LSP54: Why Hatred Is a Free Will Choice - And Why Everyone Needs to Face the Truth About Hatred

 

It's common these days for spiritual leaders of all stripes to speak eloquently and volubly of love's power to heal the world. We're especially keen to talk about the power of love after we've been asked to deal with yet another horrific attack on innocent people, such as the recent gun attack at Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida  or the van attack in Toronto. When our fellow human beings choose to behave like monsters, we're quick to respond by sharing thoughts and prayers on social media, holding candlelight vigils, and making donations on crowd-sourcing sites. This is all well and good. What I don't see is a willingness on the part of influential commentators to ask why the violent perpetrators felt such hatred towards others and why they thought it was okay to act on their hatred. I don't see people asking what hatred is and why we're seeing a resurgence of this beastly human emotion throughout the world.

It's not good enough to sweep these questions under the carpet by proclaiming that hatred is simply a void in a person's head where love should be, as if it's not the hate-filled person's moral responsibility.

Hatred is not a lack of anything. Hatred is a moral choice. And unless a person can demonstrate that his/her biological brain has been catastrophically damaged by a head injury or a psychotic break or a viral attack or mercury poisoning or severe dementia or something else along the lines of an extreme physiological force, that person is responsible for the choice to hate others. 

As with all major meta-choices in life, hatred is a learned behaviour that evolves over time. You don't suddenly wake up one morning and decide to hate everyone whose name starts with a "J" (unless, as mentioned in the paragraph above, you've experienced a traumatic brain injury). Hatred is way of coping with a life you just don't like, a life that doesn't match what you believe you're entitled to. Hatred rewrites your brain's moral code and gives you permission to override the quiet whispering of  your soul's inner voice (that is, your conscience).

Irrefutable proof that hatred is a moral choice is found in the history of slavery among human cultures throughout time, region, and religious tradition. No one of conscience could ever believe that slavery is acceptable to God or the soul. Yet countless millions have persuaded themselves that slavery is a morally acceptable way to take what they think God owes them. Shown here is part of an Egyptian wall painting on display at the British Museum, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2024.

Here is my working definition of hatred: Hatred is the choice to project your own personal responsibility onto somebody else so you don't have to deal with the consequences of your own thoughts, feelings, or actions. 

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own lack of happiness.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own selfishness.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own status addiction.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for your own lack of self-knowing and self-love.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for the rage you feel when someone tells you you've made a mistake.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for the rage you feel when someone tells you you're not special and you're not chosen and you're not "better" than anyone else.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people for the rage you feel when someone tells you you're not perfect and you're never going to be perfect.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people because you don't think you should ever have to deal with your own feelings of shame or guilt.

Hatred is the choice to blame other people when you realize you haven't yet achieved your "rightful" place as a saviour, Messiah, or enlightened teacher of justice and mercy, a place you're so certain you deserve.

Hatred is an inevitable consequence of your own belief that you already know yourself so well that you couldn't possibly fool yourself into believing things about yourself that simply aren't true.

In short, hatred is your brain's way of trying to prove to itself that you're a really nice person who's trying to save others when, in fact, you're a mean, nasty person who's narcissistic and selfish and refuses to take personal responsibility for your own choices and beliefs and attitudes towards others.

Among the narcissistic self-delusions that create no end of human suffering are these:

• a belief that you're incapable of making mistakes because you have all the right education and all the right knowledge
• a belief that you're better than other people because you have the only correct ideological understanding of the universe
• a belief in the superiority of your own mental processes because your logic is obviously impeccable
• a belief that you deserve to feel moral outrage if anyone suggests you should feel shame or guilt about the choices you've made (including religious choices)
• a belief that you're using all your exquisite knowledge and specialness and logic to save other people from their own stupidity (though you probably realize you shouldn't say this part out loud)

Hatred is a terrible force, and it creates indescribable suffering in the world, but it exists only because individual human beings and certain communities allow it to exist.

It exists where individuals and ideological communities refuse to be honest with themselves about what human beings are capable of when they embrace a loving and humble relationship with God and with themselves. 

Of course, the choice to love with humbleness and courage is also a choice. Love and hate are at opposite ends of the free will spectrum. But the great thing about free will is that you can change your mind about the kind of person you want to be. Even if your family, religious community, or social community have encouraged you to be a person who hates, you can always decide you no longer want to be that person. You can decide to learn -- to remember -- how to love.

