The courts and the populace have been steadily growing toward a logical and spiritual fallacy, and this trend will result in dire consequences for our society. Increasingly, people seem to believe a murderer must be insane to commit whatever heinous murder he committed (e.g.; counterpoint). In particular, common thought now suggests it somehow requires a greater degree of mental illness to murder someone with a blade than with a firearm.

The ability and will to commit murder is not a result of mental illness, but merely a natural outcropping of our sinful nature. Sans restraint by the Holy Spirit, we would all be inclined to murder just as casually as conversing. See Matthew 5:21-22 and Matthew 15:19. If murder were not punished by society and not deemed immoral (defined relative to God's commands), what would stop us from killing others without regret when we are angered? There is no need for insanity to commit murder. Murderous is actually our natural state, a result of the Fall.

Come to think of it, Arab Muslims know this all too well. They have no qualms about murdering others, especially Jews and Americans (and those fellow Arabs who are too soft on Jews and Americans). They abuse them, beat them, cut off their heads, drag their lifeless bodies through the streets, and dance over the bodies of their victims. Is it really easier to suggest that hundreds of millions of Muslims are all insane (wrong, to be sure, but not insane) than to merely accept the fact that we're all quite capable of such atrocities?

Denying our sinful nature has severe consequences. In fact, it has the opposite effect to what's desired. By denying our capacity to sin, we fail to acknowledge the evil forces within all of us, implicitly loosening our restraint on them. If we walked along the edge of a cliff yet casually denied the precarious nature of our situation and the dire consequences of losing self-control, it would be terribly easy to simply slip off that edge. When we take conscious note of the danger, we can make the efforts necessary to avoid it. Suggesting that murder requires insanity is merely a way of saying the sane cannot commit murder, thereby denying our proximity to the edge of the cliff of morality.