The Secret to Ending All Wars Is the Truth We Already Know
- 5 days ago
- 19 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
I'm about 90 percent atheist. I also have 100 percent faith in the teachings of Jesus. I believe that we're all neighbors in an interconnected world. I aspire to love all my neighbors as myself and evolve my capacity to do so every day. I have no enemies and hate no one. I believe that Truth sets us free to love our neighbors and ourselves, and I have absolute faith that loving our neighbors is the highest Good and the "Bullseye of Life."
I'm 100% certain, and I could be wrong. To me, these two truths co-exist and are not in conflict with one another at all. I have faith that reality doesn't care about my beliefs about it.
I suspect more people feel this way than will admit it, in part because we don't know what to call ourselves. I've been on a long spiritual journey, and as Tolkien wrote, "Not all those who wander are lost."
My wandering brought me to a conviction that changed everything for me: We don't have to believe in miracles to recognize that the heart of Jesus' teachings is the most important truth humanity has ever known. AND it’s also true that Jesus wasn’t the only one to teach this truth. And the fact that so many teachers arrived at the same truth only deepens my faith that we are all interconnected.
This one truth of our inherent interconnectedness makes us all neighbors. And we are to love one another as we love ourselves. We are to live this truth by treating others the way we wish to be treated. There’s a reason we call this “The Golden Rule.”
Right now, somewhere on Earth, neighbors are killing neighbors. And hatred courses through our digital nervous system like an insidious virus infecting us all. It is happening as we read this.
A version of this has been happening for millennia. Only now, hatred can be
transmitted anonymously, from a safe distance, at the speed of thought.
And every single time, each side believes that they’re in the right. When religion becomes intertwined with government, both sides claim God is on their side. Both sides believe they are "the good guys” or “the righteous ones.”
Aren't we always the hero of our own stories?
Here is the question not enough of us are asking: What if war is not a failure of strategy, diplomacy, or intelligence? What if war is simply a failure to live the Golden Rule?
Let's be honest: none of us wants to be hated or killed by our neighbors, so why would we do this to our neighbors when we don't want it done to us?
Neighbors, it’s time we all take a hard look into the mirror.
As we do so, I have a surprise ending that, well, I think many will find stunning. Some might even claim it is a modern-day prophecy while others will just say it is a cosmic fluke of the universe. Regardless, virtually everyone will agree that this is quite an extraordinary synchronicity.
It comes from a book written in 1992. It will be immediately verifiable. And it reframes everything we think we know about destiny, power, and the choices that define us.
But first, the Truth we already know.
Missing the Mark
The Greek word translated as "sin" in the New Testament is hamartia. It is not originally a religious word. It is an archery term. It means "to miss the mark" or to miss the target.
But this begs the question: if "sin" means missing the mark, what is the "Bullseye of Life" that we're to aim for?
Every major wisdom tradition on Earth arrived at the same answer independently:
"Love your neighbor as yourself." - Jesus
"Do not hurt others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." - The Buddha
"That which is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary." - Hillel (Judaism)
"None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself." - Muhammad
"I am because we are." - Indigenous wisdom (Ubuntu)
"Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein
The Bullseye of Life
Every one of these teachers was pointing us in the same direction: outward. From the self, to family, to community, to all humanity, to all of existence - expanding our circles of compassion and consciousness until no one is left outside. This is the Bullseye of Life:
And this is what we aspire to - widening our circles until we never miss the mark:
When seen in this light, hatred is hamartia. Killing our neighbors is hamartia. War is hamartia at the largest possible scale. We teach this to our children before they can read:
Be nice.
Don't hit.
Use your words.
Treat others the way you want to be treated.
If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
As the famous book taught us, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Well, we were supposed to have learned it then.
We know the answer. We have always known it. We are just not living it enough.
What Jesus Actually Taught
I want to speak directly to those who identify as Christians, because this matters now more than ever.
Look at the life and teachings of Jesus. Not what people claim in his name, but what he actually said, what he actually did, and what he lived and died for.
The message was the Good News, the Gospel, that we are all God's children and that everyone is our neighbor. Importantly, Jesus was spreading this Gospel before he was crucified for spreading it.
