I woke up this morning to the headline: “More than 200 killed during religious clashes in Nigeria;” violence between Christians and Muslims killed more than 200 people.  Since 1999, Nigeria has had more than 13,500 people perish in religious or ethnic clashes.  Previously this month, inter-religious violence struck Egypt and religious violence escalated in Malaysia. The year 2010 had hardly began when the Lakki Marwat suicide bombing in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, killed 105 people and injured over 100.

The West is proud of its religious and spiritual freedom, but when we look around we see growing indifference between individuals, violence in our workplace, and corrupt government officials and business administrators. The world now has more sex-slave trafficking than at any other period in our history. In the United States our children are in crisis:

• The proportion of students injured by a weapon at school has not declined since 1993. [Youth and Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General]
• In 2004, 5,292 young people ages 10 to 24 were murdered — an average of 15 each day [Youth Violence Facts at a Glance, Summer 2007, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)]
• Among boys, 42% of high schoolers and 32% of middle schoolers believe it is okay to hit or threaten a person who makes them angry. One in five (20%) of the girls agrees. [Josephson Institute, 2006 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth]

It is evident that we are losing our moral compass - our diverse worldviews are not sustaining a growing spirituality.  Religious and spiritual teachers continue to preach recycled perspectives that massage the souls of their followers and bring wealth and fame to themselves, but do not have the spiritual power to transform societies.

It has become critical that new meaning is discovered in religion; that we begin to embrace its true definition: the experience of finding and knowing God with the goal to become Godlike. To unleash the passion for developing a majestic and well-balanced personality that is instinctively inclusive, moral, loving, and selfless, requires that we discover a new revelation of Jesus; that we attain an expanded understanding of his life and gospel of eternal salvation as it is offered in the fifth epochal revelation.  This is the challenge that is facing every religious and spiritual person today. 

In all our efforts to stabilize society and facilitate the solution of its problems it is our duty to “seek first the realities of heaven.” We find God through the leadings of spiritual insight, but we approach this insight of the soul through love of the beautiful, the pursuit of truth, loyalty to duty, and the worship of divine goodness.  When we fearlessly commit ourselves to this approach there is no place for sectarian rivalry, group bitterness, or assertions of moral superiority and spiritual infallibility. Societies will flourish because the decisions and actions of their citizens will be a profound demonstration of the truth of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.