Ex-pastor pleads guilty to child porn chargesNEW CASTLE A former pastor of a Slippery Rock Township church pleaded guilty this week to two counts of possession of child pornography. No sentencing date has been set for Robert D. Schmidtberger, 52, but prosecutors recommended a sentence of 12 months minus two days to 24 months minus four days with 15 years’ probation. Lawrence County Judge Thomas Piccione, who oversaw the guilty plea, ordered a psychological assessment to determine whether Schmidtberger might be a violent sexual predator.For more of this story, click on or type the URL below:http://www.timesonline.com/articles/2008/01/28/news/doc47994ee49c77b089171946.txt
What, I hope for your sake you never have to eat your words.
I would like to take the time to congratulate the men on this forum. Apparently they’ve never been fooled by anyone. You guys can see them coming from a mile away. No one has ever lied to you, stole from you, nor hurt you in any way.
I guess all it takes to make it through life unscathed is a penis!
What,
Even psychiatrists have trouble identifying sociopaths. They have the ability to say and do anything without showing any obvious signs of dishonesty or emotional responses.
You should look some stuff up about them. They are master chameleons and you would never know if you met one.
Lots of serial killers are sociopaths. They have the ability to hunt a human, torture and kill them then go home to their spouse smiling and act completely normal.
They disassociate from their actions. They turn on and off at will different behaviors and personalities. You see what they want you to see.
There is a great showtime series called “Dexter” (season 1 is out on dvd to rent) and the main character is a sociopathic serial killer. It is an excellent study on their lack of ability to experience human emotion.
cry4,
Don’t let them get to you. Being fooled by a sociopath is not your fault.
Lots of people have a blame the victim mentality. I think males have an instinctual need to protect females, which is a wonderful trait, but when they feel powerless to stop things like rape, murders, and abuse it makes them try to “explain” why it’s your fault and not theirs.
If you look at it like that it is very sweet.
Again thanks dawnisis. And I know they’ve all been fooled too, but they don’t know it. They’ve all shook hands with, or had a beer with a wife beater, and didn’t know it. They’ve all met a girl that was soooo sweet and cute, and didn’t know she was wondering how she could get her hands on his checkbook. They’ve all met the grandpa that was a distinguished gentleman, and didn’t know he molested his own kids when they were young.
Sociopaths don’t wear a sign.
I don’t feel powerless at all. If there’s a rape or murder or abuse happening, I don’t have a problem stepping in, I’ve done it before.
But why is it my fault that some people let themselves get into a bad position? Do you think there’s some secret squirrel male only meeting where we shuffle the wife beaters around like molester priests?
I don’t have a blame the victim mentality at all, but jesus h christ, the vast majority of abusers do not go from Prince Charming to beatings overnight. First it’s yelling & screaming, then it’s throwing shit, then it’s rough handling, then it’s for real life threatening violence. The telltale signs are there in most cases.
c4t,
You’re taking my remarks too personal, I do not doubt that there are some real sociopaths out there, but there are not enough to dupe 20% of women into a violent relationship.
You’re basically stating that somewhere around 20% of the male population are sociopaths, and that’s absurd. Even if 5% (a ridiculously high number) are sociopaths, they’d have to pick up women like a Hollywood Rock Star, and that just isn’t happening.
LMAO
So some women are at fault for “letting themselves get into a bad position”.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO you aren’t blaming the victim.
You’re right they don’t turn into beaters overnight. That’s the WHOLE POINT. They manipulate and set up a situation where the women cannot leave, usually by threatening the children and cutting off finances and social contact.
But hey the women didn’t catch on right away so it’s there fault. They should have known.
I’ll give you are great example of how many women a single sociopath can destroy.
That cop Drew Peterson was on wife #4. Number 4 is missing and presumed dead. Number 3 is dead. Number 1, 2, 3, & 4 reported physical abuse.
That’s 4 wives and how many additional women has the man dated?
One sociopath = MANY victims
If he’s not convicted he will find another wife, and another, and another. (hopefully not now that he’s been all over the news but you get my point)
I’m seeing a lot of blanket statements thrown around in this thread. It’s humbling to see that we atheists make many of the same mistakes we accuse theists of making.
The topics may be different, but the outcome seems to be the same. Males seem too quick to claim that Females are blowing the problem out of proportion. Females seem too interested in spitting out statistics and then jumping to conclusions.
I hope we can all agree that sociopathy is a misunderstood trait. I’m seeing a lot of what I would call Armchair Psychology here.
alatham,
This thread began as a discussion about pedophilia a crime/mental disorder mainly perpetrated by males.
It morphed into a discussion about murder, rape and abuse also crimes/mental disorders mainly perpetrated by males.