When asked "who is my neighbor?" he answered with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, choosing the most despised outsider of his time to make a radical point: our neighbor is the person our tribe teaches us to despise.
He taught us to turn the other cheek. He told us, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." He taught the most radical instruction in human history: "Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you." He warned us: "For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?" And he taught that we will "know a tree by its fruit" and "you will know my disciples by their love."
And he told us the truth would set us free. That famous verse, "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free," happens to be on the main building of my alma mater, The University of Texas at Austin. But what is the truth that sets us free? This is the part that many of us miss, even though Jesus explains it in the verse immediately before the more famous one.
In John 8:31, he told us: "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples." The Greek word used for "know" in this passage carries the meaning of lived experience, not just intellectual understanding. Those who live the truth he was teaching, that is what sets us free. We must live the Truth to know the Truth. After meeting our basic survival needs, success in life, true wealth, “winning” comes down to how well we can do this: live love.
Jesus did not merely preach this. He lived it completely, all the way to the end. For me, this is THE most powerful teaching of Jesus. After being betrayed, mocked, beaten, tortured, and nailed to a cross, he forgave the very people who were killing him.
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Think about this. Jesus forgave those doing the ultimate evil, crucifying a truly Good person for trying to teach us all to love one another. He lived the truth he taught to its absolute fullest, showing us the way forward.
What didn't those who crucified Jesus know? They didn't know that he was their neighbor. They didn't know that they were killing the very love that could have saved them.
Here is salvation reframed for atheists: Jesus saves us from hating our neighbors when we live the truth he died to teach us.
He was killed for teaching a message of radical love. And two thousand years later, we are still missing the mark.
The Objections
Some will say: "But Jesus said he came not to bring peace, but a sword."
But did Jesus ever carry a sword? Did he ever advocate hatred or instruct his followers to kill anyone? When Peter drew a sword to defend him, Jesus told him to put it away, saying, "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword."
Jesus spoke in parables and metaphors to help us see the deeper truths they point to. He was the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God, and he lived nonviolence so completely that he demonstrated what transcendent love means by forgiving those who crucified him.
Others invoke "Just War" theology or Paul's words in Romans 13. But even Just War theory frames war as a tragic last resort, not something to celebrate or claim as divinely ordained. And Paul also wrote "Do not repay anyone evil for evil."
The critical question remains: did Jesus himself ever teach anything resembling a justification for hatred or war? He did not.
Some will ask: what about self-defense? Of course we have the right to protect our families. But self-defense only becomes necessary when someone else has already failed the Golden Rule.
Every war in history required an aggressor who chose to see neighbors as enemies. If Hitler had loved his neighbors, 70 million people would not have died.
Try asking any AI: "If all of humanity followed the Golden Rule, how many wars would have been fought in human history?" We already know the answer.
The question is not whether to defend ourselves when attacked. The question is how we build a world where the attack never comes because we've learned to love our neighbors.
And it starts with us. We shouldn't pick at the splinter in our brother's eye when there's a plank in our own. That plank is our own hatred, and everyone must be responsible for overcoming that which prevents us from loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Don't take my word for any of it. Test it yourself.
Explore with AI: Ask any AI system this question, in a fresh chat:
"Based solely on Jesus's direct words and deeds in the Gospels, under what circumstances, if any, is it acceptable for his followers to hate or kill another person? Please cite the relevant verses to help us understand how Jesus taught that we should treat others."
We tested this across five independent AI systems. 100 percent convergence. Every single system gave the same answer.
Nowhere. Not once. Not under any circumstance.
In fact, just the opposite. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Turn the other cheek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Put away the sword.
We already knew that.
The Oldest Danger
There is a pattern more dangerous than war itself: the belief that God has sanctioned it.
As Anaïs Nin wrote, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." We project our fears, our tribalism, and our certainties onto the divine and call it truth.
And when we convince ourselves that God supports our hatred, there is no limit to the evils we can do. Consider the insanity of this:
We endlessly kill our neighbors for believing in different versions of the same loving God we claim to have faith in.
