More details about Seung Hui Cho’s interaction with religion, from the Washington Post:
Hyang In Cho was so desperate to find help for her silent, angry son that she sought out some members of One Mind Church in Woodbridge to heal him of what the church’s head pastor called “demonic power.”
But before the church could act late last summer, Seung Hui Cho had to return to Virginia Tech to start his senior year, said the Rev. Dong Cheol Lee, minister of the Presbyterian congregation.
…”His problem needed to be solved by spiritual power,” said Lee, whose church members met with Cho and his mother. “That’s why she came to our church — because we were helping several people like him.” Those churchgoers told Hyang In Cho that her son was afflicted by demonic power and needed deliverance, Lee said.
Rev Lee is not the only figure to have suggested that Cho had been possessed – Richard Roberts (son of Oral) and Franklin Graham ventured the same diagnosis, and a minister named Paul F Davis revealed that
…”The eyes are the window of the soul. Cho Seung-Hui’s eyes revealed there was another resident occupying and possessing him. Cho’s dull eyes displayed an absence of life and abandonment. His body was the host and the demons the parasitical inhabitants, which clearly spoke through him during his video manifesto mentioning ‘my children, my brothers and sisters’ of which there was no factual basis…”
The One Mind Church is part of the Remnant Movement, which is also part of the “DaRakBang” (DRB) evangelization movement (see here for these links), from the Korean word for “Upper Room”. This website explains (well, sort of) what this means:
Darakbang is 3 M Movement. 1.) It is the movement of following the Message. 2.) It is the movement of having one mind. 3.) If these 2 take place, a Movement arises. In a word, if we become one by sharing the same message and mind, it becomes the movement that makes evidences in the field.
Titus was the fellow-worker who had the same spirit of 3 M as Paul.
A Korean-language website called Darakwen.net has a few articles in (rather poor) English, which give a bit more background. It seems that the Darakbang movement was founded in South Korea in the late 1980s by Pastor Ryu Kwang-soo, who was formerly part of the Hapdong Presbyertian Church; the split was acrimonious, with Hapdong accusing Kwang-soo of heresy and expelling sympathisers. Apparently there are now 3,000 churches in the movement.
Kwang-soo believes that demons are a significant force in the world, as he explains in one of his writings:
However, there are many peoples obsessed with demons. Some peoples around us honor the evil spirits. It is said that there are more than eight million demons in Japan where the number of mental patients reaches at the highest in the Asia.
…Therefore demon brings about dirty disease and impure minds, and rotten acts. Haunting the peoples, the demon stimulates them to take the deviated actions so severely as to commit suicide. It is proved that the number of mental patients occupied the top among the suicides.
Elsewhere, he tells us that
4 demon-possessed people came together to start the new age movement in the United States, but we have been given the authority to drive out the forces of darkness. There is no reason for us to be scared of the evil forces.
(Hat tip: Bulldada Newsblog)
Name variation: Ryu Kwang-su
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