The NYT has a long piece on the mentally ill Romanian nun who was killed in a botched attempt at exorcism.
"You can't take the Devil out of people with pills," the 29-year-old priest, Daniel Petre Corogeanu, told a Romanian television station during a four-hour interview taped just before he and the nuns were arrested in June.
Isn't that disturbingly similar to
Tom Cruise on the "Today Show"?
All it does is mask the problem, Matt. And if you understand the history of it, it masks the problem. That's what it does. That's all it does. You're not getting to the reason why. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.
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7 comments:
Hey Dave, why don't you get yourself worked up over semantics? The story about the nun who was indeed 'killed,' because the two words mean the same damn thing, was a topic of discussion several weeks ago. This post is about the similarity between the priest and Tom Cruise, which by the way is remarkable, yet you pick out the most insignificant portion of the post to whine about. Bravo!
When I first started reading this blog, I hated Ann. Then she opened her comments up and I found myself liking Ann more and more because in comparison to her readers, she's brilliant and likeable.
Dave: Murder is a subcategory of killing. It makes no sense to say a person you think was murdered was not killed. By definition, everyone murdered is killed. It is murder if there are additional elements, and in fact, from what we see in the reports, it wouldn't seem to be first degree murder. It doesn't seem to have been done with an intent to kill. I think murder would be an incorrect word choice, assuming things that we don't know. "Kill" is good usage, absolutely accurate.
There is a deep problem here, having to do with uneducated people in positions of power in a country held back by political oppression.
Great analogy, Ann!
Another analogy: that priest had the makings of a cult leader a la David . . . oh rats, what was the name of the guy in Waco . . . thanks, Google: David Koresh. The nun may have been schizophrenic but he was clearly afflicted with worsening megalomania. Drunk on the power given to him by the local people.
Doesn't "murder" involve intent to kill? She was killed, but they don't seem to have been trying to kill her.
Amba: Under American law -- and we have to remember this happened in Romania -- statutes define murder and can go beyond intentional killing, to include extreme negligence (though this would be a lower degree). We also have "felony murder," which requires only intent to commit a felony (like robbery). In moral discourse, "murder" is used to express the wrongness of a killing, as for example, when people call abortion or the death penalty "murder," even though both are legal.
Gerry: Excessive pill-prescribers and religionists put our problems beyond ourselves, as an outside force, either the devil or disease. We would do better to deal with our own problems by working through them and taking responsibility for them without pills or religious rites. That said, some people really do have a physiological problem and need drugs.
JohnR: I am sorry to hear about your wife, but what line are you talking about? Obviously, I think some people have real mental illness and need treatment, and your wife appears to be one of them, but far too many people -- especially children -- are using psychotropic drugs.
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