(This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the interaction of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience our natural impulse toward the Divine, which does not make others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)
This is the third in a series of blogs on the seemingly unending conflict in the world. The previous entry in this series appeared here on Tuesday. The series makes the point that there is a way to avoid the constant conflict and killing upon the earth, and that way is for the earth’s people to adopt a New Spirituality — a new “story” about God, about Life, and about Each Other.

HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY’S BLOG…
* A single principle that can end the terror we live in
* The ‘story’ that is killing us
* How Separation Theology could end humanity’s dream
* God’s Message to the World in five words

There is a principle that can end the seemingly unending conflict in our world. There is a way to avoid the War to End All Wars, one scenario for which has been predicted by analysts and media pundits, and which I outlined in this space two days ago.
The way to end the constant conflict and killing upon the earth is for the earth’s people to…

… adopt a New Spirituality — a new “story” about God, about Life and its purpose, and about who we are in relationship to God and to each other.
As challenging and off-putting as it is for some people to admit this, it is our current story about all of these things that is killing us.
Our opportunity on this planet is at this time unparalleled in humanity’s history. So is our peril. Our present Theology of Separation can put an end to humanity’s dream faster than anything I know. Yet I have great hope and great optimism for our future. The reason: We are facing the same problems we’ve always faced — problems of inequity, oppression, misery, abject poverty, and the rage that springs from all of that — but now our technology has made it possible for the teeming masses, for the repressed and the oppressed, to make it clear they are sick and tired of it and are not going to take it any more. No longer can the strongest have their way over those who are weak.

Moreover (and more significant), we have created and lived in a culture of violence that actually allows us to justify the killing and subjugation of others. Shockingly, the mechanism in human society that has condoned such an approach too often has been our religions.
Either by preaching violence outright, or by looking the other way when it is perpetrated “in the name of God” (or Allah, or Jehovah, or the Diety of your choice), our religions have said one thing and done another too much of the time, from their beginning.
That is because our religions, the largest number of them, are based on Separation Theology. And, as I have noted here last week, our Separation Theologies have produced a Separation Cosmology, which, in turn, has produced a Separation Sociology, from which has emerged as Separation Pathology. That is, pathological behaviors of self destruction.
We see these self destructive behaviors today in the Middle East, where the Sunnis and Shias are murdering each other in Iraq, and where members of Hamas and Fatah are killing each other in Palestine. We even see, among certain cultures, so-called “honor killings,” in which a family will turn against one of its own, killing a female member who breaks the “rules” of the religious culture in which she lives by doing something as innocently human as falling in love with the “wrong man.”
We kill young girls in our own families for falling in love with with wrong man? Yes. It is a matter of honor, you see. It is a matter of family honor. The family does not see itself as dishonoring itself by killing — only by falling in love with an inappropriate Other. Only a deeply errant, utterly mixed up, totally twisted set of spiritual priorities could establish such definitions of what is “honorable.”
It is not a coincidence that this Violence Against One’s Own is far more prevalent in some religions and cultures than in others. It is hard to imagine a farmer in Nebraska or a businessman in Copenhagen who would order and ruthlessly execute the killing of his own daughter because she was seen kissing a man of another religion or race. It is not difficult to imagine such a thing happening in some other areas of the world, where people feel they have a deep understanding of What God Wants — and that it is their job to carry it out.
I have for years now been earnestly attempting to introduce a New Idea about What God Wants to our world. As you know, when I was asked on the Today Show on NBC what God’s message to the world is, I told interviewer Matt Lauer: I can put God’s Message to the World in five words, Matt…
You’ve got me all wrong.
Now what the world needs is about a thousand people (that’s all it should take) who agree on the principles of the New Spirituality and who are willing to do something about the world as it is; who are willing to work for change.. That is, people who are willing to take action, and not merely say they embrace the New Spirituality. A thousand people believing the same thing and moving in the same direction with commitment and fervor can impact the world entire. Ask Osama bin Laden.
So in the days and weeks ahead I am going to lay the groundwork for agreement — and see if we can pull together our own group of Agreeing People and extract a commitment from them to move forward together in a new and powerful way that could bring an end, at last, to the threat of the War to End All Wars, and produce, actually and for real, “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Humans Everywhere.”
A New Cultural Story. and a New Idea about Who We Are in relationship to God, to Life, and to Each Other, is what it will take, and is what we’ll explore here.
(More in our next Installment, Monday.)