T. 24. I. 3 – 6. Jesus: “All that is ever cherished as a hidden belief in attack, to be defended though unrecognized, supports your faith in specialness. This takes many forms, but always clashes with the reality of God’s creation and with the grandeur that He gave His Son.
What else could justify attack but specialness? For who could hate someone whose Self is his, and Whom he knows? Only the special could have enemies, for only they are different and not the same. And difference of any kind imposes ‘orders of reality,’ and a need to judge that cannot be escaped.
What God created cannot be attacked, for there is nothing in the universe unlike itself. But what is ‘perceived as different’ calls for judgment, and this must come from ‘someone better,’ someone incapable of being like what he condemns, ‘above it,’ sinless by comparison with it. And thus does specialness become a means and end at once. For specialness not only sets apart, but serves as grounds from which attack on those who seem ‘beneath’ the special one seems ‘natural and just.’
The special ones feel weak and frail because of differences, for the belief system that would make them special is what is their enemy. Yet they protect its enmity and call it ‘friend.’ On its behalf they fight against the universe, for nothing in the world they value more.
Specialness is the great dictator of the wrong decisions. Here is the grand illusion of what you are and what your brother is. And here is what must make the body dear and worth preserving. Specialness must be defended. Other illusions can attack it, and they do. For the separate thing your brother must become to you, to keep your specialness intact, is but an illusion! He who is ‘worse than’ you must be attacked, so that your specialness can live on his defeat. For specialness is triumph, and its victory is his defeat and shame. How can he live, with all your sins upon him? And who must be his conqueror but you?
Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you knew you were just like him? Could you attack him if you realized you journey with him, to a goal that is the same? Would you not help him reach it in every way you could, if his attainment of it were perceived as yours?”