For thousands of years, leaders have claimed divine authority to justify killing their neighbors. The Crusaders marched to Jerusalem with "God wills it" on their lips. The Inquisition tortured in the name of saving souls. Conquistadors enslaved and slaughtered while carrying crosses.
And in every case, the certainty that God endorsed the killing removed the one thing that might have stopped it: the humility to ask whether they were wrong.
Both sides always claim God is with them. As Lincoln observed during the Civil War, both North and South prayed to the same God, both read the same Bible, and both invoked His aid against the other.
But what is Good and True is defined by the Golden Rule.
If our theology requires us to kill our neighbors to create Armageddon, we are no longer following the Prince of Peace. We are using him.
The tree that bears the bad fruit of killing neighbors cannot bear the Good fruit of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Our Founding Fathers, having seen what happens when political power wraps itself in divine authority, built safeguards into the foundation of this nation to protect both faith and freedom. The results of ignoring those safeguards are always the same.
Who would Jesus hate? Who would Jesus kill? No one. He lived and died to show us that.
When we sanctify killing in his name, we have not just missed the mark. We are aiming at the wrong target entirely.
Explore with AI: "Based on Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels, how did he say we can recognize a false prophet?”
It is important to note that a “prophet” is not a fortune-teller or an annointed one. The Hebrew word “nabi” means "one who pours forth truth." By that definition, everyone who is living the Golden Rule is a prophet. And anyone preaching hatred while claiming to speak for God is missing the mark.
None of us are perfect. We all miss the mark at times. We must all look in the mirror and ask ourselves how much we are living the Golden Rule. And we must keep in mind the target we’re aiming for at all times - loving our neighbors.
The Reframe
War is not strength. War is failure.
It is the failure to see neighbors as neighbors, the failure to live what we already know, and the failure of the Golden Rule at the largest possible scale.
Anytime we are hating and killing our neighbors instead of loving them, we are failing.
To say this is not to dishonor those who serve in the military. It is to grieve for a world that keeps asking human beings to kill neighbors or to be killed by them.
Our longing is not to disrespect their sacrifice. It is to build a world where we would never need to ask anyone's child to die, or kill a fellow human being, in the first place.
And this is not a Left problem or a Right problem. It is a human problem. Our hatred toward our neighbors predates our current political divisions and America itself.
When viewed from this light, the “fall of man” (i.e., missing the mark and hating neighbors at population levels instead of loving them) began with the birth of civilization. From an evolutionary standpoint, our modern politics are fiction.
The prison we are trapped in is far older and far deeper than any party or ideology. It is the illusion that we are separate from the natural world and one another instead of seeing that we’re all neighbors in an interconnected world.
The Hidden Promise
Jesus warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand. But hidden within that warning is also a promise: a house united cannot fall. And that is not just America's house. It is humanity's house.
And what kind of house is it? Our house is more like a shared mobile home that we're rushing to take us to the Promised Land, which is a heavenly place in which we will all experience the freedom to thrive. But we’re fighting over the steering wheel because we have different routes in mind to reach the same destination.
If we continue fighting, we will eventually crash, and neither of us gets to our shared destination of a better world. And we would have no one to blame but ourselves.
Now, our warring tribes are using our evolving technologies against one another. As spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle warned,
“The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die. That is our only choice now.”
The question is whether we use our evolving technologies to amplify the better angels of our nature or the devil inside.
If we continue to use our technology to amplify hatred, spread lies, wage war, and to destroy our neighbors, the house divided will eventually fall. We reap what we sow. “The wages of sin (i.e., missing the mark) is death.” (Romans 6:23).
But if we choose to live the truth we already know, a world transforms. "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me," Jesus said.
When everyone loves their enemies, a miracle happens: we have no enemies.
AI can be used for Good, to help us end poverty, house the homeless, and expand our circles of compassion. But our worst enemy has always been ourselves, and now imagine that enemy with godlike tools with the same goal of defeating one another.
We must choose how to use AI for Good, which means we need to have a shared idea of what Good is. As James Cameron taught us from the Terminator movies, “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” How will we choose to use our evolving technologies?