A particular passage in the New Testament summarizes these thoughts beautifully. The passage I'm thinking of is found in 1 Corinthians 13:1-8a, so it's long been attributed to the apostle Paul. I'm pretty certain, however, that this short and timeless ode to Divine Love was written by Jesus and later stolen by Paul as part of the latter's ongoing efforts to make his teachings seem more closely aligned with those of Jesus.

It goes like this (using the NRSV translation, mostly):

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have piety, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. 

What love looks like: Light, openness, shared space, healing beauty, one well of water that quenches the thirst of all people equally. Shown here is the well in the cloister garden of Westminster Abbey, London, England. Photo credit JAT 2023.

LSP49: Humanity's Search for Meaning in the 2016 U.S. Election

This post has gone through a lot of changes since I first wrote it just after the 2016 U.S. elections. But instead of deleting the entry, I've decided to use the changes as an example of this maxim: "How you do anything is how you do everything."

 

In 2021, after I moved into a new home, I discovered this plaster plaque had snapped in half during the moving process. I reminds me of what happens inside the biological brain of someone who has abandoned his or her own conscience. Angels stop gathering with you. Angels still love you and forgive you, but angels aren't obliged to help you if you're voting for the world leaders who know only Hate. Angels have Free Will, too. Photo credit JAT 2021.

 

Addendum March 1, 2025:  I wrote this short piece for an online forum. It expresses how I'm feeling about the current U.S. political swamp, so I'm adding it here. For context, I'm writing about the disastrous Oval Office meeting that took place between Trump 2.0, Vice-President Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on February 28, 2025.

So yesterday afternoon, I decided it would be nice to lie down on my sofa and have a bit of a rest after lunch. The sun was peeking out after a long, heavy, winter rain, and I thought, "Yes, it can't hurt to have a nap."

And while I was sleeping, Trump and Vance decided it was a good time to try to wreck the whole world.

I'm tired of hearing Trump say he wants the war in Ukraine to end because "millions of people of dying." If he cared at all about the lives of regular people, he wouldn't have chosen the dogs of hellfire to be his closest advisors.

The lies, the hypocrisy, the projection onto others of all his own venom -- these are the traits of a human being who has given up any semblance of decency, compassion, courage, and self-awareness.

Some commentators have suggested it would have been better if the conversation between Zelenskyy, Trump, and Vance had taken place behind closed doors. I disagree. Bullies, narcissists, and psychopaths adore secrecy, because secrecy allows them to deny they ever violated anyone.

Because it was all caught on film, individuals can now decide for themselves what they saw, what they learned, and what side of the debate they resonate with. Regardless of what one believed the day before yesterday about these three men, there's no unseeing the real intents that emerged in the Oval Office yesterday.

It's better that we know and keep remembering what we all saw (even though it's triggering for far too many people).

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Addendum posted November 2, 2024: Today, I'm doing something I've never done before. I've decided to delete the entire post I originally wrote on November 11, 2016. I'm deleting it because the election campaign of 2024 has taught me that vehement supporters of Donald Trump are willing to embrace any lies he tells them. These supporters have abandoned their own conscience and their own inner voice. They've decided they shouldn't have to take personal responsibility for their own choices. Many seem happy to follow any conspiracy theory rather than do the hard work of finding meaning through the Soul's courage.

If I leave the original post intact, it will be misused. And those who want to misuse it will get away with it because far-right Trump supporters aren't interested in the moral code taught by Jesus. They're trying to grow a very different kind of religious tree, one rooted in purity, piety, and perfection. They believe the glorification of Trump will bring about some sort of utopian restoration. They believe all their lies and all their violent, misogynistic rhetoric are justified because their goal is so worthy.

They are wrong.

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Addendum posted January 3, 2024: Because of recent changes in how individuals tend to read online posts and use -- or rather, misuse -- posts (by taking bits and pieces out of context and using catchy phrases to support their personal crusades), I want to say right up front, before you get to the paragraphs I wrote in November 2016, that I do not support former President Donald Trump in any way on any topic. Nor am I likely to ever change my mind. He is a coward -- a bullying, narcissistic, selfish coward.

In 2016, I didn't have the evidence to support or condone a flat out, across the board denunciation of the personality and policies of Donald Trump. But since the January 6, 2021 violence on Capitol Hill, Trump has, through his own words and actions, provided abundant proof about the kind of man he really is. Today, I wouldn't vote for him if he were the last person in Christendom.

