In my years as a psychotherapist I would often suggests to clients that for them to successfully bring about any significant changes in their own lives, they needed to consider beginning with a change, not so much in their surroundings or in their close associations with others, but somewhere deep within themselves. If I were to possess the omnipotent power to change this sometimes maligned and troubled world of ours, it would be of little avail unless you and I were in that very same and given twinkling of an eye metamorphosed into a truly loving and caring individual. Any possible or positive transformation of the world that we experience necessarily begins with you and every other individual. You can begin to effect positive changes by emphatically insisting that only truths in the individual minds of compassionate persons have the redemptive power to set man free of anything that enslaves him and most importantly of all is having the empowerment to thing and believe as we each so choose.
     Killing the beast does not necessarily depend upon the ultimate annihilation of some of our perceived enemies or even those occasional neighbors who have to this point in time intentionally enslaved us to ideologies that are essentially based on unfounded proposition, or at the very least, gross misinterpretations of our shared realities. We have need to eliminate only those ideas and teachings that have continually failed us and simply refocus our faith away from false gods and ideologies to the very foremost spiritual part of ourselves that lie autonomously deep within each of us. Reassign that homage and faith previously given away to a false reverence and give the real credit of any godliness that is long overdue to yourself and each of our fellow neighbors for the greatness that has been endlessly demonstrated by all of the diversities of mankind throughout this often-benign world. Take back your inalienable freedoms that you have possibly too easily abdicated to both those secular and spiritual slaveholders. To achieve this ultimate salvation, you don't have the need to commit some heinous annihilation; all you have to do is simply starve the malicious beasts of their greed for resources and power. Demand the truth!
     If there actually do exists any form of a true Kingdom of God, surely it dwells within the inner-beings and hearts of you and our more loving neighbors. Therein resides the real Father, and that was the singularly abstruse understanding that Jesus the man was attempting to emphatically impart when he ardently proclaimed, "I and the Father are one" and "If you have known me, you have known the Father." This simple reality explains why Jesus had answered the Pharisees' temptatious question of what is the great commandment in the law as being our loving God with all our heart, soul and mind, BUT liken to the this first stated commandment, is our need for loving all our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus, from this one-time only encounter with the Pharisees on this specific question, afterwards and henceforth stated that the only first and great commandment upon which all of the law and the prophets rest was our loving our neighbors as ourselves. Of course, it better served our illustrious spiritual slaveholders' secular, spiritual and personal agendas to conveniently overlook this obviously and distinctly stated Divine truth. It is our good fortune that the early churchmen did not totally discard this particular truth despite the fact that they had and have failed to place it rightfully above their singular focus on and perpetual insistence of absolute obedience to the church.
     As a self-proclaimed Freedom Seeker, I can only make known these simple truths to you as part of my decreed responsibility and dedication to being simply my brothers' true keeper. If I pretended to be anymore than that of the simple man that I am, I would be grossly violating the sacred trusts of my brothers and sisters. Do not follow any man; instead, follow only the truths that has been rightfully empowered to free you from the ideological shackles previously and most wrongfully placed on your heart, soul and mind. Together these variously applied restraints incessantly endeavor to deny you from seeking and having greater joy in your one and only life on this earth.
