Somehow, in our society, it's against the law to do a lot of things -- a lot of things that can hurt us or others, and there should be many such laws -- yet it's okay to purvey lifestyles and motifs that have cost the lives of our young.

While we talk much about gun control after incidents such as Sandy Hook in Connecticut (if we recall, twenty-six teachers, staffers, and youngsters were killed there), we hear very little and do nothing about the dark culture that has spawned such atrocities.

It gets back to a "Goth" mentality. Adam Lanza -- the shooter at Sandy Point -- was immersed in that sullen, hooded world of video games in a dark room. Violent games. Games he took to real life, with horrid effect. Whether or not, from a musical standpoint, he was specifically into the genre, it's a motif that has risen from the ashes of the punk-rock era: vile, violent lyrics and that dark way -- black clothes, black trench coat, black leather, pierced skin, weird hair, long face, remote look, loud boots -- of comporting oneself.

Music matters. Culture matters. Video games matter.

It was the same "Goth" outlook that was behind the two shooters in Columbine, Colorado and the Goth mentality that had the shooter at the theatre showing that Batman sequel (The Dark Knight Rises) in Aurora, Colorado, dressed in black (ironically, the "Goth" subculture is traced to a nightclub in London called "Batcave"). Linked or not to specific music, and whatever we want to label it -- Goth, Punk, heavy-metal -- it is a style of modern rebellion that is taken to the extreme of violent frenzy, often with a good measure of occultism thrown in -- which should be of no surprise in that the Bible (1 Samuel 15:23) tells us that "rebellion is as witchcraft." At the very least, markings of this subculture should be banned from our schools. Spiked hair. Blazing fingernails. That knife-sharp look of hatred. And it should be spoken about -- and prayed about -- from the pulpit, as well as from statehouses and Washington.

For this stuff -- this "eccentric" Marilyn Manson, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne stuff -- matters. It is not just eccentric. One is reminded of that fact in reading the story of a Goth-like man named Damien Echols of Arkansas who was convicted with two others and sent to death row for the ritual-like slaying of three children in the Memphis area.

Whether or not Echols was guilty (it's all but impossible to come to a final conclusion; after eighteen years on death row he was released), this seems clearly a case whereby a constant diet of "Goth" caused personality abnormalities, commitments to psychiatric wards, alienation from family, and violence in the youngster.

He, too, took up the trench coat. He too showed rebellion through bizarre hairstyles. He was a fellow who fell asleep each night with heavy-metal roaring from his headphones into his brain. In the end he gravitated toward witchcraft, "magick," a deeply occult book called A Course in Miracles, and Masonic-like groups such as the Golden Dawn.

Reading his book, Life After Death, about his horrible upbringing, wayward youth, and (he says) wrong conviction, brings the whole Goth threat into sharp relief as the clear and present danger it has been -- a danger that has cost young lives not only through mayhem but suicide (which is a staple theme as far as Gothic-punk-heavy-metal lyrics).

This stuff matters. This stuff should be banned from common media along with pornography. "Free" speech is not free when it enslaves. There used to be criminal codes that covered profanity, violent language, threats, and so forth.

If there still are, they are totally unenforced. Michael Jackson could grab himself on stage. Beyonce can perform as a stripper during the Super Bowl. There is recently Miley Cyrus (with a hairdo that even looked like two horns). Vampires are role models. And when it comes to violence and occultism, anything goes. To say it has gone too far is to bring full fruition to the term "understatement." This stuff had gone too far decades ago. It is now over the top of the top. The military even allows those involved in wicca to have their own chaplains.

Guys like Echols? Guys like Lanza? Put a lot of it on broken homes. Put a lot of it on a failed school system. Put a lot of it on the individual, on the failings of religion, on whatever you want to put it on. But put most of it on what underlies the dark flavor, the umbra, of Goth. So very many of our youth are witches without knowing it.

Goth is evil. So is the hardcore pornography all over the internet. So is the violence. It should be -- and once was -- banned from the public place.

This is not to judge the individual.

Echols was a kid who didn't seem to have a chance.

He grew up in a ramshackle house -- a broken-down sharecropper's shanty -- built near Marion on an old Indian burial mound.

"Strange things were always hovering at the periphery of my family life, but none so much as during our years in that house," he writes. "There was just a bad feeling around the place. The house felt malevolent. I could never escape the feeling that the entire place wished me ill. It was unpleasant in every regard; it felt dark, even on the sunniest summer days. Sometimes late at night I would be overwhelmed with the feeling that someone was standing by the bed, leaning over me, so close they could have brushed their lips across mine if they'd so desired. It wasn't like a ghost or anything; it was just a feeling the house itself radiated, like an aura."

That aura dovetailed with a lifestyle that then brought him tragedy, and may also have brought tragedy to others.

[resources: spiritual warfare books]

[Retreats: Louisiana and Indiana]

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