Malice

Here's the conclusion from a study published in the journal Aggressive Behavior: Watching TV programs about mean people can make you a mean person. The study focused on 250 college women who viewed clips depicting different forms of aggression, from violent fighting to gossiping and excluding others.

But here's the scary part to the study:

Aggressive reactions are more automatic and less conscious than most people assume. ... That means nobody deliberately decides to imitate a Real Housewife; the connection is more subtle and unintentional. … One of the authors points out that even TV shows depicting friends putting each other down in the name of a joke has its effects, too.

Watching a clip of two girls fighting over a boyfriend causes the same kind of reaction that watching a murderous scene would. This leads to a higher chance of engaging in aggressive behavior because the stimuli “primes” your brain for aggression.

So, anyone know of a show where everyone treats each other respectfully, don’t make jokes at someone’s expense, and no one secretly sabotages anyone?

A Maryland high school athletic director faces criminal charges for allegedly using artificial intelligence to mimic the voice of Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert, misleading people into believing Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments. Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said, "We now have conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic. It's been determined the recording was generated through the use of artificial intelligence technology.”

After an investigation by the Baltimore County Police Department, Dazhon Darien was arrested on charges of stalking, theft, disruption of school operations, and retaliation against a witness.

While celebrities have been on guard against the use of AI for unauthorized use of likeness, this particular target is notable for his ordinariness. Hany Farid is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics and helped analyze the recording. “What's so particularly poignant here is that this is a Baltimore school principal. This is not Taylor Swift. It's not Elon Musk. It's just some guy trying to get through his day.”

According to police, Darien's alleged scheme began as retaliation against Eiswert over “work performance challenges.” Investigators reported that Eiswert began investigating for the potential mishandling of nearly $2,000 in school funds, and had reprimanded Darien for firing a coach without approval. Darien’s contract was up for renewal next semester, but Eiswert implied that the renewal might not happen.

In January 2024, detectives discovered the AI-generated voice recording, which had spread on social media. The recording caused significant disruptions, leading to Eiswert's temporary removal from the school and triggering hate-filled messages and numerous calls to the school.

Darien was eventually arrested at Baltimore/Washington International Airport while attempting to board a flight to Houston. He was stopped for packing a gun in his bags, and officers discovered a warrant for his arrest.

Still, the result continued to leave Professor Farid unsettled. “What is going to be the consequence of this?” Farid emphasized the need for regulatory action. “I don't understand at what point we're going to wake up as a country and say, like, ‘Why are we allowing this? Where are our regulators?’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is a good example that deception is on the rise (“evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” 2 Tim. 3:13). We should be discerning about the information we choose to believe and pass on to others (whether secular or religious).

In 2019, David and Ina Steiner were running a newsletter called CommerceBytes. The newsletter reported on a lawsuit by online retailer eBay alleging that its rival Amazon had poached many of its third-party sellers. The Steiners probably knew the story would anger officials at one or both of the tech companies, but had no idea how far they might go to retaliate. As it turns out, they went too far. Way too far.

The intimidating harassment included bizarre and unexpected deliveries of items to the Steiners’ home, including live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask. U.S. Attorney Josh Levy said, "eBay engaged in absolutely horrific, criminal conduct.”

James Baugh was eBay’s senior director of safety and security at the time. Prosecutors called him the ringleader of the harassment, citing an email where he called Ina Steiner “a biased troll who needs to be burned down.”

The company announced in January it will pay a fine of $3 million to resolve criminal charges levied against several of its employees in connection with a campaign of harassment against the Steiners.

The CEO of eBay, Jamie Iannone, called the employee behavior “wrong and reprehensible.” He went on to say, “since these events occurred, new leaders have joined the company, and eBay has strengthened its policies and training. EBay remains committed to upholding high standards of conduct and ethics and to making things right with the Steiners.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Uncontrolled anger and a thirst for revenge can lead to many costly mistakes, both in the business world and in a person’s private life.

