Dennis Markuze Arrested, Again
From The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada): Man charged with threatening people using social media — again.
A Saint-Laurent man has been charged, again, with abusing social media to threaten people who express their views online.
Dennis Markuze, 40, faces three new charges, including one alleging he violated the conditions of a sentence he received in May for the same offence. He was also charged with threatening the Montreal police officer who was investigating claims from several of Markuze’s past victims. Those victims alleged that Markuze’s threats have intensified in recent months.
In May, Markuze received an 18-month suspended sentence after pleading guilty to uttering threats toward eight people he believed to be atheists. The court was told Markuze’s problems could be attributed to drug consumption, which caused him to believe he was “the Voice of God.” As part of his sentence, he was ordered to “abstain from participating in a social network, blog and discussion forum.” But during the summer, several people contacted The Gazette to report that Markuze appeared to be ignoring the court order.
[Hat Tip: Friendly Atheist]
Keep reading: at the bottom it says he was released under conditions. Like, that worked so well last time, didn't it?
ReplyDeleteYeah-- certainly a man that hopped up on god is on drugs, or is he? LOL!
ReplyDeleteThis is scary.
ReplyDeleteThere's litterally nothing a man who truly thinks he's god instrument on earth won't do.
The ironic thing here is, theists being dualists of varios kinds will usually insist the mind is not dependent on the physical brain.
DeleteThen how do these people propose to detail whether this guy isn't actually hearing the voice of god?
He's crazy? How do you know if you think the brain isn't the source of that crazyness?
He's on drugs? How do you know that's what's responsible when you time and again dismiss measurements of brain activity correlated with reports of behavior and thoughts?
All we will be offered to questions such as these are endless streams of post-facto or ad-hoc rationalizations, or just plain ignorance and denial.
Paranoid schizophrenics who commit terrible crimes can be theist or atheist. BTW, most serial killers are atheist. Even Jefffry Dahmer admitted that it was atheism that allowed him to murder all those people without any guilt.
ReplyDeleteNo truth allowed here, this is unfair!
DeleteYou miss Rumraket's point. He is not arguing that theism makes people more likely to be serial killers, but that in the case of paranoid schizophrenics who claim to hear the voice of God how can a theist detect the falsehood of such claims.
DeleteLet us take the example of Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper who claimed he heard the voice of God commanding him to kill prostitutes, how do you determine that he isn't hearing the voice of God when you by definition believe this is possible. How do you know that his claim to communicate with God is any different from that of a possibly historical or not Jesus.
By the way most serial killers are not atheists many like Sutcliffe or The Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway were devout Christians. In the case of Jefffry Dahmer he came from a devout extreme fundamentalist protestant family and one wonders what effect that upbringing had on him. There is no correlation that has been established between serial killers and their religious views. Serial killers appear to have a more diverse background than most people expect.
Psychopathy is what allowed Dahmer to murder people without guilt. (Psychopaths don't feel guilt.) He may have attributed it to atheism (are we to consider him a 'self-aware' or 'self-knowing' person?), but as a psychopath who had sexual fantasies about viscera, he was motivated by deep psychological urges.
DeleteMadelyn O'Hare, the darling of American atheism was murdered by a fellow atheist, and her surviving son became Christian.
ReplyDeleteAnders Breivik killed about 70 children and teens, and was a christian.
DeleteHow long do we play this game?
I had two points:
1. People who want to kill will find a way to rationalize doing so, godbelief is in no way a hinderance for that.
2. Theists can't actually deny that it's possible these nutcases are hearing the voice of god.
And Stalin had a moustache and Hitler was a vegetarian.
DeleteThis whole concept of some person X being the 'darling' of some ism Y reeks of a mindset informed by authority, revelation and dogma and had the fingerprints of religious idiots all over it.
This of course is not restricted to religion, fascism and communism were/are are driven by this as well.
As a fellow traveller with the likes of Larry Moran, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins et al, I have a certain amount of trust for what they say based on their earned reputation for evidence based rational thought, this trust is provisional and subject to change as new evidence comes forth.
For those interested in the behind the scenes details of how he got arrested the second time, I've written an extensive blog post here: http://bit.ly/MabusRedux
ReplyDelete