A paranoid schizophrenic that murders someone because voices in their head told them to, or because the see the person they murdered threatening them with an non-existent weapon, is hearing and seeing those things because of a measurable chemical or structural disruption in the brain, most likely caused due to an inherited gene.
There's no reason to appeal to a supernatural explanation for something when there's a clear science-based explanation for something.
We don't need to come up with theories about demonic possession to explain mental illness or "evil" actions resulting from mental illness any more than we need theories about an evil dragon eating the sun to explain eclipses.
Thank you. If mental illness were demonic possession, mere modern pharmaceuticals would be powerless to keep psychoses in check. On the other hand, there are people who do heinous deeds with mental clarity and full consent of the will. That is evil.
There are many causes of serious mental illness. Some are the result of traumatic early life experiences such as sexual and or physical abuse or severe neglect early in childhood (detachment disorders). But that does not explain all mental illnesses. There are also biochemical causes; some genetically based and hereditary like schizophrenia and bi-polar disorders and there are causes that can be attributed to the mother’s exposure to viruses or toxic chemicals while pregnant. Traumatic brain injuries or undiagnosed brain tumors also sometimes play a role. The brain is a very complex organ. And there are documented cases of people diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who came from loving, stable, intact and even among devout Christian families.
For much of this century, psychiatry and psychology overwhelmingly focused on nurture. Parents were blamed for schizophrenic children.
And for many years mothers were blamed if their child was autistic, the prevailing theory at the time was that the mothers of autistic children caused their child’s autism by not being “loving enough” or “too detached” during their child’s infancy until studies found that autism occurs in families with multiple children where only one of those children was autistic and the mother treated that child no differently from all her other children. Autism may also have a genetic component and BTW – it’s not caused by vaccines. And it should also be noted that Adam Lanza has an older brother who is not mentally ill.
Simplistically and irrationally jumping to the conclusion that the mother is entirely to blame absence all the facts or that it’s the result of demonic forces (or video games, or TV, or movies, or on guns, or the “gun culture”, or on divorce, or on medications, or the lack of medication, on vaccines, on ….fill in the blank) is no different than simplistically blaming juvenile type I diabetes or cancer on the mother or on Coca Cola or on the Devil. The answer is not to be found in more gun control or in banning video games, outlawing divorce, prayer in public schools or in Exorcism.
And as far as blaming the mother for not institutionalizing Adam in a psychiatric hospital, I posted this on a related thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2969335/posts?page=95#95
Add to that that there is great society pressure on parents not to institutionalize their children, even if they could or even should. What do you imagine most people would say to the parents of a young child who chose to permanently send their child away to an institution? Sadly quite a few would say “You sent your child away to an institution because you just didn’t want to be bothered; you were too uncaring, too selfish to care for them”.
We simply do not have many good ways of treating and dealing with the seriously mentally ill, those who exhibit violent tendencies or those are not dangerous to anyone but themselves and we do not support their families and enable them to forcibly commit and medicate when it is sometimes the right and responsible thing to do.
That’s where you are very wrong - where do you think those “voices in their head” come from?
Inherited gene or not, no-one can prove that a mental disorder itself is the CAUSE of someone killing someone else. As I clearly stated, such physiological issues can certainly create a person/mind that is more susceptible to said influence.
There are parallels in drug use - as well as in mystic/Eastern spirituality/religions - induced, trance-like states then contact with “others” that are so similar to what paranoid schizophrenics sometimes describe.
Open doors can be the result of chemicals, physiological issues, or simply dabbling with certain activities that are open doors. The flat denial of of a supernatural component is naive and dangerous. This is a big part of why we are seeing the outright evil played out in such a vivid way.