On owing up to our own violence

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. 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.