I presented the statistics to further the discussions.
Admittedly the psychoanalysis is just trying to identify, discuss and understand which mental disorders cause each of these different crimes which I don’t think any of us could ever really know. Yet that is what discussion is for.
As females we go through life with the knowledge always in the back of our minds that there are men out there actively HUNTING us and we can be attacked anytime, anywhere.
This makes it a sensitive issue for most females many of whom have already experienced different types of abuse/attacks.
It is also sensitive for males because it can be perceived as an attack on their entire sex.
I see nothing but positive in the discussion occurring here between the males and females each with their own viewpoint.
This is not an easy topic to discuss and I think it has remained civil and mature and personally I have learned a lot from reading the posts and I hope others have as well.
I apologize for my own oversensitivity on this subject again and if I offended anyone consider this an apology. I think there are lots of wonderful men in the world and I love and appreciate “maleness”.
Moi aussi! I think the reason I never stayed with abusive men was because of my dad. Even though it rendered me a bit niave as a youngster (as far as recognizing abusers at face value), I certainly knew that abuse was not the way it was supposed to be. My dad was always with plenty of love and support as I learned many a harsh lesson.
Sniff, sniff.
Dawn,
Yes, I agree with that. It just looks to me like the discussion is going around in ever-expanding circles.
To me it seems that any attempt to understand human nature is bound to fail. If we were simple enough to understand ourselves, we’d be too simple to even get started.
But you’re right, that doesn’t mean that discussion is a negative thing.
I think that maybe we should first come to an agreement about a few assumptions I’ve seen here:
1) Are men more willing to be physically abusive? I’m asking about intent, not capability.
2) Are women more willing to be emotionally abusive?
3) Can we even measure the extent of physical vs. emotional pain?
4) Can we discount society’s gender-roles as a possible cause for these things?
My personal experiences make me lean towards answering “no” to all of those questions. I think some people are going to behave poorly and that sex alone is not a valid basis for comparison when you’re talking about a problem with individuals.
I guess it all boils down to this: Is there an inherent difference between the sexes when it comes to morality?
I don’t believe that, but I can’t back it up very well.
Oops, forgot the backslash.
Great questions:
1) Are men more willing to be physically abusive? I’m asking about intent, not capability.
Yes, and I say that because of testosterone.
2) Are women more willing to be emotionally abusive?
Yes, and I say that because of estrogen.
3) Can we even measure the extent of physical vs. emotional pain?
Yes, emotional pain although an awful thing to be sure with life damaging effects is not equal to rape, murder or severe physical violence.
The reason I say physical assaults/rapes are more damaging than emotional assaults is IF you live through the physical assault you will be left with the same level of emotional.
4) Can we discount society’s gender-roles as a possible cause for these things?
Hmmmmmm…..that’s a toughy, but testosterone does cause aggressive responses and estrogen does cause emotional responses. BUT perhaps it is the gender roles learned that actually causes these hormone levels.
I think your best point is that women certainly emotionally abuse as often if not more than men physically abuse. I think that makes this entire conversation seem more even-handed.
Especially for a child emotional abuse is extremely damaging but I don’t know that it rises to the same level as physical or sexual child abuse.
I’m gonna go with no because I would much rather be screamed at or ridiculed by my mom than be raped by my dad.
Left a word off sorry:
you will be left with the same level of emotional damage
A personal tie in to this is my husband and his love of firearms.
I am not anti-gun at all but I know deep down if push came to shove I would hesitate to fire whereas my hubby would shoot 1st ask questions later.
My dad and brother also have guns. In fact men love guns.
They really really do. They also enjoy killing animals, whereas I bring in birds with broken wings to try and fix them.
Anecdotal evidence for sure but still has some validity I think.
And my dad had me shooting and bow hunting at a young age so the gender role tie in doesn’t explain the difference btw my brother’s love of guns and hunting and my aversion.
Dawn,
Ha, we may have discovered the fundamental difference in the two arguments.
I’m, of course, jumping to conclusions.
Personally, I feel that emotional damage is worse than physical damage. And maybe that has something to do with my sex. I would rather get beaten up all the time than get put down all the time.
To me, destroying someone’s self esteem is more devastating than putting them in the hospital. I’ve always found that emotional pain takes much longer to heal than physical pain.
Certainly the argument could be made that physical abuse also entails emotional abuse. I can’t refute that, I have no experience with it.
Maybe men are just better at dealing with physical pain and woman are better at dealing with emotional pain. In essence, I can’t understand your pain, you can’t understand mine.
