Colorado Springs' New Life church finds itself in the spotlight once again. The Evangelical megachurch captured public attention last year when leader Ted Haggard went down in gay hooker flames. This year's news doesn't titillate in quite the same way. Or any way, for that matter.
24-year old Matthew Murray stormed the church and gunned down two sisters. He's also suspected of two other incidents in Colorado. So, what does this have to do with Ted Haggard? No one knows for sure, but Murray's internet messages may hold a clue. One post complains about being booted from the Youth Ministry program, which apparently objected to an unspecified "illness".
[His] online rants make passing references both to New Life and founding pastor Ted Haggard, who was dismissed last year after a former male prostitute alleged a relationship with him.
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In an Oct. 6 post, nghtmrchld26 wrote about his anger at the church, "We‘ll make our own religion and be our own God‘s instead listening to some abusive pedophile church like what I was raised in telling us who‘s ‘saved‘ and who‘s not," the person wrote.
It's unclear exactly what Murray's saying here, but it does indicate a deep, deranged resentment for the church - and gays.
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He says nothing about gays whatsoever. He calls them pedophiles. Aren't you the ones usually complaining when people conflate pedophilia with homosexuality? And yet you've just done the same thing.
And it seems to me that he also has quite a clear and correct grasp on the hypocrisy and hubris of the mega-churches (if not such a clear grasp of grammar and punctuation).
His comments don't indicate a "deep, deranged resentment" for gays at all. In fact, he obviously hated the church and its teachings - presumably including its teachings about gays. Reading between the lines, my guess is that Murray was quite possibly gay himself. From what I know of the church and what I've read about this case, the 'illness' he was booted from the Youth Ministry program for was probably homosexuality.
As to reality of Matthew Murray's relationship to homosexuality, check out our website on http://www.matrix-evolutions.com, which reads in part,
…as to Matthew Murray’s murders at Youth with a Mission and at New Life, the notion that the son of a powerful and very devout Christian physician, who was home taught in born again religious fashion and has nothing but a traffic ticket to indicate any prior rebelliousness at the relatively advanced age of 24, raises great suspicion. The more likely possibility is that Matthew Murray was primed by his parents and/or other religious controllers to be a martyr for the born-again Christians, his mayhem in Colorado Springs and Arvada now being a “burning of the Reichstag” justification for fundamentalist conservatives to crank up to a considerably higher level of repression and control in the United States.
I just read some of his posts. They sound like standard-issue schizophrenic writings. I'm not sure if I'd look for deeper issues here, much less try to make them pro- or anti-gay.