What has happened to people that hate fills their hearts?  I wonder if it is because it energizes them once it hits the “pleasure center of their brain” in ways that chemicals do.  What an awful thought…….

Is hate about convictions – beliefs?  Racism?  Sexism?  Humanism?  Do you know that this year, 2015, is the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War?  That war was about the fractious issue of slavery, a horrible conviction!

Remember these horrible events:  Matthew Shepard being crucified on a barbed wire fence; the shooting of six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012; the 1999 Columbine killing of 13 people and the wounding of 20 others; and, most recently, the Emmanuel AME Church shootings and murders.

Does evil and goodness sit side by side?  C.S. Lewis once wrote that “Great virtue and great evil are next door neighbors”.  The rector at Christ Church Episcopal, Rev. Barry Vaughn, wrote in an article:  “The fruits of evil grow right next to love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance – the fruits of the Spirit. Our job is to cultivate those fruits and root out the other fruits in our own hearts and in the world around us.”

It is time to grow in our goodness and root out evil wherever it resides.  Be it in addiction or hate.  Let’s do just that shall we?  Let us be willing to deal with our own problems in healthy and rational ways moving away from addictions and hate.  The world needs to be a better, safer place and it will take all of us to move goodness forward.  Peace!

“Goodness is about character – integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.” – Dennis Prager