While seeking to better understand the nature of aggression, David Chester of Virginia Commonwealth University, along with Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky, started studying revenge. They discovered that a person who is insulted or socially rejected feels an emotional pain. The area in the brain associated with pain was most active in participants who went on to react with an aggressive response after feeling rejected. Chester said, “It’s tapping into an ancient … tendency to respond to threats and harm with aggressive retaliation.”

In a follow-up study he was surprised to find that emotional pain was intricately yoked with pleasure. That is, while rejection initially feels painful, it can quickly be masked by pleasure when presented with the opportunity to get revenge. It even activates the brain's known reward circuit, the nucleus accumbens. People who are provoked behave aggressively precisely because it can be a rewarding experience. Revenge really can be sweet.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In contrast to the desire of our old nature, God wants believers to forgive those who harm them, love their enemies, and pray for those who persecute them so that we show the world what God is like.

November 19, 2024 will mark the 161st anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." According to a 2013 editorial in The New York Times, this brief (272 words or two-minute) speech still has the power to "do what words are rarely able to do: invoke an eloquent silence." The same article adds, "There is an overpowering immediacy in these plain words."

At the time of the speech, the majority of newspapers praised it, but just to prove you really can't please all the people all the time, this powerful speech received negative reviews. The Harrisburg Patriot derided Lincoln's address by referring to his "silly remarks." (The paper has since retracted their criticism of the Gettysburg Address.) Other newspapers didn't live to retract their words. The New York World accused Lincoln of "gross ignorance or willful misstatement" with his declaration of "four score and seven years ago." The Democratic-leaning Chicago Times observed, "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States." Foreign newspapers also criticized Lincoln's remarks. The Times of London commented: "The ceremony [at Gettysburg] was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln."

Why do we enjoy watching others—especially rich, powerful, famous people—"fall from grace"? Joseph Epstein commented on our need to know and discuss stories about prominent people who have failed:

How delightful to those of us living out our modest lives, to witness, if only through the media, such ego-filled balloons getting popped .… When we see someone mightier than we divested of his dignity, stripped of his pretentions, humiliated in public, we feel comforted by having retained our own dignity, pretensions, good name. Perhaps after all, we conclude, it is just as well that we are not so rich, powerful, beautiful, talented. Relishing in others humiliations is good for our ego …. Even when we know deep down that if [our local newspaper] knew everything about us, we might be on the cover too.

Many mountain climbers regard Italian Walter Bonatti as the greatest climber of all time. In 1954, when he was 24-years-old, he was the youngest member of the Italian climbing team that became the first in the world to conquer K2, the second tallest mountain in the world after Everest.

Wikipedia says, "K2 is known as the Savage Mountain due to the difficulty of ascent and the second-highest fatality rate among the 'eight thousanders' for those who climb it. For every four people who have reached the summit, one has died trying."

Mountaineer Reinhold Messner told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, "Bonatti was just a boy from Bergamo who in a very few years became the best climber in the world," and that he had been envied around the world because he was "too ahead of the curve, too alone, too good."

But when Bonatti died in 2011 at age 81, his New York Times obituary focused much of its attention on a controversy surrounding the 1954 conquest of K2 that dogged him for the rest of his life. Although two members of the Italian team reached the summit of the mountain, Bonatti himself did not. He and a porter were responsible to transport oxygen tanks to a camp at 26,000 feet, where they were to meet the other climbers who were waiting for them. Then together the entire team was to make the final, one-day ascent to the top.

However, when Bonatti and his porter arrived with the oxygen tanks at the agreed-upon location, no one was there. Bonatti and the porter had to spend the night camped in the open, where they almost died from the cold. The next morning, leaving the oxygen tanks in the snow, they rushed back down the mountain, and the porter lost fingers and toes to frostbite.

A few hours after Bonatti and the porter had left the oxygen tanks in the snow, the other members of the Italian team appeared, took the tanks, and proceeded to the summit and to mountaineering glory. Later, Bonatti accused them of deliberately missing their planned meeting place on the mountain. The others denied it, and the Italian Alpine Club sided with them. From then on, Bonatti did much of his climbing alone rather than with teams, and for the next 50 years the controversy over K2 lingered in the climbing community.

