The most destructive emotion we have is fear. It is also one of our oldest responses, hard-wired into deepest parts of our brain.  For millennia fear of predators kept us alive, until we organised them into a place where they can no longer endanger us.  But old instincts are hard to shake off.  Fear, once essential to life, now threatens to destroy us.  Fear makes us believe the world is a particular way, and we group ourselves with people who share that outlook.  Then together we find names for those who are not in our group as giving people names helps us manage our fear of them. 

The establishment of church groups, fearfully clinging to their truth, is as old as Christianity itself. St Paul had to berate Christians in Corinth for lining up with the teachers of their day.  Apollos, Cephas, even Paul himself, were not just people but badges of allegiance, and therefore lines of division.

We have a hard but necessary task to unlearn these patterns, both for our own health and for the world we live in.  While I am not in the queue to proclaim Barack Obama the messiah, I think he holds a view of the world which might be a viable alternative to a world shaped by fear.  At a prayer breakfast last February, he said:

But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.

We know too that whatever our differences, there is one law that binds all great religions together. Jesus told us to "love thy neighbour as thyself." The Torah commands, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." In Islam, there is a hadith that reads "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." And the same is true for Buddhists and Hindus; for followers of Confucius and for humanists. It is, of course, the Golden Rule - the call to love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.

Fear will always be with us, but we need to try to understand what it does to us, so we can recognise what it does to our enemy, and so begin to recognise the same thing going on in them as in us.  When we find what we have in common, then there is a way forward for a safer, and less fearful, world.

Andrew Spurr

Vicar of Evesham