Using Forgiveness To End War

Look around, and you’ll see people in constant conflict, struggle, and war. As a society, we’ve come to believe that violence is the way to solve our problems. Groups fight each other over land, money, pride, or a false sense of being in the right that makes violence seem okay. This urge to settle conflicts with violence has cost many millions of lives, all spent trying to prove a point by force. And most people accept it, without question, as just the way life is. I am here to say it is not the only way. If you are open to hearing it, listen and understand.

The only way to end the mindset of war on this planet is through true forgiveness of your enemies. I say true forgiveness on purpose, because there’s a lot of confusion about what forgiveness really is and how to practice it. True forgiveness doesn’t come from blind belief, from being polite, or from wanting to look like a good person. It comes from deeply understanding how your enemy came to be violent in the first place. It means putting yourself in their shoes and understanding what drove their choices. With very few exceptions, once you truly understand their reasons, you will feel compassion for your enemy.

First, let’s ask: Does violence, whether it’s physical force or something else, actually help humanity? Many groups have been at war for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Arabs and Jews in the Middle East trace their conflict back to the days of Abraham. India and Pakistan have been fighting over land and religion since the time of Gandhi. When one person takes revenge, someone on the other side wants to strike back. History shows that groups like these have been killing each other for a very long time, and still there’s no end to the hatred and violence. Hatred only breeds more hatred, and violence only breeds more violence. You cannot solve the problem of war with more violence.

There is only one way out of this cycle of violence. All of us, one person at a time and then as a whole, must come to a place of compassion and true forgiveness toward those who attack us, whether they hurt us emotionally, mentally, or physically. Let’s take an example and walk through it from beginning to end. Many people around the world feel enormous hatred toward terrorists and the harm they cause. That hatred stirs up more hatred, which makes the terrorists hate even more. Let’s see if we can look at terrorists through the eyes of true forgiveness and come to feel compassion for them. As I do throughout this website, I’ll write it as a conversation inside your own head, between your ego (the part of you that needs to feel important and right) and your true self.

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Your Ego: I hate those terrorists! They should all die and leave us the fuck alone! What the hell did I ever do to them?

Your True Self: Why do you hate them?

Your Ego: Because they have no right to kill people just because we don’t believe in their cause.

Your True Self: Why do you think they’re doing it?

Your Ego: Because some people in this world are just evil. There is no reason.

Your True Self: Well, let’s actually look at it. Why does anyone become violent toward someone else, or even kill them?

Your Ego: I don’t know. Maybe they’re killing us because we don’t follow their religion.

Your True Self: Imagine you were born alone on a desert island. You have no religion, no job, no nationality. You don’t even have a name. In that situation, could you be violent toward someone else?

Your Ego: Probably not.

Your True Self: Because first you need someone to see as worth less, as “not good enough,” right? Their nationality isn’t good enough, or their looks, or their religion. But without any of these labels, there’s nothing to be against in the first place, is there? Only once you’ve attached yourself to a label, and decided that makes you better, can you decide someone else is worse. Are you with me so far?

Your Ego: Yes.

Your True Self: And where do these labels come from?

Your Ego: We’re born with them.

Your True Self: Actually, we aren’t. Were you an American before you were born? Will you be an American after you die? America didn’t even exist 500 years ago. So what about the people who lived here 500 years ago? Were they Americans? Do you see what I mean? Where did you get the idea that you’re an American?

Your Ego: From society. From where I was born. My passport, and so on.

Your True Self: Okay. And is it really true that you are an American? Will you still be one after you die? Say, just for argument’s sake, you’re reborn in another country in your next life. Will you still be an American then? What if there’s a civil war in the next 50 years and the country breaks apart into separate states? Are you still an American then?

Your Ego: I see what you’re saying.

Your True Self: So, following that same reasoning, are these terrorists really Arab, deep down? As human beings, are they really Muslim at their core?

Your Ego: Well, I suppose not. But that still doesn’t make it okay to kill people.