Then, in 2004, one of the Italian climbers who had reached the summit of K2 essentially admitted in a book that Bonatti's version of the events was true.

When Bonatti died in 2011 at age 81, his partner Ms. Rossella Podesta, age 77, said, "The K2 story was a big thorn in his heart. He could not believe that, even after all those many years, nobody had apologized or acknowledged the truth. This falseness has left a mark in his life."

In his own book, The Mountains of My Life, Walter Bonatti wrote, "My disappointments came from people, not the mountains."

Indeed, forgiving others can be more difficult than climbing the world's tallest mountains.

In September 2011, The New York Times ran an article about a small town in Missouri called Mountain Grove. Gossip and rumors have always existed in this tight-knit community, but before the days of anonymous social media sites, people traded stories at the local diner called Dee's Place. At Dee's Place you could usually find a dozen longtime residents who gathered each morning to talk about weather, politics, and, of course, their neighbors.

But of late [the article reports], more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 have shifted from sharing the latest news and rumors over eggs and coffee to … a social media Web site called Topix, where they write and read startlingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity, about one another. [Unlike sites like Facebook, which require users to give their real names, Topix users can pick different names and thus remain anonymous.]

And in Dee's Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner's owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a "cesspool of character assassination." And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger.

His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post … which described the mother of two, as among other things, "a methed-out, doped-out [addict] with AIDS" Not a word was true, Mr. and Mrs. James said, but the consequences were real enough …. Now, the couple has resolved to move. "I'll never come back to this town again," Ms. James said in an interview at the diner. "I just want to get … out of town."

The article concludes with a warning about gossip: "The same Web sites created for candid talk about local news and politics are also hubs of unsubstantiated gossip, stirring widespread resentment in communities where ties run deep … and anonymity is something of a novel concept."

Lance Morrow, an award-winning journalist with Time magazine, once set out to write an article asking if there was one universal joke, told everywhere around the world. Here's what happened:

I sent out a query to all of Time's bureaus around the world—Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney, New Delhi, Jerusalem, Rome, Bonn, London, Paris, Rio, Buenos Aires, and so on. I asked the correspondents to tell me one or two jokes then current in their part of the world.

It turns out there is a universal joke. It was what Americans refer to as the "Polish joke." Except of course that everywhere, the role of [Polish people] in the "Polish joke" is enacted by some appropriate other group. The Flemings have Walloon jokes, for example. The English tell Irish jokes, and vice versa …. The people in Tokyo have jokes about the people in Osaka. I was once on the tiny island of Grenada (133 square miles) and was told that people on one side of the island had a large stock of vicious jokes about people on the other side of the island; and vice versa.

In the universal humor, as in universal evil, you need the Other. The Other is the butt of your joke, or the butt of your evil.

When researchers at the University of Texas at Austin asked 2,000 people why they have sex, there were plenty of answers—237, to be precise. The most popular answer given by those surveyed was that they felt an attraction for the other person. Others said sex was a chief way to feel closer to someone else or to show someone how much they are loved. Many simply said they had sex because "it feels good" and "it's fun."

Most of the answers were expected, but researchers also received quite a few unexpected reasons for sexual behavior. The more startling included:

• "[I wanted] to boost my social status."

• "[I had sex] because my partner was famous."

• "[I wanted] to get a raise or promotion."

• "[I wanted] to change the topic of conversation."

• "[I wanted] to return a favor."

• "Someone dared me."

• "I wanted to punish myself."

• "I lost a bet."

• "I had sex to keep warm."

• "[I had sex] because my hormones were out of control."

• "[Sex] seemed like good exercise."

• "I wanted to give someone a sexually transmitted disease."

The laws of etiquette proclaim that we should not speak ill of the dead—especially the recently deceased. There is one place, however, where this offense is being committed with regularity: online obituary guestbooks.

Legacy.com is a company that provides online obituary services for more than 300 newspapers in the United States and processes more than 18,000 notes daily. Not all of those messages are glowing tributes. In fact, the company assigns 45 of its 75 employees—and spends 30 percent of its budget—to intercept messages they call "dissing the dead." Some of the barbs are unmistakable, such as off-color insults and scathing accusations. Many others are subtle, such as this one: "Reading the obituary, it sounds like he was a great father." This was signed, "His son Peter."