     Any man or religion that would dare invite you to "follow" them exclusively in the name of some conceptualized imagery is only going to be surreptitiously transferring your conceivable enslavement from one seductive ideology to another. Please understand that this heartfelt warning applies to me as well. Note that Jesus did not set out to establish a church for his followers while he lived. It was a much later, some three hundred and twenty-five year, accomplishment made most surreptitiously in Jesus' good name long after he had supposedly died on the cross. "Upon this rock build my church" was not put forth as some mandate for the establishment of an exclusive spiritual ideology or physical institution. It was the metaphorical solid rock of his one and only true commandment upon which the collective of his followers of his teachings were to build their individual identities. Even the first celebrations of what is now referred to as Holy Communion was initially practiced in the homes of the lay followers of Jesus' teachings at any given time at which there was the breaking of bread amongst friends. This repeated remembrance was to be celebrated with family, neighbors and strangers alike and it was originally considered even more worshipful particularly when strangers had been spontaneously invited into the home to share in this brotherly feast of love, Agapé. It was in this frequent celebration of Agapé that the early Christians had demonstrated their reverent respect and adherence to that First Commandment. It was a joyous celebration of brotherly Love and it was customarily prepared and served by the women. The early Roman Catholic Church had not only selfishly and so wrongly confiscated this cherished commemoration from the people, it then denied any stranger from the participation in what was specifically to have included any neighbor or stranger freely invited to join in. What Jesus had so enthusiastically encouraged that ALL mankind should practice was unjustly reserved by the Church for only those who had pledged their absolute obedience to some righteous and self-proclaimed priesthood and institution that was more fixed on taxation than salvation.  With Jesus' profound understanding of the awesome and burdensome plight of the common man in his day and the great need for the universal salvation (freedom from...) of every citizen, he knew all too well not to establish another subversive institution that would only apt to continue the ongoing state of human subjugation.  All that Jesus had even intended was to bring some joy into the lives of his oppressed brothers and sisters.
     The beast has successfully mesmerized and duped so many of our good neighbors that the awesome tasks of ever successfully subduing it now appears to be an almost insurmountable task. There was a time when the beast had to carry out its own gruesome executions of establishment-threatening heretics, heretics that by the way, were mostly postulating an alternative to the truth that was being sold and prostituted by the Catholic Church.  But now many of those hateful and self-serving actions of the church as well as that of some conventional civil authorities have been intricately and often too easily ingrained in our communal psyches. With this hate-filled and witting brainwashing some of our more ignorance dupes have too willingly taken up ideological and physical arms against some of our diverse neighbors simply because we have come to accept them as the enemy or simply designated as social perverts. I must confess my sometimes deep-seeded feelings of the perceived and conjectured hopelessness of surgically removing these cancerous ideological growths without jeopardizing the sanctity and integrity of the host patients/victims.
     The only plausible answer to this most monumental problem of mass infection is to create a superb serum capable of inoculating the individual's heart, soul and mind. Clearly that first part of the prescribed remedy is simply clarifying and establishing the most obvious of truths despite the expected and contrived clerical objections. Much too often the successful distribution of these truths is unfortunately found in the hands of the illiberal slaveholders, and they most doggedly don't wish to abdicate any of their power over others. You have no doubt heard of the enormous power of information and of course, the power of that information may exist whether the information is true or false. Consider the sometimes-awesome power of fear, whether that fear is well founded or not. The very false teachings of these imposing slaveholders contain their own contrived antidotes against any unwanted introduction of the truth. The singularly most successful of these contrived antidotes is fear itself, the fear of damnation or maybe just the fear of being burned at the stake or banishment from the community.  Fear alone is the unjust and malicious flogging of the mind and spirit, and its observed effectiveness far outweighs the flogging of the body itself even with a barbed leather whip.
     The answer?  First of all, we need to make sure that we Freedom Seekers don't set out to make the same gross mistakes that the consummate illiberal has made from the beginning of time. We need to carefully guard against the unwitting incursion of greed that could too easily arise from over-accumulating the just rewards of sowing the good seeds of truth. I would prefer to believe that the illiberals of the past did not always consciously conspire their ultimate schemes of oppression. I would like to believe that most of these dreadful schemes might have simply manifested themselves due to that illiberals' lack of a well-defined identity—in other words, he just didn't have the needed sources or effortless availability of the truth and in its place created a body of doctrines and beliefs designed only to have solicited absolute obedience to the establishment.  Today, there is no conceivable excuse for any of us to fall prey to the corresponding circumstances that previously gave rise to the ominous oppression of mankind's most gifted quality; his mind. There are simply too many good and reliable sources of truly righteous thought and an almost endless supply of ideas of how we can improve not only man's impaired plight and his diminished identity but also the much needed restoration and preservation of this marvelous Garden of Eden that we have been so privileged to have occupied.
