The Cause Of Right

The Global crises we face today are unique in many ways, not only in their scope, complexity, and urgency, but also in that for the first time in human history each and every one of them is caused by humans. They are creations of our individual and collective behavior and can therefore be traced, in significant part to psychological origins: to our individual and collective beliefs, greed fear, fantasies, defenses and misperceptions. Our global problems are global symptoms, and the state of the world reflects the state of our minds.

Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in his 1984 book, The Psychology of Human Survival. We live in a world filled with greed, fantasies, misperceptions and fear. We watch those thoughts become real, and we own them. We bring them into our mental laboratory and mix them with our beliefs. The mixture that results from brewing this concoction of thoughts creates perceptions that are hybrids of the truth. But we call them truths, nonetheless.

We like to mix fear with our religious beliefs as well as our political beliefs. We challenge God to take sides while we fantasize and defend how God will act. Collective religious beliefs seasoned with fear and greed are hybrids that are designed to promote power, not faith. Faith is buried under the umbrella of violence and hatred, and “in the name of God” becomes the victory cry. We tear the fabric of faith from God, and attach it to our human misperceptions then we kill to honor those misperceptions.

We like to say we live in a world of hatred and fear. A world where one religion tries to eradicate another in order to worship a just and noble God. Whatever we call that God becomes our war badge, and we use it show our allegiance to the cause of right. But our cause of right has no right. Our cause of right reflects our belief in the religion of fear, not the religion that knows that the cause of right is really self-inflicted torture.