Kenneth J. Doka, a professor of gerontology (the study of aging), believes computer technology has made it easier for people to say something with one click than write a letter and put it in a mailbox.

"In more than 25 years of grief counseling," Doka says, "I can cite only a couple of instances of people communicating mean things to the family of someone who died by sending them a letter or writing in the paper guestbook. On the other hand, I've talked to a lot of funeral directors who have put up online guestbooks, and they say the level of screening required is a real problem."

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of Words That Hurt, Words That Heal, has lectured throughout this country on the powerful, and often negative, impact of words. He often asks audiences if they can go 24 hours without saying any unkind words about, or to, another person. Invariably, a small number of listeners raise their hands, signifying "yes." Others laugh, and quite a large number call out, "no!"

Telushkin responds: "Those who can't answer 'yes' must recognize that you have a serious problem. If you cannot go 24 hours without drinking liquor, you are addicted to alcohol. If you cannot go 24 hours without smoking, you are addicted to nicotine. Similarly, if you cannot go 24 hours without saying unkind words about others, then you have lost control over your tongue."

Forgive me, for I have killed.

I have used swords and shotguns, handguns and grenades. I have shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned. I have crushed skulls with golf clubs and hammers and baseball bats. I have slaughtered men and women, drug dealers and crime bosses, soldiers and secret agents, mad scientists and aliens, zombies and the pizza guy. I have killed hundreds, even thousands—so many that I lost count long ago. I have taken up machine guns, plasma rifles, and chainsaws. I have learned to aim for the head.

I have killed with XBox and GameCube, Playstation and PC. I have killed with joystick, mouse, and keyboard. I have killed for hours at a time, on screens big and small; on laptops and high-resolution monitors. I have killed in my basement, in my living room, at the local arcade, at a neighbor's house, with a co-worker's teenage son. I have killed late into the night, until three or four in the morning—because my adrenaline was surging, because my kids were safely in bed, because I was simply on a roll. Because I was winning and they were dying….

Every weeknight I play, most nights later than the one before. And every night, I slink up the stairs and ease my weary frame into bed, trying not to disturb my wife, who went to sleep hours before. My body is spent, yet I cannot sleep. The bedroom is silent, yet I can still hear those ominous refrains. I close my eyes, yet I can still picture the endless corridors, each one leading to yet another door or outcropping, another blind corner, another enemy, another target….

Come Saturday morning, I'm at the computer again. That's when I hear it, the muted thud of feet on the stairs, and there, standing to my right, eyes fixed on the screen, is my little boy. I tell him to go back upstairs, but he doesn't budge. In his mind, there is a cartoon on the computer, the likes of which he's never seen before. He somehow knows that this is forbidden fruit—that he must possess its secrets, or at least observe them. I call for my wife, asking her to please come get her son.

Later on, this boy—who has never operated a joystick in his life—asks me a question that I never saw coming: "Daddy, can I watch you play the bad game?"

Forgive me, for I have killed.

David Grossman, a retired Army psychologist, believes that violent video games are teaching our kids to kill. Grossman first became aware of this issue while conducting research for his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, On Killing, which recounts the U.S. Army's solution to an interesting problem: as many as 85 percent of soldiers did not fire their weapons during World Wars I and II.

The reason for the soldiers' reluctance, according to Grossman, was psychological: "Hardwired into the brains of most healthy members of most species is a response against killing their own kind." In order to deal with this problem, the army desensitized soldiers to the act of killing by having them practice shooting human-shaped targets made of wood. As technology improved, however, the military began using video games to simulate the killing of other human beings.

Grossman believes that modern video games like Doom and Grand Theft Auto operate along the same principles, and have the same effect. In other words, they are chillingly effective at desensitizing teens to the act of killing other human beings. David Walsh, director of the National Institute on Media and the Family, agrees: "What happens when a teen spends a lot of time playing violent video games is [that] the aggression center of the brain activates, but the emotional center of the brain deactivates—exactly the combination that we would not want to see."