In the end though, I think it all boils down to one thing. We all experience suffering and we should all work to minimize it. To me, whether or not the suffering is physical or emotional in origin is irrelevant.
alatham,
Indeed you may be right. Perhaps it is different perceptions. I would think that perhaps a female emotionally abusing a male would be equally as damaging as a male physically abusing a female.
That makes a lot of sense and I never considered it like that.
A female’s “beauty and sensitivity” is more damaged by the brutishness of male physical assaults, whereas a male’s “power and strength” is more damaged by emotional abuse, especially by a female. Each equally attacks the “essence” of one’s identity.
I would change my answer now.
3) Can we even measure the extent of physical vs. emotional pain?
No, we cannot because they are equal.
Dawn,
Please don’t say things like this, Dawn.
That argument is only valid as an anecdote, not as a logical argument.
I, for one, do not enjoy guns unless they’re virtual.
This is the kind of blanket statement that I don’t like to see here.
I don’t really buy this either. “Gender role” is a much bigger aspect of a person’s upbringing than simply how your father raised you. Certainly that had a big impact on you, but did your mother also go hunting with you?
Even then, if you discount the gender role argument, that doesn’t count as positive evidence for the sex argument.
I’m not disagreeing with you here, you may well be right. But there are too many variables to break the whole issue down with any certainty.
I think guns being something mainly for men is a sound argument.
I didn’t mean to imply every single man wants a gun or that every single woman hates them.
I don’t hate guns myself. I like having them around.
But guns are MAINLY: made by men, marketed to men and purchased by men.
I’m sure there are females who belong to the NRA but I think we both know it’s a male dominated organization.
I’m sure there are some females that hunt for sport, but it’s mainly an activity enjoyed by males.
So when I say men really really love guns it’s because they do, not all perhaps but quite a lot, I dare say a firm majority. I would need to find some kind of statistics to be sure, which I can’t only handgun stats.
In my experience, emotional abuse ALWAYS preceeded the physical abuse. A person with a crappy self-concept must be easier to confuse and then abuse, or perhaps less apt to fight back/report/leave etc.
dawn:
Yes, some, not all. Do you not accept that?
I just have a hard time accepting this as the situation 2 out of every 10 women are/were in. I kind of get the feel from you that abused women are these helpless things who can’t support themselves, and are easily manipulated, and that just rubs me the wrong way.
c4t,
I’m in no way implying I’ve never been duped, but it sure as shit has never been from a gold digger or an abusive person. But if/when I do get screwed, that’s it, I’m done. And I will get even if I deem it appropriate (moral-less atheist, heh). My own personality type is to not trust people at all though, so maybe that’s why I rarely get in a pickle.
alatham,
You bring up a very good point, it also takes me much longer to deal with emotional pain than physical. Another difference in the sexes?
mxracer,
Usually when women figure out that are “in a bad situation” they are in love, commitments have been made, and children are involved and this makes them forgive over and over and over.
A female’s capacity for unconditional love is what makes us good mothers and have the ability to care for and love our offspring regardless of the sacrifice and their sometimes monstrous behavior and that love extends to our partners.
I would forgive my husband for almost anything and I would stand by him through good and bad because I LOVE him. It would take a lot for me to leave him, even if he became abusive because he is my life, my other half.
This is NOT a fault of women it is a strength that some men take advantage of.
It is not helplessness that makes a woman stay it’s love, which in a very bad situation becomes fear and total confusion for the female.
One of the main feelings of women who have left abusive husbands is guilt. Guilt for leaving them, abandoning them, not being “good enough” to not be abused.
Love causes this. It is our instinctual nature to provide unconditional love. We would not abandon our children if they have mental problems so to expect women to easily abandon their love and commitment we have for our husbands, well it just isn’t easy for us.
It would take years for me to leave my own husband because I love him so very much. I would die for him, I would do ANYTHING for him, so just to leave him seems wrong no matter what he did to me.
I would like to think I would just walk away, but that’s just not what happens.
OK, I get it better now, thanks for explaining.
I love my wife too, but there’s a variety of things that I wouldn’t tolerate & would result in an automatic “get out now”. I don’t have a very high tolerance for BS.
mxracer,
I am glad that even though men and women are so very different that we have love to bring us together.
Perfect compliments to each other when all is well mentally at least LOL.
Alatham
Yes. There are some folks here assigning mystical powers to sociopaths. MOST are much easier to spot than some of you think.
But all of this aside I am amazed that nobody commented on the Milgram experiment. It clearly shows that women can be mindless abusers just as easily as men.
Also violence among lesbi*n couples is approximately equal to that between hetero couples. The difference between male perpetrated violence and female perpetrated violence is that men are usually physically stronger and therefore can do more damage. The correlation between gender and inherent (I have intentionally used this word twice above) violence is just not as strong as some here think it is.
