On owning up to our own violence

Karen Armstrong notes how good we are at ignoring the log in our eye.

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Summary

Karen Armstrong notes how good we are at ignoring the log in our eye.

Transcript

I think we always have to acknowledge our violent past, be it religious or secular, and come clean about it. There’s a great tendency to point to other people’s violence and not look at one’s own. I mean Jesus himself had a saying for this, did he not, don’t, he said, look at the splinter in somebody else’s eye and ignore the beam, the log that’s in your own. And we do that all the time. We … every tradition, be it religious or secular, every country however peace-loving and free it claims to be has perpetrated violence either in warfare or in systemic structural violence or both. And we have to come clean about that.