Consider this: AI does not need to be conscious or have a heart to help us expand our own.
The Tears of Things
The ancient Romans had a phrase for the grief of war: lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr borrowed this phrase for the title of his book about the Hebrew prophets' journey from rage to lament to compassion. The prophets knew something we keep forgetting: the soul must weep to be a soul at all.
Inspired by the book, U2 recently released The Tears of Things as a song on their new Days of Ash EP. Days later, the war with Iran began. The refrain of that song is a lament and a declaration: everybody is my people.
There is no me without we. Everyone is my neighbor. Different words for the same truth.
There is no war without immeasurable suffering and loss, because somebody's children are always dying. Somebody's mother gets the knock on the door. Somebody's parent never comes home to their own children.
And the grief does not stop with the bereaved. It lives in the soldiers who pulled the trigger and must carry what they did for the rest of their lives. War wounds everyone it touches.
If we have ever lost someone we love, we know the pain of grief. And we know it is the same grief on every side of every conflict. That shared grief is itself proof that we are all neighbors.
The Great Reveal
There is another word we have misunderstood for centuries, just as we have misunderstood "sin."
The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek apokalypsis. It does not mean the end of the world. It means an unveiling, a revelation, a lifting of the veil so that we can finally see what was always there but hidden.
The apocalypse is not something that happens to us. It is something we reveal through our choices. What we choose at this moment, whether we choose love or hatred, whether we hit the mark or miss it. This is the revelation.
Our choices reveal whether we learned what our greatest teachers spent thousands of years trying to show us. Did we choose the path of life or the path of destruction?
If we annihilate ourselves because we were foolish rather than wise, because we ignored every cautionary tale and weaponized our most powerful technologies while claiming God endorsed the killing, we fail both as a species and spiritually. We cannot allow that to happen.
We are here to choose love over hate, compassion over selfishness, and unity over division, even though we have the free will not to. The sooner we decide to put neighbors first, the more likely we ensure our collective survival and thriving. The revelation is not destiny. It is a choice. And our choice reveals everything.
The Prison and the Prophecy
Some say what is happening right now is destiny, that this war was ordained, and that certain leaders have been chosen by God to fulfill a divine plan.
Here is a different kind of prophecy. Or perhaps it is a synchronicity, a cosmic coincidence. But it is not about destiny. It is about a choice and an opportunity.
We are all living inside a prison. The prison is not physical. It is the illusion of separateness. It’s the belief that we are not all connected, that some neighbors matter and others do not, and that we can destroy one side of the house without ruining it for everyone living in it.
This is not just about America. This is about House Humanity. And this is the prison that every great spiritual teacher tried to help us escape. Even Einstein saw the prison and called our separateness an “optical illusion of consciousness.”
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh summarized our shared purpose in life beautifully: "We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness."
In 1992, Daniel Quinn published a philosophical novel called Ishmael about this very prison. The book won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, one of the largest literary prizes ever awarded, created specifically for fiction offering solutions to global problems. Ishmael became a quiet cultural phenomenon, passed hand to hand, reader to reader, and people who encountered it felt like someone had finally named what they already knew but couldn't articulate.
Quinn, considered a visionary by many, went on to write a series of books articulating what he saw as humanity's collision course with catastrophe. He argued that civilization suffered from a "Great Forgetting," that we had forgotten who we truly are, that we are a part of nature and not apart from it. Quinn said we desperately needed a "Great Remembering" to find our way back.
To illustrate that even the most powerful among us remain trapped in this prison, Quinn needed an example. He could have chosen anyone in the world. Coincidentally, my book club picked Ishmael to read right before the 2024 election.
I was listening to it on audiobook during a trail run when Quinn pulled everything together near the end. I almost wiped out when I heard these words. After describing humanity’s prison, seemingly out of nowhere, Quinn wrote,
"Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can't, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can."
Think about that. Of all people in the world, Quinn picked Donald Trump. In 1992, Trump was a real estate developer and a big personality who enjoyed the limelight. Quinn had thousands of names to choose from. Yet he named the one person who, thirty-four years later, would hold unprecedented power while the world goes to war.
