Home •-Feature	READ: A God of Hatred?
Two prominent news stories in the United States today are the upcoming presidential election and the death of Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs. Both events are being used and misused as platforms for those with a religious or political agenda.
The presidential campaign has already grown tainted and nasty by the attacks on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion.
I grew up in a tiny town where my family, as Roman Catholics, were part of a small minority. On top of that, they were Sicilian immigrants. So I grew up in an atmosphere of religious and ethnic bigotry. Despite that, I had a happy childhood, but I was keenly aware of the discrimination we experienced.
I’m no longer Roman Catholic, or even Christian. But I respect the teachings of Jesus, and other great spiritual leaders such as Buddha. As someone once remarked, Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Buddha a Buddhist.
In my opinion, the greatest teaching of Jesus was his command to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The divine energy, by whatever name you call it, is a God of love, not a God of hatred. And yet so many today are promoting hatred in God’s name.
You have heard it said God is love. It’s become almost a cliche. Yet it is true. You’ve also heard it said love makes the world go round. That also is true, in a more literal sense than perhaps most of you realize.
We have said many times God is all that is. That also is literally true.
That divine energy — whether you call it God, Goddess, or whatever — is the fabric and the essence of everything that exists. Even so-called inanimate things — rocks, mountains, etc. And certainly all the things you define as “living” — plants, animals, birds, fish. And, of course, human beings.
God and love are interwoven through every particle of everything that has ever existed or will ever exist. God truly is omnipresent across all space and time.
Following this line of reasoning, you — each and every one of you — are God. You are divine. And you have all the power that goes with being divine.
However, you are free to use or misuse that power. What you are seeing in those events John mentioned — the US presidential campaign and Steve Jobs’ death — is a blatant misuse and abuse of that power you all possess.
We define love as the choice to see the divinity in all beings, all that is. When you do not see that divinity, when you refuse to recognize it, you enable what you call hatred.
Yet hatred is not a “thing.” It is only the absence of love. In one sense hate is good, because it shows you where love is not. It creates a vacuum only love, only God can fill.
So those who advocate hatred in God’s name are living a contradiction that cannot long stand. They are exercising their power in ways that only alienate them from others. And, more critically, alienate them from themselves, from the God within.
Only the God within — the God of love — can heal your wounds. The God of hatred cannot endure. It is already losing its hold on your planet. You are moving into a truly new age, an age of expanding awareness, an age of an all-embracing consciousness.
The God of love will live. The God of hatred will die.
Love your article and could not agree more. The last chapter of my book, Truth Works, is about this very topic.