Your True Self: If you believed what they believe, and you were just as blinded by the hatred all around you, isn’t it possible you would do the same thing? Remember, it isn’t only small groups of terrorists who can be blinded by hatred. Whole nations can be too. Just look at how forty million Germans turned their hatred on the Jewish people during World War II. Those Germans were otherwise ordinary people. But they became consumed by their identity as Germans and came to believe they were better than another group of people. If they could become that confused and unbalanced, isn’t it possible that you could too, if you lived in the same kind of world?

Your Ego: Well, it might be possible.

Your True Self: If you can have human weaknesses, why can’t they? I’m not saying their violence is okay. What I’m trying to change is the hatred you feel toward them, which comes from judging them as worthless scum. They are human beings first and foremost, even if they’ve lost sight of that right now. Once you can see their humanity, you can no longer answer with hatred. You can only answer with compassion and forgiveness.

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The labels we take on from the world around us (what spiritual teachers call the ego) aren’t truly real. They’re just ideas. That includes a person’s religion, too. Of course, there’s a limit to how far you can push this, but it’s amazing how far the ego will go to justify itself. Today’s Jesus was yesterday’s Zeus and Osiris, the gods of ancient Greece and Egypt. Tomorrow it will be someone else. Anyone who says that believing in one particular god is the only way is being dishonest at best, and in complete denial at worst.

Take the belief that only people who believe in Jesus Christ will be saved, or that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Beliefs like these can only survive through blind faith and total denial, until someone brave like Copernicus or Galileo comes along and proves beyond doubt that the Earth goes around the Sun. I don’t want to get into a religious debate, but here’s the main point: Did the millions of people who lived before Jesus all go to hell? And if humanity survives another hundred thousand years, with countless billions of people living and dying under all sorts of beliefs, will all of those billions go to hell too?

What’s surprising is that other religions believe the same thing Christians believe about Jesus, just with a different savior. For example, terrorists want us to believe that if we don’t accept Allah as God and Muhammad as his final messenger, we’ll go to hell. That includes all the billions of Christians, too.

You might say that at least Christians aren’t killing people and forcing their beliefs on them. But history tells a different story. A thousand years ago, Christians were the terrorists, and Muslims were the enlightened ones. During the Crusades, the Catholic Church promised complete forgiveness of every sin to anyone who went to the Middle East to kill Muslims and take their land. Countless people who called themselves Christians believed this just as blindly as Muslim terrorists believe in their teachings today.

The point is this: they may be forcing their beliefs on us because someone else is trying to force beliefs on them. That is the root of the conflict we face today. Each side believes it’s right and judges the other side as wrong. There’s no way to end this conflict until one side stops seeing the other as the enemy, and refuses to judge them as inferior or “worth less.” When we do that, we step off the path of violence completely.

For that to happen, we have to see the other side not as a nationality, a religion, or a label, but first and foremost as human beings. They may be confused or emotionally unbalanced. If so, they’re sick, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and they need help. If we really tried to understand what’s going on, we would see that a terrorist is sick and needs help. They do to others what they feel is being done to them. They have been judged as not good enough, and they lash out from hopelessness and depression, feeling like failures by society’s standards.

As a whole, we share some of the responsibility, because we buy into that same standard and label these people as terrorists. Because that standard also judges the would-be terrorist, he feels worthless and starts blaming everyone else for how he feels. Only then can he turn to violence.

Can’t you see that the only way to prevent terrorism is to reject the standards society pushes on us? Society wants us to punish terrorists and treat them as less than human, as purely evil, which is exactly what terrorists do to us. In reality, a terrorist is a human being with deep self-worth problems who needs psychological help. Out of deep depression and despair, they turn to violence. They have stopped seeing themselves as human, and so they stop seeing others as human.

The answer is to see the terrorist as a human being. I fully admit there are exceptions: narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths are another matter. But most people deserve true forgiveness and compassion. Most people are human beings first, and we need to see them that way. When we go along with a standard that calls for revenge and treating people as less than human, we only add to the problem. Every war needs one side to turn the other into monsters. If we can recognize our shared humanity, and look with compassion and forgiveness at those who are trapped in fear, we could never again start a war.