The Breeding Ground of Demons

Maybe oversharing, but that's what I do sometimes: In the past 10 or 12 years, by being blessed with positive interactions with some amazing people I've been cured of marijuanaphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and most recently, through a series of events that I regard as almost miraculous, the last vestiges of some lingering trans and homophobia have finally evaporated away

These are real hangups that kept me from being able to relate to people, and they also kept me from knowing myself. They keep a person from self-discovered epiphanies. Instead you mindlessly repeat the dead habits of culture passed to you and accepted by you without examination.

These phobias are the breeding ground of demons, take that figuratively or literally, it doesn't matter. They are the enemy of faith as they cause you to stereotype, stigmatize, dehumanize, and demonize (create demons out of) the people around you that you should be getting to know and loving and learning from. These phobias live off fear, pride, and ego, all of which I have an abundance of. Believe me.

It was not only through reason alone, but primarily my faith in Christ and through the Church that I've been able to finally put these demons down. I could always understand the reasons, but a moralistic fear often kept me from letting those demons die. I can't really explain the mechanics of it, it is a mystery to me how it came about.  But by God's grace I'm glad to finally be free of those oppressors.

I'd recommend everyone do it. The world is a better place when you don't arbitrarily hate people just because you personified them as some kind of demon in your mind based on the group you identify them with.

Painful Symptoms

It seems like the institutionally abandoned, morally devoid, and socially misfit young white male with family problems to mass murdering school shooter pipeline is a fairly specific pathology. Maybe we should figure that out too while we're failing to take everyone's guns again. Is a society that creates people like that really all that better off just because we figure out how not to give them guns? I mean maybe we shouldn't let people like that have guns, but maybe we should try to help people not become like that too? The problem is that these kind of problems typically aren't something you can pawn off to the state, forget about, and go along your merry way. I think there may be something terribly wrong with us if our activism in the face of these now very typified events are completely focused on yelling at politicians and at each other about gun control and none of it is focused on what is wrong with our communities and institutions such that we are repeatedly manifesting this very specific homicidal ideation in young men. The gun control argument is primarily a convenient scapegoat that we all know will ultimately fail, which is OK, because then we won't have to deal with any actual change, and we can still blame it on the politicians instead of taking any real personal and possibly uncomfortable ownership of the problem. Taking the blame like this is one of the reasons a corrupt and perverse political class can persist despite their obvious incapacity to be anything like something we ought to respect. It's the true value exchange, power in exchange for blame. The school shootings are a painful symptom. Blaming politicians is just a pain killer.