Your perceptions influence outlook on world’s miseries

We live in perilous times.

The preacher man says we are living in the end times. When you turn on the TV, the world seems to be spinning out of orbit on so many levels.

In Las Vegas, 58 people lost their lives in a mass shooting at the hands of sole gunman; NFL football players are kneeling during the playing of our national anthem, deepening the divide in an already ultra-fractured society; storms have taken out Puerto Rico and ravaged Florida and Texas; there’s riots in the streets and some cities’ murder rates have reached seemingly epidemic proportions; North Korea continues to develop weapons of mass destruction and routinely tests missiles to perfect the delivery of a nuclear warhead; terrorists continue to plot and carry out acts of horror around the world; and all this is just the short list of things that make our world such a volatile, dangerous place to live.

On the other hand, there actually never has been a safer time to be alive. Here are a few reasons.

• War-related deaths are declining and continue to be at an all-time low.

• Over the past decade, much headway been made on addressing many countries’ malaria issues.

• The world is more judicial, having more democracies now than ever before.

• The advent of modern medicine enables people to live longer than many past generations.

• Violence against woman has been going down for decades and children also are safer presently than they’ve ever been.

• There’s less crime occurring in this generation than in the ones gone by.

There is ample research to show you are safer being alive today than in most generations past. In fact, you’re many more times likely to be killed in a car crash than by a terrorist or armed robber.

Is the problem really about whether the world is more dangerous or safer? Or are these just blinders actually impeding us from seeing the real problem at hand?

I’m convinced what you believe about what’s happened to you is way more important than what’s actually happen to you. Perception drives reality. What we believe drives how we react to whatever is happening to us at the time.

Experts know this and many use this understanding to manipulate others into responding in a way that benefits their best interest. Negative news affects your brain and how you interpret the world around you.

If your brain is convinced by constant conditioning and media bias that the world is more dangerous than ever before, these thought processes, left unchecked, provoke fear. And fears allowed to run amuck in your mind perpetuate the perfect platform and the need to respond to some kind of perceived threat. Thus, it’s the perfect setup for manipulations of all kinds.

The sad reality is so many people allow irrational thought processes and distortions of the truth to dictate what they believe for them. Now you’re being controlled by what you have become convinced is the truth and must be a problem that requires a definite response from you.

Bottom line is this process allows so many to become trapped into believing and taking something that’s not the problem at all and distorting it, through the lenses of fear, until it presents itself as the problem.

Take religion, for example. How can one evangelical denomination so dogmatically declare that other evangelical denominations are demonic? Is Christianity the problem?

How can a woman live with a physically abusive husband for 30 years and believe it’s her fault her husband hits her or she somehow deserves it? Is heterosexual marriage the problem?

Some people are being treated unfairly because of their skin color. Is racism the problem?

Depending on what you believe about any of these hot-button topics will determine how you react. And depending on how much your beliefs are driven by fear and manipulation directly affects how distorted your response likely is to be.

Now for the real problem. It’s not God and genuine Chris­tianity. It’s not traditional marriage and family values. It’s not racism. It’s not radicalized hate groups. It’s not guns. It’s not men either.

It’s identity. It’s the fact that we forget we are all in this together and at the end of the day, we are all a lot more alike than we are different.

We all share the same eternal flame and the truth is that God has placed eternity in the hearts of all people, but somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that we belong to each other and that we really are supposed to be our brother’s keeper. It’s that way by design because from one man’s blood, God created all nations of people.

That’s our true identity. If we all began to treat everyone from this eternal identity prospective, maybe we could keep the problem the problem. We all suffer from a very serious neurosis — namely a chronic identity crisis.