Violence comes from fear.

Violence is not condoned by God. It is not encouraged by God. It is not fostered through the spirit, and yet violence in whatever form is the by-product, for some, of what it means to be human.

Violence does come from fear. Anger is based on fear. It is merely the outward expression of the fear within. Violence is one sort of expression of anger. Human life is characteristically accompanied by anger, but you must remember that sometimes that anger grows out of a commitment to survive, no matter what obstacles are put in its way. If it were not for that kind of expression of anger, you would not be alive today in your current human form. So there is anger which is directed toward preservation, and there is anger that is directed toward destruction. Each form of anger must be experienced either as an observer or as a participant.

Human life characteristically finds it difficult to make a distinction between preservation and destruction, for how many times do you attempt to preserve something only to destroy it? Those lines are not clear at all times. When you encounter destructive anger, it may help to see that form of anger as an expression of confusion, mixing up what is preserving and misinterpreting the destructive consequences.

Most individuals who have been engaged in acts of destruction are acting out of the foundation of fear, fear that something will be lost. That is a kind of preservation, is it not? Acts of uncontrolled destruction do not come from the wellspring that instructs one to simply destroy. It comes from a fountain that says something will be lost or something is being lost, and therefore action is necessary to prevent that loss, for surrounding that loss is the fear of what that loss means to an individual. It is out of that fear that there is a kind of action of preservation that will be seen by others as being destructive.

You need only think back a brief time to the massive destruction brought upon by your own country as a vehicle for ending a war. For those who suffered from nuclear attack, there was no sense of this coming out of the goodness of preservation. It was seen and experienced as willful acts of hatred, inhumanity, but to many in your country it was considered the most effective way to end the carnage of war. There was so much hatred in your nation for all that you labeled as the enemy. Consider now that relationship with those nations. There is unprecedented partnership.

Destruction/self-preservation—two sides of the proverbial same coin. That conflict, the expression of it, the witnessing of it is part of the human experience. It is not condoned by God, for it is not reflective of love, but all human beings are in the process through their lives of learning what love is. And that’s why we say your life is a process.

When you see disturbed individuals, disturbed societies and nations, acting in ways that are clearly destructive, remind yourself of what within your own lifetime was considered a wise move, a humane move, that would end the suffering of war.