Somewhere on the Genesis album "Duke" Phil Collins sings, "You kill what you fear and you fear what you don't understand." Fear, for all of it's devastation, represents engagement and therefore the opportunity for education and enlightenment. Fear says, "I can't love you because you scare me." But apathy, the well-intentioned "live and let live" perspective that many of us adopt in the face of the other, is far more damaging because it denies the opportunity even to be enlightened or educated. Apathy says, "I can't love you because you mean nothing."
Hate is love mixed freely with despair, with the certainty that love, in the case of the hated one, is futile and will never be returned. Thus hate is a sin against one another and a sin against all that is holy; it comes after the death of hope. And hope sometimes is the cruelest and most pitiless of mercies--but it is mercy still.
I grew up in Christian fundamentalism, went to hell, came back, became a Presbyterian then a Buddhist Presbyterian, and now I'm a profane Presbyterian Zen Taoist -- not that I'm into labels or anything. Here's what I've learned so far: The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
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Somewhere on the Genesis album "Duke" Phil Collins sings, "You kill what you fear and you fear what you don't understand." Fear, for all of it's devastation, represents engagement and therefore the opportunity for education and enlightenment. Fear says, "I can't love you because you scare me." But apathy, the well-intentioned "live and let live" perspective that many of us adopt in the face of the other, is far more damaging because it denies the opportunity even to be enlightened or educated. Apathy says, "I can't love you because you mean nothing."
Hate is love mixed freely with despair, with the certainty that love, in the case of the hated one, is futile and will never be returned. Thus hate is a sin against one another and a sin against all that is holy; it comes after the death of hope. And hope sometimes is the cruelest and most pitiless of mercies--but it is mercy still.
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