On Friday, May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger, a disgruntled 22-year-old filled with pent up rage over being spurned by beautiful girls, exploded in rage, leaving seven dead and several others wounded. The massacre took place in Santa Barbara California; which is truly one of the most beautiful places in the United States where mountains slope down into the ocean.
The young gunman targeted the Isla Vista area of Santa Barbara, which is known for rampant drug and alcohol use, as well as a popular pick up area for many of the college students in the area. Just last month, police in Isla Vista made 130 arrests during spring break, as they squared off with violent youth who were throwing bottles and overturning vehicles.
Elliot Rodger was the son of the assistant director for The Hunger Games movies. I find this tragically ironic, as The Hunger Games are largely the glorification of young people killing each other at an annually televised death match, orchestrated by a fascist, totalitarian regime.
Elliot Rodger and PUAHate
Rodger was motivated by a deep hatred for both men and women, owing to his frustration with his inability to attract women with whom he desperately want to have sex. He was a member of an “Anti-Pickup-Artist” forum at PUAHate.com, where members often share their resentment for women who have rejected them and against dating experts who they feel have failed or deceived them. Rodger also sounds like an MRA (Men’s Rights Activists) member when he uses terms like “inferior man,” etc.
PUA (Pick Up Artists) and MRA groups are often characterized with vitriol against women, though not all members engage in misogynistic rhetoric. Elliot Rodger posted a message on the forum last year, wherein he envisioned wiping out all other males from the face of the earth with a lethal virus so he could have his pick from the most beautiful women on earth. Rodger wrote incredulously:
“If you could release a virus that would kill every single man on Earth, except for yourself because you would have the antidote, would you do it? You will be the only man left, with all the females. You would be able to have your pick of any beautiful woman you want, as well as having dealt vengeance on the men who took them from you. Imagine how satisfying that would be.”
That there are many more men like Rodger out there seems evident, as other members on the forum had the impudence to call him a “hero,” in the aftermath of his murder spree.
Elliot Rodger’s Maniacal Rant
Rodger left a 137-page manifesto titled, “My Twisted World.” In it he opined:
“I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts.”
Mahbod Moghadam, a co-founder of the popular website Rap Genius, praised the “beautiful” prose in Rodger’s death manifesto last Sunday following the mass murder.
Rodger also left a chilling video before the massacre, where he shared his maniacal intentions. Between bouts of strange, diabolical laughter, he made the following statements:
“College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. But in those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me. But I will punish you all for it.
I’m going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde s**t that I see inside there. All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would’ve all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them.
After I have annihilated every single girl in the sorority house I will take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there. All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure…”
Incredibly, totally blinded to the wickedness of his own heart, Rodger wondered:
“I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it.”
Elliot Rodger, Atheism and Self-Deification
Much of Rodger’s jaded worldview stemmed from his rejection of the one true God and his desire to be his own god. In fact, Rodger said in his video:
“I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one. The true alpha male…Well, now I will be a god compared to you, you will all be animals, you are animals and I will slaughter you like animals. I’ll be a god exacting my retribution on all those who deserve it and you do deserve it just for the crime of living a better life than me.”
In Rodger’s thoroughly godless manifesto he mentions, “They took me to church a few times and I hated it.” In the manifesto the only god he mentions is himself:
“I am the closest thing there is to a living god…I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved.”
Elliot Rodger rejected God and moral absolutes and therefore, like every other atheist, had no moral compass based on objective morality to guide his life. Rodger, therefore, was only left with is own wicked heart; feelings of lust, envy, jealousy and hatred and the wicked influences in the culture of death that permeate the world via demonic forces and mass media.
Rodger’s godless atheism, which allowed him to become his own god who would exploit others on his way to his own illusory throne, is a growing trend and logical result of a culture that is becoming more and more hedonistic by the moment. Additionally, surveys reveal that members of MRA/PUA-type groups are overwhelmingly libertine and atheistic. (Source) (Source)
In contrast to the rhetoric of libertine atheists in misogynistic web forums, God’s Word reveals that men are equally made in the image of God (Genesis 2) and that husbands are to dwell with their wives in an understanding way (1 Peter 3:6-10) and love them as Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:25-27).
Elliot Rodger and Mass Media
Elliot Rodger’s worldview was shaped by popular media with the constant glorification of “hooking up,” and the propagation of stereotypes which cast disdain on those who are virgins with movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This causes those who are often already insecure because of peer pressure to feel stigmatized if they are not in a relationship or married by a certain age. In contrast, God’s Word makes it clear that singleness can even be a desirable gift from the Lord. In fact, the apostle Paul reveals that the single person is even more blessed than his or her married friends if his or her focus is on the Lord (1 Corinthians 7:6, 8, 25-39).
Elliot Rodger and the Liberal Lie of Self-Entitlement
Another factor that influenced Elliot Rodger that has flown under the radar is the fact that his mentality was a product of the entitlement society, propagated and fostered by the media and leftist politics. When watching Rodger’s video, it quickly becomes apparent that he believed he was entitled to sex with several women and wanted to punish them for unjustly depriving him of what he erroneously believed they owed him! The media constantly saturates men with the message that if they drive the right car or wear the right cologne, women will line up wanting to have sex with them. Unfortunately, many men have allowed themselves to be duped by this perverse message.
Elliot Rodger and World of Warcraft
It seems apparent that Elliot Rodger may have been influenced by dark games like the multiplayer, online game World of Warcraft. My wife and I noticed while watching the video he posted that Rodger mentioned that he declared that he wanted to turn “every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood”:
“Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power I would stop at nothing to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood and rightfully so.”