Following this addendum is the post I originally wrote over seven years ago. You can decide for yourself whether Trump believes he's been elevated to the status of God.

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Addendum posted January 13. 2021: It's been a bit over 4 years since I wrote this post, and, during this time, a lot has changed. The entire world has been dealing with the unexpected travails of the novel coronavirus we call COVID-19. And the United States has again struggled with an election where a man named Donald Trump has forced a debate about the soul.

I'm writing this addendum on the day the U.S. House of Representatives is going to vote on a motion to impeach Trump for inciting insurrection. I hope the vote succeeds.

Over the past four years, Trump has shown with increasing clarity that he has no courage. He doesn't have the courage to listen to his own soul, let alone the souls of millions of Americans who needed a courageous leader during the 2020 pandemic, but instead found themselves saddled with someone who could only think about his own loss of Happiness when he lost the fall election.

On the plus side, people from both the Democratic and Republican parties have been appalled by the barrage of lies spewed by Trump and his closest supporters, lies that directly incited violence on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. America has been forced to see the ugly side of rhetoric, personality cults, and dualistic political mongering -- all negative aspects of System 2 when left unchecked by System 1.

It's a lesson we all should have learned from 20th century history, but apparently we needed a refresher. 

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LSP18: Teeth-Gnashing and Gnosticism: The Question of Evil Entities

Okay. There's simply no way of getting around these three big questions: (1) Do evil supernatural entities exist? (2) Is there an ongoing battle in Creation between good and evil? and (3) If there is such a battle, do human beings play a significant role in restoring balance to the universe?

My short answers are (1) No; (2) No; and (3) No.

Although I'm generally supportive of Dr. Alexander's first book, there's one chapter I disagree with from beginning to end. It's Chapter 15 ("The Gift of Forgetting"), in which Dr. Alexander attempts to answer the question of why God allows evil and suffering in the world (i.e. the theodicy question).  I really wish he'd given more thought to this chapter before he decided to include it in his book. It's chockablock full of the damaging, dualistic, overly simplistic Gnostic ideas that have plagued the human-Divine relationship for centuries.

From the core assumptions of Gnosticism many different religious movements have sprouted (including the Qumran sect of Second Temple Judaism; the Persian religion known as Manichaeism; and assorted Christian heresies). At its root, Gnosticism assumes there's something seriously wrong with the world we live in, but if we have the correct secret knowledge ("gnosis" in Greek) we can escape from worldly evil and return to the love that's characteristic of our true home in Heaven. Central to Gnosticism's claims is a belief in a Christ-like Saviour figure who will risk -- or who has risked -- everything to reveal this secret knowledge to human beings.

Jesus was a man, mystic, and healer who knew God so well and trusted God so much that he rejected all the ancient religious ideas about good versus evil and taught something very different. His teachings started with the idea that God gives us full latitude to explore what free will means. Some people choose to follow the path of power and abuse, but there's always the possibility they'll use their free will to choose the other path -- the path of goodness and love and trust in God. If they don't, however, God will forgive them, bring them Home, heal them, and help them understand the free will lessons they experienced. There's no room in Jesus' paradigm for the Devil or Judgment Day or Hell or salvation of the elect. So Jesus' paradigm has never been a very popular idea, even among Christians (strange as that may seem). If you want to get to know God, and feel Divine Love in "the Core," you can't go wrong by following Jesus' teachings on courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion. This figure of the crucified Christ was made in the first half of the 12th century in Germany, and is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

Dr. Alexander reveals his sympathy for the Gnostic position throughout Chapter 15. He says, for instance (and I quote), "Small particles of evil were scattered throughout the universe, but the sum total of all that evil was as a grain of sand on a vast beach compared to the goodness, abundance, hope, and unconditional love in which the universe was literally awash" (page 83).

Let's stop the bus right there. "Small particles of evil were scattered throughout the universe"!!??  Really? God is so stupid that God took a watering can and sprinkled evil around the garden of Creation? God is so stupid that God couldn't figure out any way to give us free will as human beings except to introduce seeds of evil into the world we live in (Proof of Heaven, page 83-84)?

Oh, come on!