As evidence of this claim, Grossman points to a Paducah, Kentucky, native named Michael Carneal. In 1997, then 14-year-old Carneal opened fire in the lobby of his high school, seriously injuring five of his classmates and killing three others. A subsequent police investigation found that Michael's parents had converted their two-car garage into a playroom lined with point-and-shoot arcade games. In other words, a lifetime of playing violent video games had provided Michael with the emotional training needed to kill another human being.

What's even more frightening is that those video games also provided Michael with the physical training needed to use a deadly weapon. Prior to the night before his killing spree, he had never shot an actual pistol. However, when he opened fire on his fellow students, he did so with a surprising degree of accuracy. Grossman explains:

You have kneeling, scrambling, screaming targets. Carneal fires eight shots at eight different targets. Five of them are head shots, the other three [are] upper torso. Now, I have trained the FBI. I have trained Navy SEALS, Green Berets, and Texas Rangers. And when I tell them about this case, they're simply stumped. Nowhere in the annals of law enforcement, military, or criminal history can we find equivalent achievement.

In the fall of 2002, Rick Garmon's daughter, Katie, became a victim of date rape. She was 18-years-old at the time and a freshman in college. Too humiliated to speak about what had happened—even with her family—Katie switched schools and attempted to move on with her life.

However, the scars of that traumatic event began to fester. Over the next 14 months, she withdrew from her family and friends. She developed an eating disorder and began losing weight. Finally confronted by her mother, Julie, Katie confessed the truth. Fortunately, after a year of fervent prayer and support, Katie was able to overcome the pain and return to a normal life.

Unfortunately, Katie was not the only one struggling with inner-demons during that year. Her father was fighting his own battle against the desire for revenge at any cost. In fact, as soon as he heard the news, Rick Garmon developed a plan to kill the man who had so deeply wounded his daughter:

I pulled back from Julie and everybody else. Get up, go to work, think about the plan, try to forget, go home, try to go to sleep, dream the plan. I plotted to drive through the campus and use my Smith and Wesson .243 caliber, bolt-action rifle…. I'd sit in the parking lot as long as necessary until he walked by. Then I could get it out of my head, and Katie could start eating again.

Katie came home for the weekend two months after the truth came out. It tore me up to see her. She and I didn't talk much anymore. I missed watching the Atlanta Braves with her. I missed laughing with her. I just plain missed her….

Julie tried to tempt her with a great meal on Saturday. Sitting across from Katie, I kept my eyes on my food. It felt as though we lived in a funeral home. The only sounds were clanking of silverware and the clinking of ice. I couldn't take the phoniness. I slammed my chair to the table and took off to my room in the basement. I'd spent a lot of time down there in my getaway room of guns and the sports channel. Methodically, I started cleaning the rifle I'd use.

Then I heard [my son] Thomas trotting downstairs. "Whatcha doing, Dad?" I kept on cleaning and never looked at him. I rocked in my recliner with the gun across my lap.

"Can I help you clean?" I didn't say a word. "You going hunting?" I looked up at him, his eyes so brown they looked almost black, just like mine. He stood inches from my knees. His hair, cut to match a G. I. Joe flattop, just like mine. I kept my gaze on my son and moved the red rag around in circles.

Our eyes met. Thomas's eyes brimmed with tears. He knows. Dear, God. I think my son knows my plan.

I stopped polishing the gun and laid it on the floor by the chair. "Come here, boy. Give your daddy a hug." He wrapped his arms around me tight as a cobra. Thomas's love was somehow stronger than my hatred. His hug began to crumble my rage like a sledgehammer breaking a wall. Chip by chip.

Sweet Jesus, what have I been thinking? My job's not finished. Forgive me. Thomas isn't raised. If I go to jail, he won't have a father. God, help me.

Locking the gun in the cabinet, I made a choice to forgive. God, I gotta let go of this hate. It's killing me. The decision started in my head, not from any feeling. Swallowing back tears, Thomas and I walked upstairs together, my arm on his shoulder.

