for not being able to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate levels of accommodation between "faith" (re: dogma) and science.
in short, it doesn't surprise me at all. the overwhelming impact of the continual reminders of material causality in life and reality have really merely increased the dependency on dogma to wash it all away rather than increasing our ability to actually acknowledge and deal with it. life is demanding that we evolve, and we're failing to.
Posted by: Joe Shelby ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://WWW.nakedwriting.COM/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 15, 2007 06:58 PM
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