Mystical???? I’m simply trying to say that sociopaths are more difficult to spot when one is young and inexperienced. It definetly gets easier with age. Also, I think being a victim is equal opportunity among the sexes. I was a bartender for 10 years. I’ve seen just as many men hook up with idiots as women. And yes, I’ve seen them be abused (as being an idiot is also equal opportunity among the sexes).
Also, I may be wrong, but IMHO as soon as someone declares they’re impervious to society’s predators is the minute s/he becomes the most vunerable. Always keep up your guard, and don’t hesitate to educate our youths, who easily misjudge.
And please don’t overshelter your daughters. They need to see the horrific side of humanity while they’re still under your protection. Let them watch “The Burning Bed” (my first indoctrination to violence). Point out news that delinates crimes against women (by both strangers and loved ones). Allow them to read memoirs of victims. Explain to them the red flags. Educate them! Don’t allow them to be more vulnerable than your sons.
Do all this with love, and maybe she won’t have the stories to tell that I do.
Is George W Bush a sociopath?
Good advice and I wish you the healing you richly deserve.
Many thanks What.
Well, let’s look at this from the male POV, shall we.
Wife starts a physical fight with the husband, then calls the police. Cops show up and an arrest has to be made, since it’s a domestic disturbance call. Who goes to jail? The man.
It happend to me personally.
Gee, maybe I should kill a woman now so that you broads here can turn this into something anti-male.
And another comment on this anti-male thread.
The wife I mentioned and I got divorced. Any guess how that went?
1) Who got the house? the woman
2) Who got the kids? the woman
3) Who got money? the woman
So in my life – and many many other men’s lives – it is we men who are the discriminated against gender.
STFU you retarded, ignorant bitch.
That’s a very biased assertion that is flat out wrong.
There are women who rape men. There are also women who rape their own sons, and others who rape their own daughters.
There are women who kill their boyfriends or husbands, and others who hire other people to kill their boyfriends or husbands.
DNAunion
I too found that post from Dawnisis to be ignorant. IMO she has a romanticized view of women and a patronizing attitude towards men.
rna2dna,
RE your previous post:
I certainly don’t think that saying “men have a increased capacity for violence, due to evolutionary history” is any kind of an excuse for violence…it certainly isn’t. But the fact remains nevertheless.
The comparison between chimps and pygmy chimps is facinating in this sense.
Chimps use the threat of violence to assert their superiority over rivals (for food, sex etc) whereas pygmy chimps use the reward of sex to do the same. In both cases these behaviours have evolutionary bases. Personally I prefer the pygmy chimp approach
I should add, that much of the sexual reward offered by pygmy chimps, is non-procreative in nature.
Fellatio
Cunninglulus
Mastabation
Mutual mastabation
Homosexuality
Paedophilia
These little perverts have been up to the above in the jungle for millions of years. just goes to show there us nothing new under the sun!
Danger,
Can’t seem to find that anywhere, is there a source?
What percentage of the male population would you guess will at some time make little bow knots using shoe laces?
Does the answer mean that the act isn’t a learned behavior?
rna2dna,
while there is no “proof” per se, there is reason to beleive that men (in general) have a higher capacity for violence than women (in general)
physiologically, male hormones elicit an aggresive response (think ster0ids, angry men with tiny balls)and if we look at our closest relatives we see some shared attributes that suggest that our shared ancestores burdened us with this aggresiveness.
also there’s the fact that all human societies, many developing independantly of one another, have for some reason ended up with their men being more violent/aggressive than their women. chances are against the unilateral development of all these societies without an underlying cause.
Milgram experiment!
what:
the milgram experiment (testing a subjects willingness to “harm” a third party based on orders from an authority figure)doesn’t seem to have much to add to the gender discussion, the rates of compliance were roughly the same for males and females and besides that, it can be argued that the willingness to comply with the authority figure isn’t really related to one’s own propensity for violent behavior, at least a valid conclusion on that can’t be drawn from the one experiment.
someone should do a study on that though…
rna2dna,
I appreciate your point that behaviours (such as tying shoelaces) need not have evolved , but I would suggest that our capacity for violence is rooted much deeper in our nature.
I believe that emotions such as rage, fear and love are not simply the way that brains happen to function, but are traits that have been selected over our evolutionary history. Do you have a better explanation for why these traits exist??
Do you really equate basic primal emotions such as rage, fear and love, with learned behaviours such as tying shoelaces?
I do appreciate your point though. Just because we do something, doesn’t mean that it is a naturally selected adaptation. It’s just that I disagree with you that rage/violence fits into this catagory.
Of course violence CAN be a learned behaviour as well.