This is a very situation-specific question that has no one answer, so let me try to draw out the grey-scale nature of the above. For the average person, it is quite easy to label someone as 'impaired' when they exhibit behaviors that seem to oppose our intrinsic morality, however, it's important to understand the role of instincts in determining someone's disposition and behavior, and that for some, mother nature often 'skews' the intensity of our various instincts to sometimes relatively 'obscene' levels. As easily as Mother Nature can randomly grant someone higher intelligence, or extreme altruism, or strong p/maternalism, she can also grant someone extreme greed, lust, ego, etc., to such a degree even, that it warps that person's disposition far out of the average. This isn't to say that they are 'broken', any more than someone with a genius intelligence is broken, but it does make it difficult for that person to fit into a society that doesn't share their instinctual balances.

Now you've lumped murderers and pedophiles together, but I'd like to approach them separately. Murder is something that we are all capable of imagining and desiring. We are animals first, and one of the most potent instincts we have is rage, along with our instinctual knowledge of justice and revenge, all very valuable instincts that have helped our ancestors to survive in a primordial world, so the ability to kill another is quite pronounced in our psyches. The inability or unwillingness to perhaps fulfill this desire is often cited as a vindication or muting of these desires, but I think we have all come across people that we despise so much that if we had a magic button we could anonymously press that would kill that undesirable person, we'd press it without hesitation. Everyone is capable of murder in the right circumstances. So, what this reduces all of us to is 'situational' murderers. Sure, there might be a genetic pretense to the intensity of our desire to kill an offender, but I believe that 'anybody' that is raised in a challenging, hostile, or ulteriorly-guided environment, can be developed into a murderer. An example would be the Charles Manson groupies. He poisoned the minds of young innocent girls and unimaginably turned them into murderers.

We are all murderers at some level, so rather than view murder as a failure of the mind, we should strive to understand and accept how powerful these killing instincts are, and how we should mitigate them with effective recourses of societal justice/punishment, so that we always have other effective options than to kill.

Pedophilia, on the other hand, is a much more succinct and wicked 'abomination' of nature, one that focuses what could be quite a formidable intelligence, into the pursuit of sexually violating an young innocent vulnerable mind, with ramifications so profound that their child victims suffer for a lifetime. For pedophiles, their course of sexual-attraction maturity appears to be skewed towards children that don't yet exhibit strong physical sexual cues (such as breasts, mannerisms, etc.).

I won't pretend to understand the mind of a pedophile, but this behavior suggests to me a strong motivation of needing to exert dominance, taking advantage of the victim's inherent defenselessness in order to complete a portion of the pedophile's sexual needs that they are unable to complete in a normal sexual encounter because of whatever psychological barriers they suffer from. It would be quite difficult to say with any certainty if this behavior is learned or if there is truly genetic impetus to it, but my intuition points to a strong genetic foundation based upon the observations of the statistically-supported 'genetic' pretense of homosexual behavior (not saying they are the same paradigm as pedophilia, but homosexuality is a prime example of genetically skewed-from-the-average sexuality). Sexuality is much too primitive to be limited to a solely logically-derived pursuit and as such, any sexual preference 'must' have a strong genetic foundation.

So, what do we do with pedophiles? Very emotionally-charged question. If you were to abstract their affliction and consider them 'handicapped', well, it seems logical that we'd have to help them with their affliction, as much as we'd help a blind, or retarded individual survive. The problem with the handicap of pedophilia however, is that this particular problem seriously agitates our more basic primal p/maternal instincts, and as most parents will attest to, there are few things that will incite more horror or rage than the thought of danger to one's offspring. This makes it quite easy to overlook the handicap nature of pedophilia and instead act in an angry mob fashion, ready to lynch pedophiles on sight. Make no mistake, I too am having a very difficult time writing this entry because I am not spared this emotional derivative that wants to overrule logic and cause grievous harm to any individual capable of such an act. But, as the website name insists, BetterHuman.org is about the search for truth, clarity, understanding, and liberation from the misdirection of the instincts; this is but one of many tests we all need to pass.

So again, what do we do with pedophiles? We need to understand that they are dangerous with children, which makes it quite obvious that they cannot be trusted to be around children, but what also needs to be exposed is that a pedophile is a very intelligent sexual predator, and is capable of falsely building trust in order to accomplish their needs. Though they may often be aware of how dangerous they are, and may sincerely and truly feel remorse, shame, etc., at their affliction, they will not be able to control their desires, any more than 'normal' people can suppress their sexual desire for others. Sexuality, being the single most profound instinct we have, will win by attrition every time. No matter how one may try to deny this need, it will subtly and eventually force one to create a situation that can provide it with placation. And that means, pedophiles will always be a danger to children, no matter how much they may even wish it were otherwise. The solution must be a strict and verifiable isolation from children, period. I won't attempt to describe the nature of this isolation as the implementation of this concept can take infinite forms.

This all being said, I must ask you to recognize why we inherently hate pedophilia (it agitates our powerful p/maternal instincts), recognize that they most likely don't choose their sexual affliction and are just as much a victim of it, and that it is not necessary to hate, repel, or kill them, in order to effectively remove their ability to cause harm. A humane, rational treatment for them can not only successfully prevent tragedy, but can also help us as a society to grow away from barbaric knee-jerk lynch-mob solutions that only magnify the fallout of this problem.

And before we judge anyone, please consider that because no one person is ever exactly 'average', we then are all subtly handicapped to some degree. Far be it for us to determine someone else's affliction as worthy of extreme punishment, and then continue through life concealing our own deep dark secrets.

> If they can acheive this, should they be forgiven?