I immediately did a search to see if his words were original or if this was yet another example of the influence of the culture of death in pop culture. Sure enough, I found that these are the words attributed to the evil leader Garrosh Hellscream in the game World of Warcraft. Hellscream yells:
“Anger, hatred, fear, they are weapons of war. The tools of a Warchief. Yes, yes, I can see it now. I can see the future of this world. A world ruled by the Horde, my Horde! The old one calls to you. The heart will be your end. See the visions of fear, despair and doubt as I have. You will be trapped for eternity. The true horde will come to pass, I have seen it! I have seen mountains of skulls and rivers of blood, and I will have my world!” (YouTube – 1:36 to 1:45)
The Crystallization of Elliot Rodger
While I acknowledge that not everyone who plays such games such as World of Warcraft or frequents such websites as PUAHate.com will turn out like Elliot Rodger, the reality is that an overwhelming number of recent mass murderers have been addicted to violent video games. When you have countless young people being taught by the government schools the Darwinian lie that they have no God to answer to but themselves, and are constantly bombarded by the media with messages encouraging sexual perversion, violence and self-entitlement, you have a recipe for disaster. It’s a wonder that these recent atrocities don’t take place even more often than they do. Elliot Rodger is not a mere aberration of the culture of death that we now live in, but an outright crystallization. Let each of us who knows the truth see what we can do to teach these important lessons to our children and seek to be role models for those we can influence in a godly way.
Elliot Rodger and Broken Cisterns
When we fail to allow the God who made us to fill our hearts with His love and Spirit and instead seek to find our ultimate fulfillment in created things, we will always come up empty. God reveals to us in is Word that He put eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). When we seek material and temporal things over that which is spiritual and eternal, we are left with a vast vacuum that only God can fill. We end up like the frustrated child who tries to hammer a triangular block through a round hole.
Elliot Rodger was a 22-year-old frustrated young man who kept trying to find satisfaction in the wrong places and needed to allow the Lord to truly fill his heart. Sadly, like the boy who couldn’t fit the triangle block into the round hole, he threw a temper tantrum, but in his case his tantrum cost several people their lives, caused undo pain, and caused sadness to their families and countless friends. We all have a God-shaped hole in our hearts that only God can fill. We need to teach our children where true life resides and how to handle disappointment while they are young. God’s Word says:
“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
Living Waters
Elliot Rodger rejected God and tried to be his own god and find satisfaction in the unsatisfactory things of this world. In the end he murdered several people and then killed himself. He is ultimately to blame for his actions, though there was plenty of cultural gas thrown on to his fire that caused it to rage all the more. So long as we thirst and drink from the world’s empty wells, our need for God and eternity will never be satisfied. It is only when we turn from our life of sin, that separates us from God, and turn in faith to the One who died on the cross to pay for our sins, that we finally find true peace and satisfaction. Jesus addressed a woman who was perhaps as dissatisfied with her life as Elliot Rodger was with his. Like Rodger, she had hoped to find her ultimate satisfaction in other human beings rather than through an eternal relationship with God. She had been married five times and was not married to the man she was currently living with. Jesus said to this woman during the heat of the day, in front of a well in Samaria:
“Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).
The Rock of our Salvation
God reveals to us in His Word that when the Jews were wandering in the wilderness, during their exodus from Egypt and on their way to the Promise Land, that they were dehydrating and in desperate need of water. God commanded Moses to strike a rock (Exodus 17). The result was torrents of living water that were used to refresh and revitalize God’s people. This incident is a typology foreshadowing how Jesus, the rock of our salvation, will ultimately satisfy our deepest thirsts with His Spirit. God revealed to us through the Old Testament prophet Isaiah that Jesus the Messiah would be struck for us (Isaiah 53). When Jesus was crucified, we read in the gospel of John, “But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water” (John 19:34). His blood was shed to wash away the guilt of our sins and the water flowed as a picture that Jesus is a life-giving God and, as a result of His death, would fill us with His Spirit. Jesus is the rock of our salvation (Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 118:22; Isaiah 8:13-15; 28:16; Daniel 2:34-45; Mark 12:10; Matthew 16:18; Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:4-8), and the apostle Paul identified Him with the rock that Moses struck in the wilderness:
“And all of them drank the same spiritual drink. For all of them drank from the spiritual Rock which followed them – for that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4)
Jesus made the following promise to all of us:
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:37-39).
Don’t Wait Until it’s too Late
Dear friend, I want to encourage you to realize that you will never find the incredible love and joy with which God desires to fill your heart in games like World of Warcraft, the material things of this world, money, or in cheap sexual relationships. Jesus warned that circumstances would get even worse for the Elliot Rodger’s of the world, who left this planet rejecting God and the saving grace He offers to all lost souls.
Jesus spoke of a rich man whose thirst only grew worse after he died and entered hell and how it was too late for it to ever be quenched. He cried out for a man named Lazarus to “dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame,” but it was too late (Luke 16:24)! May God lead us away from the broken cisterns of this world to his glorious fountain that God impartially provides:
“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost” (Isaiah 55:1).
Let us drink deep from the well found in the Lord Jesus Christ alone, while the drinking is still possible and before it is too late.
I leave you with Jesus’ last promise to the lost world, found in the last chapter of the last book of the bible, the book of Revelation:
“The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost” (Revelation 22:17).
May God richly bless you as you seek His face and live for His glory!
