Output Stream of Consciousness

Wired picked up on the saga of an overly-enthusiastic off-kilter creationist making escalating insults and threats to University of Colorado professors, as well as a few other folks online.

Well, he has absconded.

According to Mitton, Korn appears to have skipped town. Police visited Korn's apartment, but found that he and his wife were gone. The apartment had been sublet and his wife had quit her job, said Mitton, who added he has met and spoken to Korn on several occasions.

Excerpts of some of the e-mails are located here, including such wonderful quotes as:

i will be speaking with my attorney as well, for i am planning to file legal charges against you, accusing you of child molestation. no, not of me, since although i am a child of God i also am an adult. but the children who attend your “university” and who are entrusted into your care, are being intellectually, morally, and spiritually molested by the bogus darwinian theories of nihilism and death that you teach in the name of “higher education”.

i charge you with being a murderer of souls.

if you think i am joking, just wait till we meet in court.

...and...

“Pastor Jerry Gibson spoke at Doug Whites New Day Covenant Church in Boulder.

He said that every true Christian should be ready and willing to take up arms to kill the enemies of Christian society.

But I believe it is far more effective to take up a pen to kill the enemies of Truth.

People have been quoting only the first two sentences of that last quote, when it's clearly mollified by the third. That said, the sender is clearly off his nut. Envelopes were put under professors' doors after the closing of the biology department building for that particular weekend... with skulls and crossbones on them. From the Wired article:

"The skull and crossbones on the envelopes given to the EBIO (evolutionary biology) professors symbolize the human fossils about whose age they constantly lie to the public," Korn wrote.

Realllly...?

The man behind these is suspected to be a Michael Korn... at least, the only other alternative would seem to be some mysterious person who knows Korn's every thought and vice versa. I rather doubt that. The referral to self in the third person... seems a bit transparent.

That "defender of Korn" sent more e-mails just a few days ago.

That barrage also included the wonderfully stupid little pamphlet-in-a-PDF, "Devilution". The main point of which seems to be, to quote:

Darwinian Evolution ("Devilution") is the source of every imaginable evil in our society: drugs, crime, prostitution, corruption, war, abortion, death, for the simple reason that it teaches our children that life has no higher purpose, value, or meaning.

Professors who teach Devilution are quite simply murderers of human souls!

Twit. Apart from the rather vapidly stupid realization that we have had all of the above for considerably longer than 150 years, Darwinian Evolution all but commands a minimum moral level in social animals for such animals to survive. Inborn abilities to suss out cheaters, guilt, love, looking up to parental figures must sufficiently balance out self-interest at the expense of others. It would certainly frighten me to meet people whose only lock on floodgates of murder is fear of hell, for once such a person got to the point of realizing hell is the inevitable destination for them, the consequences for the rest of us would be dire indeed.

I do hope this saga ends... well, it won't end well, with spooked professors and a pall over university education, but I hope it just turns out that Korn was frightened, and that he will come to his senses and/or get the treatment that he might need and/or channel his energies into something more constructive. I hope his wife at least stops him from doing anything stupid. I don't think it will end in violence...

...but I don't know how many locks he's got on his floodgates.