The choice of hate over love repeatedly scars human history

At least two things about the human species continue to surprise me. First, the capacity to love unreservedly. Second, the capacity to destroy people and things with vicious acts of hatred.

As for love, I'm reading (and soon will review here on the blog) my friend John Philip Newell's about-to-be-released new book, The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home.

The pages are full of examples of great teachers who have shown us how to love and why it's so central to being the people we were created to be.

At the same time, I've just read this article from The Conversation about the 10th anniversary of the start of the Islamic State (ISIS, or simply IS) group's genocide in Iraq. It's an account of the destruction that hate can rain down upon its targets.

And I am left to wonder again why hate so often seems to trump love.

Part of it, of course, has to do with false certitude when it comes to religious beliefs. The list of wars, crimes and other destructive acts that are rooted in malformed religion is depressingly long. And the ISIS-led genocide is included in that list of sorrows.

As The Conversation article notes, "thousands of people from Iraq’s marginalized communities, including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims, were killed in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and the surrounding areas" starting in 2014.

As the author of the article, Alda Benjamen, who teaches history at the University of Dayton and who was born in Iraq, writes, "Yazidis and Christians continue to suffer marginalization, the regions they inhabit remain unstable, and their heritage is subject to ongoing destruction. As a scholar of Iraq, I have a particular concern about the loss of intangible heritage such as prayers, songs and historic narratives -- which I am now working to preserve."

Benjamen also concludes that the "aim of IS, as my colleagues and I found, was to erase not only these communities themselves but also the forms of intercommunal coexistence that had characterized northern Iraq historically. Many of the religious sites IS targeted were revered by multiple religions."

The ongoing results of such acts of hatred scar human history over and over. And movements to repair some of what and who has been damaged often get dismissed as unnecessary or too little and too late. But humanity cannot recover from its brutal history without a recognition of what humans did and to whom. Without that, there's no path toward healing and reconciliation and, well, love.

My hope is that the work Benjamen and others are doing will begin to bring healing and a better future to Iraq. But similar reclamation work elsewhere will always be necessary until love replaces the hatred that led to such destruction. And that change may have to happen one person at a time. Sigh.

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A CAMPAIGN OF DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS

Religion scholar and analyst Mark Silk, in this essay, describes the two approaches to politics that are rooted in the religious views that guide Donald Trump and Kamala Harris -- one that looks back to an imagined American past and one that looks forward to an imagined American future. He notes that Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan was borrowed from the 1980 slogan of the Ronald Reagan-George Bush ticket and is "simply a continuation of this restorationist ideology." Harris' new slogan, "We're not going back" is a rejection of that. Makes me wonder whether a candidate who advocated just staying where we are as a nation would have any chance of winning. Maybe not.

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