I came so close.

Have you ever felt that a driver was really slow in pulling out of a parking space for which you were waiting? It turns out your imagination may not be playing tricks on you. A recent study of 400 drivers in a shopping mall found that drivers took longer to pull out of a space if someone was waiting than if nobody was waiting there to claim the space. On average, if nobody was waiting for the space, drivers took 32.2 seconds to pull out of a spot after opening a car door. If someone was waiting, drivers took about 39 seconds. And woe to the person who honks to hurry a driver: drivers took 43 seconds to pull out of a space when the waiting driver honked!

Between two farms near Valleyview, Alberta, you can find two parallel fences, only two feet apart, running for a half mile. Why are there two fences when one would do? Two farmers, Paul and Oscar, had a disagreement that erupted into a feud. Paul wanted to build a fence between their land and split the cost, but Oscar was unwilling to contribute. Since he wanted to keep cattle on his land, Paul went ahead and built the fence anyway.

After the fence was completed, Oscar said to Paul, "I see we have a fence." "What do you mean 'we'?" Paul replied. "I got the property line surveyed and built the fence two feet into my land. That means some of my land is outside the fence. And if any of your cows sets foot on my land, I'll shoot it." Oscar knew Paul wasn't joking, so when he eventually decided to use the land adjoining Paul's for pasture, he was forced to build another fence, two feet away. Oscar and Paul are both gone now, but their double fence stands as a monument to the high price we pay for stubbornness.

Two shopkeepers were bitter rivals. Their stores were directly across the street from each other, and they would spend each day keeping track of each other's business. If one got a customer, he would smile in triumph at his rival.

One night an angel appeared to one of the shopkeepers in a dream and said, "I will give you anything you ask, but whatever you receive, your competitor will receive twice as much. Would you be rich? You can be very rich, but he will be twice as wealthy. Do you wish to live a long and healthy life? You can, but his life will be longer and healthier. What is your desire?"

The man frowned, thought for a moment, and then said, "Here is my request: Strike me blind in one eye!"

One sign of jealousy is when it's easier to show sympathy and "weep with those who weep" than it is to exhibit joy and "rejoice with those who rejoice."

All Sins Swept Away:

A slave describes her delayed but dramatic conversion.

Jarena Lee (1783-c.1850) was one of the outstanding preachers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was a servant in Philadelphia when her conversion began:

I inquired of the head cook of the house respecting the rules of the Methodists, as I knew she belonged to that society, who told me what they were--on which account I replied that I should not be able to abide by such strict rules not even one year. However, I told her that I would go with her and hear what they had to say.

The man who was to speak in the afternoon of that day was the Reverend Richard Allen, since bishop of the African Episcopal Methodists in America. During the labors of this man that afternoon, I had come to the conclusion that this is the people to which my heart unites. And it so happened that, as soon as the service closed, he invited such as felt a desire to flee the wrath to come, to unite on trial with them--I embraced the opportunity.

Three weeks from that day, my soul was gloriously converted to God under preaching, at the very outset of the sermon. The text was barely pronounced, which was "I perceive thy heart is not right in the sight of God" [(Acts 8:21)], when there appeared to my view, in the center of the heart, one sin, and this was malice--against one particular individual who had strove deeply to injure me, which I resented.

At this discovery I said, "Lord, I forgive every creature."

That instant it appeared to me as if a garment, which had entirely enveloped my whole person even to my fingers' ends, split at the crown of my head and was stripped away from me, passing like a shadow from my sight--when the glory of God seemed to cover me in its stead. That moment, though hundreds were present, I did leap to my feet and declare that God, for Christ's sake, had pardoned the sins of my soul. Great was the ecstasy of my mind, for I felt that not only the sin of malice was pardoned, but all other sins were swept away together.

That day was the first when my heart had believed and my tongue had made confession unto salvation. The first words uttered, a part of that song which shall fill eternity with its sound, was "Glory to God!" For a few moments, I had power to exhort sinners and to tell of the wonders and of the goodness of him who had clothed me with his salvation.