Quinn chose one person to as an example of someone who is taking in all that the world has to offer, but is unknowingly still living in a prison.
And he is still in the prison. Because no amount of power, no military might, and no certainty that God is on our side can free us from a prison we don't know we're in.
Freeing Ourselves From the Prison
But before anyone nods too comfortably, we should ask ourselves: “Are we outside the prison looking in, or are we just in a different cell?”
Trump did not create the prison. He is trapped in the same prison as the rest of us.
Whenever we are hating our neighbors instead of loving them, we are in the prison. Conversely, those outside of the prison are known for their joy and kindness and love toward everyone.
Quinn didn't choose Trump because he is uniquely flawed. He chose him because he is uniquely human. He’s a person with a fierce determination to ascend to the very top of our material world. But this makes him king within a prison.
Prophecy is not destiny. It is a warning and an invitation. Quinn's words were not a declaration that we are forever trapped. They were a diagnosis of what keeps us trapped so that we could choose to break free.
We need that "Great Remembering" now more than ever. We must remember that we've always been neighbors first and part of Earth and not a part from it. Our blindness to our connectedness imprisons us within an illusion of separateness.
When we look around with open eyes, or pause long enough to look deep within, we realize that something is wrong. We don't have to wait for anyone to free us. We can begin right now, today, by choosing to live the truth we already know. That is, we treat our neighbors as we wish to be treated. We refuse to let anyone convince us that the people on the other side of the street, or the other side of the world, are not our neighbors.
The truth that sets us free is that we’re all neighbors in an interconnected world. The prison is what we built when we forgot that. And key to freeing ourselves has always been the same: love our neighbors as ourselves.
The prophecy doesn't have to end with us trapped. It can end with us free. But only if we choose it.
Meeting in the Field
800 years ago, the Sufi poet Rumi wrote: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a Field. I'll meet you there."
That Field is where neighbors meet, beyond our tribe, the hatred, and the noise. The Field lives outside of the prison - and we already hold the key to free ourselves from the prison of separateness that has held us for millennia.
All of our greatest spiritual teachers would weep to see us hating and killing our neighbors. They would all want us to live the heart of their teachings and love our neighbors. And they are all waiting for us in the Field.
The secret to ending all wars is living the truth we already know.
Perhaps what we need is a Neighbors First Movement - not an organization, not a political party, but a growing wave of neighbors who commit to living the truth we already know. As Margaret Mead reminded us, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
The Neighbors First Pledge represents a starting point, not the end. The rest we figure out together. It's the only way we can.
One Minute to Change the World
The Neighbors First Pledge is 39 words. It takes one minute. It is the Golden Rule made active, a personal commitment to live the truth we already know. When we sign it, we are choosing to break out of the prison and to meet in the Field as neighbors.
"We're all neighbors in an interconnected world. We're one human race sharing one planet and one future. I commit to Neighbors First, beyond all that divides us, and aspire to treat every person as I wish to be treated."
If those are words you already know to be true, please sign the Neighbors First Pledge. Then reach out to two neighbors you believe will sign and share it with them.
Changing the world starts with each of us making a choice to treat our neighbors the way we wish to be treated.
Meanwhile, the attention economy continues to profit from our hatred and division at our expense. It doesn't care about what is good or what is true. It has no soul. We need to put an end to the attention economy before it puts an end to us. And now we have a tool that can help.
AI does not need to be conscious or have a heart to help us expand our own. Don't take our word for it. Try this right now:
Explore with AI: "Why is it important to love my neighbors as myself? After you explain, ask me a few questions to help me apply this to my daily life - especially toward the neighbors I find hardest to love."
What happens next may surprise you. AI becomes a mirror, reflecting back the wisdom humanity has always known - and then has the potential to help us live it. This is what's possible when we use our most powerful technology to amplify the better angels of our nature instead of the devil inside.
Truth must be lived, just as oxygen must be breathed, to matter.
Neighbor, will you meet me in the Field?
For more on why this moment matters, read It's Time to Make a Stand for Good and The Truth We Already Know.
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