A New Thought Take On Terrorism
By Rev. Steve Walling
There is no room for Islamopobia in New Thought.
In New Thought we do teach that all beings are God manifest as was that being, Jesus, who we revere as a master teacher.
He taught us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. He did not qualify it by saying, “but only those who believe as you do.”
We must respond to terrorism without hatred or judgment.
I do not believe New Thought requires a “why can’t we all just get along” response to terrorism. New Thought believes that humanity has the right to seek the harmonious and safe life expression of all of its members.
We see all individuals, including terrorists, as individualized expressions of God. Nonetheless we can hold terrorists accountable for their actions. The key is to do it without judgment, fear or anger. We should not buy into the egoic need for righteous judgment or seek punishment out of a need for revenge.
We can get to a place in consciousness, I believe, where we can identify actions as unacceptable to the harmony of humanity, actions that reveal a lack of alignment with what we consider to be the Divine principle of expressing a greater good for all.
After the killing of Bin Laden, the Dalai Lama was quoted by the LA Times as saying, “‘Forgiveness doesn’t mean forget what happened. If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.”
People criticize some violent passages in the Qur’an and the Bible. It is not the writings in sacred books that we should be upset with. Our focus should be on those who choose to act in ways contrary to the good of those they find disagreement with. It is they who should be held accountable for actions that they choose to take.
In Religious Science we seek first to be that which we want to see in the world. A greater good for all comes, I believe, through us dropping our excuses to be fearful, resentful, and hateful and accepting the role of creating peace within ourselves.
Within Islam itself there is a war between those who hold to medieval tribal beliefs and those who see a positive role in the world for Islam and its followers.
If you look for a book, a faith, a race, a group to hate, you will find it, but Jesus said “Seek you first the Kingdom.” You either believe there is a Power and a Presence for good in the universe that you can use (as Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes often said) or you believe something else. In other words, embody the Christ within, create a better life for yourself and in so doing you create a better world.
New Thought may be simple in the explaining but it is a powerful and faith based-teaching to create change in the world. It is a teaching which requires us to be responsible for what we bring to the world. It’s your call.
Rev. Dr. Steve Walling is senior minister at the Spiritual Awareness Center in Madera, California, east of San Jose.
Thanks, Steve (and Harv), for articulating in such a clear way a view that I find clear and mature. It’s so refreshing to leave the land of polarization and extremes and find a stand that is truly for something and against nothing.
A very thoughtful analysis. It may be helpful to see the violence that is certainly still very real today in a broader context. As has been well-described by analysts such as Steven Pinker in “The Better Angels of our Nature” there has been a steady decline in violence over time — not to zero, obviously, but a tangible decline all the same. Daily violence that was once commonplace around the world is now rare enough to attract our attention just because it still exists and because we can know so much more about what is happening right now in places that people would have only heard from after many weeks, just a few generations ago. So what we see today is really about spirits of darkness recoiling violently as light makes its way slowly but surely around the globe. And while it never moves at a constant pace, that light is still growing and is still worth helping to propel even further.