     We have a great need to take back the previously and too easily surrendered political powers that we have too often abdicated to our elected politicians. We have too inadvertently allowed sprawling bureaucracies to usurp us of the ability to change political systems that often fail to execute their originally intended purpose in a civil and lawful manner. The Internal Revenue Service has come to be known as having inundated itself with many practices of enforcement that have become paramount to some of the most hideous crimes violating the basic civil rights of taxpayers. In some cases they have been know to drive innocent citizens to suicide and then continue their savage harassment against the surviving spouse and/or family. Our US Congress has at least recently addressed this particular issue and supposedly has taken the necessary steps to insure that the IRS ceases some of its lawless and abusive collecting tactics and allow for correcting any abuses unwittingly propagated; a taxpayer's bill of rights.
     Of course, there are a number of citizens that would like to see the total revision of our Federal tax system beginning with the elimination of the present IRS. Any change is considered unlikely because of the mass bureaucracies and associated industries, i.e. tax services and lawyers that have immerged principally to minister to the resultant and sometimes overwhelming needs of the taxpayer due to the complexity of the tax code. Simplifying the system would probably eliminate not only many abuses but would likely eliminate the need of many of the supportive entities that rely entirely on tax preparations and related services as their sole source of income. I'm quite sure that the ultimate killing of this ominous beast, though it would be heavily favored by the majority, that that "majority" is probably not politically empowered to make the changes.
     Any institutionalized constraints on human behavior that seem designed to maintain the status quo of oppression need to be addressed if there is ever any chance of universal freedom and salvation. One of the more seemingly benign but actually rather oppressive political institutions is our justice system. Our courts are designed to administer to the legal needs of the general population under what is most commonly referred to as the rules of law.  In some instances these rules may actually serve the purpose of justice when they are applied without specific preference or bias. The enigmatic problem inherent in many of these employed rules of law is that they were initially instituted as the result of some witting decision of a judge making a ruling between two opposing attorneys. The adjudicated decisions in one direction or the other may have never addressed the substance of some civil violation, but was a procedural edict that may or may not have favored the justly innocent party. The attorney making the most effective argument and supporting his position with persuasive presentations of previous court decisions on related cases that are legally parallel to the present once, is most apt to come out on top. Of course, if the first decision ever made on some procedural matter was somehow converse to the practice of good law, it is quite possible that many of the subsequent decisions will be equally unreliable. The fallibility of man and his tendency to act selfishly and with greed certainly plays on the ultimate credibility of many of these rules of law. One only need seriously consider the probable enigmatic position of the vast majority those originators who were more than likely older white Protestant males. Our imminent Lady Justice may have been all too rightfully blindfolded, but there is little doubt in my mind that most of the early judges were probably as biased in their decisions as the illiberal majority that may have supported their election or in those other political circumstances, exercised notable influence on their appointments. All of this certainly adds up to another case of a classic oligarchy that only further insures that the oppressed will likely remain so until there really is a change of heart and purpose.
     I have no problem with anyone exercising their own right to practice their faith or beliefs so long as their practice thereof does not in any way interfere with the inalienable rights of anyone else. I also adamantly support the Constitutional Right for the freedom of speech, but in the same narrow and specific vein as I enthusiastically support the freedom of religion. But when some modern fanatical cleric begins to have a measurably and often fatal impact on innocent bystanders, that spokesperson has criminally abused his right and should be immediately and duly silenced. If I were to take up some noble banner of killing the beast, the first battle I would wage would be filing a class-action lawsuit against those Christian churches in America who specifically target the homosexuals as well as other disenfranchised minorities with hateful and rhetorical abuse. It could also be easily substantiated that these same mean-spirited churches often fuel the hatred that inspires the physical mistreatment of many minorities oftentimes resulting in senseless deaths, even of children. Our congress has legitimately passed laws that prohibit the public advertising of cigarettes to our youth because the product is known to kill. They ought to equally consider passing strong legislation that forbids the public displays of hate-filled rhetoric that most certainly contributes to that awful statistic of one-third of all teenage suicides being gay related. My most strongly imagined image of the oppressive beast parallels that horrifying mystical beast with seven heads written about in John the Divine's Book of Revelations. The only difference is that my illiberal beast probably has seven time seven terrifyingly hideous heads endlessly devouring the shattered souls of my oppressed brothers and sisters.