Wow, what a nut. He has an update up now that tries to distance himself from it - sort of saying that posting a murderous fantasy will help purge the bad thoughts from his head. Whatever keeps a gun out of this crazy's hand is a good thing. Maybe a writing course would help distract his evil impulses too. It could only help his disasterous writing, which may be the greater problem with that post.

I am going to be tipping off the FBI and Homeland security about his little sicko fantasy

He is deleting comments and so I saved a copy of his page and will be sending it to the FBI and Department of homeland security. Not to mention there is probably a google cache of it.

Scary stuff. Reminds me of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Perhaps that's what inspired him. If so, someone should let him know that it was a 'cautionary tale', not 'suggestions'.

Remind me again, somone, how 20th century American Christianity is the religion of love and compassion.

Even without his updates, it seems pretty clear to me that the point of the post is to repudiate such violence and affirm the importance of working within the system.

I don't think he's repudiating such violence as much as saying that it wouldn't get him what he wanted. It's not that murder would be wrong, it's that murder wouldn't get his god in government enough for it to have been morally worth it.

There's also the problem that he took a rather common hypothetical exercise (at what point is violence justified) and turned into a disturbingly specific mass murder fantasy, replete with the moral classification of Democrats as pocket Hitlers.

The problem that I had and continue to have is that he brings up mass murder as a legitimate moral inquiry and then comes to the conclusion that it's not efficient enough to acheive what he wants.

Before I actually read that, I was getting a little fidgety about all this outrage, because I myself just wrote a story in which a fictional future President gets blown up at the end by fictional terrorists (who are clearly evil, though the war against them does involve its moral compromises). So I was wondering whether this is really so different.

Well, actually it is completely different, so never mind.

Yeah, the kid's obviously sick, I'll give you that. But how is Christianity - in the majority of its implementations - a beautiful religion?

He who gives up freedom for security deserves neither.