This particular species of religious tree has been nurtured wherever people have been trying to reconcile the experience of deeply felt Divine Love with the realities of suffering and abuse in the world. Gnostics are the first to loudly trumpet the preeminence of Divine Love and the first to fall back on the myth of "good versus evil" as soon as they're asked to explain why suffering exists in the world.  In my view, the Gnostic answer to the three questions posed here is sloppy, lazy, and not the least bit courageous.

It takes courage and trust to hold fast to God's hand, to look beyond the simple black and white myths of Gnosticism, to open your whole heart, mind, body, and soul to another explanation for suffering besides evil and evil entities. It takes courage to completely let go of all belief systems that preach the existence of supernatural evil as a force in opposition to God. It takes courage to let go of the idea that "we can't truly know good unless we know its polar opposite, evil, so God must allow some evil to exist." This is the old idea, the Materialist idea of cause and effect, the New Age idea that makes no room for the wonder and mystery of Divine Love.

I should say, in closing, that I understand the position Dr. Alexander found himself in when he was writing his book. He was trying to find a logical explanation for suffering that would be accepted by an audience steeped in myths of good versus evil, light versus darkness. I once swallowed this logic myself (to my utter chagrin). However, if Dr. Alexander has to go through what I went through, his angels are gonna kick his ass around the block until he takes what he wrote in Chapter 15 and dumps it in the garbage can.

Good luck to you, Eben!  Call me if you need some help!

Best wishes,
Jen


For Further Reflection:

There's no question that human beings can spin webs of evil unimaginable to the heart of an angel, webs of evil so all-consuming that sometimes the shock waves last for decades, centuries, even millennia. It's natural and normal for us to wonder where such evil comes from. We all want explanations we can understand, because when we have explanations, we can begin the search for solutions.

Newton's third law states that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Most of us assume that Newton's third law applies in metaphysical physics as much as in classical physics. We believe that if we understand the cause of evil, the countervailing reactive force will become clear to us. We also assume the corollary: if pure love exists in the world, it must exist as a response -- an equal and opposite reaction -- to pure evil.

Our human minds find this Materialist approach appealing. After all, it seems eminently logical. It seems highly consistent with the laws of classical physics we've deduced through observation and experience. It suits our human preference for cause-and-effect justice.

Every major world religion is a response to our mind-based desire for explanations and solutions about evil. We turn to our religious leaders to explain the cause of evil so we can choose appropriate actions to heal and prevent evil.

While many of the healing actions appear similar from religion to religion (e.g. be kind, be merciful, be hospitable), the explanations for the causes of evil appear on the surface to differ widely. Christianity, Islam, and some branches of Judaism rely heavily on theories about evil entities. Buddhism, and the older traditions from which it sprang, preach the inescapable laws of karma. Dig deeper, though, to the tap roots of these religions, and you'll find a common link: the assumption that the true cause of evil is a vast, metaphysical force you can do battle with but never control (unless you're a bona fide saint, Bodhisattva, or Messiah).

Nobody wants to hear that the actual cause of evil lies in the scientific wiring of the human brain. Who's going to put money in the collection plate just to hear the bad news that we, as persons-of-soul, incarnated on purpose to see what it feels like to struggle with free will and seek redemption? That kind of teaching puts all the onus on us as human beings. It means we have to learn to take responsibility for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. There's no supernatural force to blame when we screw up and harm our relationships, including our relationship with God. There's no get-out-of-jail free card. There's only ourselves, our families and communities, and our relationship with God.

So yes, your human brain allows you the possibility to choose some very evil, scary paths. But keep in mind that your human brain isn't supernatural. It's 100% temporary biological matter. It isn't going with you when you die. It's staying right here, with the rest of your biological body, to be recycled into the planet as organic and inorganic matter. So whatever evil your brain manages to create during your human lifetime, you can trust that God knows how fix it even if you don't.

God is much smarter about all these questions than we can ever be. Although it's okay for us to be upset and confused about evil on Planet Earth, it's not okay for us to believe that God and God's angels have been negligent in their care of us or the universe.

Don't EVER tell God or your angels that you need protection from evil entities. Asking for protection is a clear indication that you're not ready or willing to trust God.

Instead, ask God for help in understanding how you've been using your own free will to shoot yourself in the foot. Then ask for help in learning how to take control of your own free will.

It's kind of like learning to right a small boat in big waves. It's challenging, but God knows that, with help, you can do it.