Utah parents, fearing apocalypse, fatally drugged children, themselves, police say

[byronius]

13. Since I'm rereading Barabara Tuchman's 'Distant Mirror', this story sounds normal.

Her history of the fourteenth century is brilliant, but incredibly dark. Apocalyptic visions were everywhere amidst the disorder. 'Flagellants', groups of hundreds of men, women and children wandering from village to village with spikes rending their flesh, immediately going to the Jewish neighborhoods and throwing them into raging bonfires. After all, a Jew had confessed under torture that Jews were systematically poisoning wells across Europe (even where there were absolutely no Jews) and attacking Christianity by this nefarious method.

Fear, hatred, blood, murder, rape, torture -- for a 'benevolent' God. In God's Name. For the cause of the Pure and the Good. Sound familiar?

We're animals with slightly more complex brains, which lend us the power to be far more destructive. And certain ideas are like viruses that cause blue screens of death -- ideas like the Prosperity Gospel, or that illness arises from sin, or that women brought catastrophe upon the human race.

Or ideas like the world is going to end tomorrow.

And need I say this out loud -- the forces of Reason and Science, as fragile and sometimes mistaken as they may be, are all that stand between us and our end. The mind without these forces as the primary focus is a dark and dangerous thing. We are still fighting this battle everyday, and the humans posting on this website, for all our flaws, are the critical guardians of the future of the human race.