You see on the television, on the internet, in the newspapers, these stories of monstrous crimes by seemingly ordinary people, from mass murderers to child molesters to children themselves. You hear about women, raped and butchered, children at a school, shot and massacred. Horrific, disgusting, what inhumane person could do this?
It is so difficult to comprehend the warped minds of these human beings, that the general public forget to try and understand the reasons behind such actions and jump straight to conclusions, calling them 'monsters' without giving a second thought about it. Of course there is no way to forgive their actions and yes, they are what you would call 'monsters', but there are always two sides to a story.

In almost every case of a horrific murder or series of murders you'll find a similar story. A victim abducted, plucked at random and killed. But that's not the only story. How about the killer? I tell you, looking through the biographies of murderers, almost all of them have had a difficult past or have some sort of mental condition. Sexually abused or regularly beaten is the most common. And usually involving divorced or foster parents. This then normally leads to a difficult time at school and a lot of rebellion. The absence of love from a parent has literally prevented them from developing basic empathy and social skills - often in the form of reactive attachment disorder (RAD). It is shocking what it can do to a child. They lose a sense of morality, compassion, becoming unable to love anything or anyone.

I am not saying that every child who is abused will turn out as a serial killer – it would probably also be in combination with their genes, perhaps a mental condition or just unusual circumstances growing up. And when the combination is right, the result is a person without the common inhibitions of society, who's troubled mind's only way of outlet is through causing pain to others.

Take a child called Beth Thomas for example. She was sexually abused by her father after her mother died, at only 19 months old, so only 1 year old. Soon after she was taken into care, her foster parents noticed something was deeply wrong. She seemed to be missing any sort of empathy or care for doing wrong. She would kill innocent baby birds, stick needles into the family pets and her baby brother had to be admitted to A&E after she smashed his head repeatedly against the concrete floor, even saying afterwards without any sense of worry that she had been trying to kill him. She was fully aware that it was hurting each of them and that she shouldn't be doing it but she felt no remorse whatsoever.
This is of course a very extreme example of what can happen to a person with a case of RAD, but you can start to imagine how someone can transform from that into a killer.

When it comes to the subject of heaven and hell, at first it is not hard deciding where these murderers belong. Hell of course. In the Bible it is said that God will forgive you for your sins and allow you into heaven if you are truly sorry and if you embrace his love. But for some - not all - of these people, they are not at all sorry for the crimes that they have committed, purely due to the mind set they have developed from the forgotten crimes that were committed against them at such a young age.

That cannot of course be an excuse, because murdering innocent people is just unforgivably. But it does change things slightly, so that it actually is harder deciding than you might originally think. One would think that every person, irrelevant of genes or appearance, has the possibility to be a good and happy person, living life to the full, from the moment they are born. The thing that makes the difference is what happens from that moment onwards - their parents, their surroundings and their upbringing. Therefore the life that they eventually go on to lead is not due to their choices necessarily, but to the faults of those around them.

So it is hard to come to any conclusion on the matter as there is guilt in either decision – to condemn or not to condemn? I guess that is to be left to God.