Hate

Hate is a disease.  Hate is an infection.

You can be born with hate; that is to say, it can be an infection transmitted from your parents who raise you with that hate.  It is all you know as a child and during your formative years.  It can be part of the interpretation of the religion with which your parents raise you.  Like your parents give you your morals, your guidance, your status in life, they also give you hate.

Hate can be a tiny seed implanted in you through some negative event, like a member of the subject demographic of your hate imparting some wrong upon you.  You hate the deed that was done so much that you grow to feel that it was the greater entity to which the person who imparted that wrong belongs that is responsible for that deed, so you hate that instead of the wrongdoing itself or simply the person themselves.

For whatever reason hate is borne inside of you, when unimpeded, it can only grow.  It grows to consume you, it becomes part of your being.  Not only do you hate the people or the ideology that is the target of your corrupting disease, you hate everyone responsible for bringing that person or ideology to power.  You grow to hate everyone who simply stands by and continues to allow those people or that ideology to exist, although those uninterested parties have never been done harm by the person or thing you hate.  It grows, it multiplies, and eventually, you become hate itself.

I said in the above paragraph, "when unimpeded."  Hate can be cured.  Hate can be purged from your system like any other disease.  Life experience and wisdom often cure hate.  But, most often, those with the disease of hate surround themselves by others with that same hatred or worse, are charismatic masters of rhetoric, like Hitler, who implant that hate in others.  Combine hate and power and build entire demographics on it?  Much, much harder to cure hate.

Then, those who are targets of that hate, hate in return.  It grows to where they not only hate the hateful oppressor, but the entire demographic to which the oppressor belongs, the ideologies the oppressors by proxy espouse though not related to the oppression to which the hated are being subjected, and all those people who stand by and let the greater demographic of the smaller hating oppressing class prosper.

Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, one of the most vile, hate-filled organizations in the United States, is dying.  He could be dead by the time I hit "publish," I don't know.  He has infected all of his descendants with the hate with which he is infected and is a charismatic enough master of rhetoric that he has created a small but powerful following.  The main target of their hatred is the LGBT demographic.  I am not gay.  I am a Christian.  Fred Phelps calls himself a Christian, though his works do not reflect the teachings of the deity I share with him.  I have seen the hatred of Fred Phelps and those like him create a hatred of Christianity, which I certainly can't blame LGBT people for.  Not only does he piss me off as an LGBT ally and fuel a greater power which oppresses people I care about, he also makes me look bad as a Christian.

Yet, I want Fred Phelps to find peace in death.  I sincerely believe that the majority of his life has been filled with suffering from the disease of hatred with which he is infected and I want him to be released from that.  My belief in the afterlife is foggy, but if there is a Hell, I don't want him there.  I don't want anybody there.  I want everyone to spend their afterlife with God, in peace, released from all of the things that tortured them on Earth.

I believe God will punish Fred Phelps, I do, and greatly, and deservedly.  He has most assuredly turned people away from God with his hate, and he should be punished for that.  But I want him to be released from the hatred, the suffering, the disease he had on Earth.  When he dies, the internally- and externally-fueled suffering of a diseased man, and the power which he exerts over those he infected, will be over.  And for that, I will be glad.