A World Taught to Hate

PEOPLE are inherently selfish. And selfishness, if not kept under control, can turn into hatred. As if natural selfishness were not bad enough, human society actually trains people to be selfish!

Generalizations, of course, do not always apply, yet certain attitudes are too prevalent to be rejected as simply aberrations. Are not politicians often more interested in winning elections than they are in helping their constituents? Are not businessmen often more interested in making money, unscrupulously if necessary, than in preventing harmful products from reaching the market? Are not clergymen often more interested in being popular or in gaining money than in guiding their flocks along paths of morality and love?

Beginning With the Young

When children are reared in a climate of permissiveness, they are actually being trained in selfishness, since considerateness and unselfishness are sacrificed on the altar of their childish desires. At school and college, students are taught to strive to be number one, not only in scholastic matters but also in sports. The motto is, “If you are second, you might as well be last!”

Video games featuring violence teach young people to solve problems the selfish way—simply eliminate the enemy! Hardly an attitude that fosters love! Over a decade ago, the U.S. surgeon general warned that video games posed a threat to young people. He said: “Everything is zap the enemy. There’s nothing constructive in the games.” A letter to The New York Times noted that many video games “pander to the basest instincts of man” and added: “They are cultivating a generation of mindless, ill-tempered adolescents.” A video-game fan from Germany was honest enough to admit the truthfulness of this latter statement when he said: “While playing them I was transferred into an isolated dream world where the primitive slogan applied: ‘Kill or be killed.’”

When coupled with racism, hatred becomes ever more sinister. Germans are therefore obviously concerned about the existence of right-wing videos that demonstrate violence against foreigners, particularly against Turks. And well they might be, since as of January 1, 1994, Turks made up 27.9 percent of Germany’s 6,878,100 foreign residents.

Racist feelings nourish what nationalism teaches children from infancy, namely, that hating your nation’s enemies is not wrong. An essay by George M. Taber, a Time contributor, noted: “Of all the political isms of history, perhaps the strongest is nationalism.” He went on to explain: “More blood has been shed in its name than for any other cause except religion. Demagogues for centuries have stirred up fanatical mobs by blaming all their troubles on some neighboring ethnic group.”

Long-standing hatred of other ethnic groups, races, or nationalities is behind many of the problems in today’s world. And xenophobia, fear of strangers or foreigners, is on the increase. Interestingly, however, a group of German sociologists discovered that xenophobia is most marked where few foreigners live. This seems to prove that it is more often caused by prejudice than by personal experience. “Young people’s prejudices are fostered mainly by their friends and families,” the sociologists found. Indeed, 77 percent of those interviewed, even though they endorsed the prejudice, had no direct contact, or very little, with foreigners.

Teaching the lesson of selfishness is not difficult, for all of us have inherited a measure of selfishness from imperfect parents. But what role does religion play in the conflict between love and hate?

What Does Religion Teach?

People generally think that religion fosters love. But if so, why are religious differences the underlying cause of tension in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and India, to mention only three examples? Of course, some people contend that political, not religious, differences are to blame for the disturbances. That is a debatable point. At any rate, it is obvious that organized religion has failed to instill in people a love strong enough to overcome political and ethnic biases. Many Catholic and Orthodox believers, and those of other faiths, in effect, condone prejudice, which leads to violence.

There is nothing wrong with trying to refute the teachings and practices of a religious group that a person may feel is incorrect. But does this give him the right to use violence in fighting it or its members? The Encyclopedia of Religion candidly admits: “Religious leaders have called for violent attacks of other religious groups repeatedly in Near Eastern and European history.”

This encyclopedia reveals that violence is an integral part of religion, by saying: “Darwinists are not alone in accepting conflict as necessary for both social and psychological growth processes. Religion has served as an endless source for conflict, for violence, and, thus, for growth.”

Violence cannot be justified on the basis that it is necessary for growth, for this would go contrary to a well-known principle laid down by Jesus Christ when the apostle Peter tried to protect him. Peter “reached out his hand and drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest and took off his ear. Then Jesus said to him: ‘Return your sword to its place, for all those who take the sword will perish by the sword.’”—Matthew 26:51, 52; John 18:10, 11.

Violence directed against individuals—whether they are good or bad—is not the way of love. Thus, people who resort to violence belie their claim to be acting in imitation of a loving God. Author Amos Oz recently noted: “It is typical of religious fanatics . . . that the ‘orders’ they get from God are always, essentially, one order: Thou shalt kill. The god of all fanatics sounds more like the devil.”

The Bible says something quite similar: “The children of God and the children of the Devil are evident by this fact: Everyone who does not carry on righteousness does not originate with God, neither does he who does not love his brother. Everyone who hates his brother is a manslayer, and you know that no manslayer has everlasting life remaining in him. If anyone makes the statement: ‘I love God,’ and yet is hating his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot be loving God, whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that the one who loves God should be loving his brother also.”—1 John 3:10, 15; 4:20, 21.

True religion must follow a pattern of love, which includes showing love even to enemies. Of Jehovah we read: “He makes his sun rise upon wicked people and good and makes it rain upon righteous people and unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:44, 45; see also 1 John 4:7-10.) How unlike Satan, the god of hate! He lures and seduces people into living lives of debauchery, crime, and selfishness, thereby filling their lives with pain and misery. All the while he knows full well that this perverted life-style will eventually lead to their destruction. Is that the kind of god worth serving, one who is unable—evidently even unwilling—to protect his own?

Fear, Anger, or a Sense of Injury

That these factors trigger hatred is easily verified. A Time report says: “Not since the troubled 1930s has Europe’s motley collection of far-right movements been able to batten on so many seeming opportunities. . . . Fearful for their jobs, people are turning in cold anger against the impotence of centrist governments and making scapegoats of the foreigners in their midst.” Jörg Schindler, in the Rheinischer Merkur/Christ und Welt, called attention to the tens of thousands of political refugees who have poured into Germany over the past two decades. The German Tribune warns: “Racism is on the rise throughout Europe.” The influx of so many immigrants creates feelings of hatred. People are heard to complain: ‘They cost us money, they are taking away our jobs, they are a danger to our daughters.’ Theodore Zeldin, a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, said people “are violent because they feel threatened or humiliated. It is the causes of their anger which need attention.”

British television journalist Joan Bakewell uses apt words to describe our world, one that teaches its citizens to hate. She writes: “I am not an orthodox Christian, but I recognise in the teaching of Jesus a profound and absolute truth: evil is the catastrophic absence of love. . . . I know we live in a society that gives little credence to a doctrine of love. Indeed, a society so slick it dismisses such a doctrine as naive, sentimental, Utopian, that sneers at notions of putting caring and selflessness before profit and self-interest. ‘Get real’ it says as it clinches the latest deal, cheats on its obligations and makes light of evidence that puts it clearly in the wrong. Such a world produces failures, loners, people who lost out in society’s priorities of success, self-esteem and happy families.”

Clearly, the god of this world, Satan, is teaching mankind to hate. But as individuals, we can learn to love. The following article will show that this is possible.

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Could video games be teaching your children to hate?

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War’s violence is a symptom of ignorance and hatred

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Pascal Beaudenon/Sipa Press