In response to "Road to Redemption"

I certainly agree with you that there are instances when the line between human and monstrous is blurred, and that human beings are capable of grotesque acts.

That said, I would disagree with your classification of Tim Thomas as a monster, whereas I would point to those who willing kill other human beings as approaching that line. I think that one of the most important characteristic of monsters, in the sense that we have been using the term, is malevolence, or at the very least, a desire to do what we would call harm to others. One cannot construe Tim Thomas as wishing to kill the 7 people that he did, as it was, as you said, an accident. To call Tim Thomas as monster would be to classify him as other, a being whom we do not understand, and likely fear. I don't think this is the case at all. When it comes to Tim Thomas, we understand exactly how how he feels, just as we would feel he same way had we made such a terrible error in judgment.

I think the line is fine, but that monsters are ultimately characters that we cannot understand on the level of being: we share no recognizable cognitive processes, we do not think and feel the same way, fundamentally.

A human example of monster would be Michael Myers in John Carpenter's Halloween films.

This character does harm to others, by killing innocent people. What he does and desires is foreign to us on a basic level: he desires mayhem, he seeks blood, he kills the innocent. He is arguably a human being, biologically, yet he is distinctly "other" than us. The way that this type of character may be portrayed is by depicting him insane, to the extent that we would likely classify his cognitive processes as lacking something essential in the classification of "human". 

original post here: http://faithisourmedium.blogspot.ca/2012/03/road-to-redemption.html