Please remember that certainty – not doubt – is the opposite of faith. The insistence on certainty reveals a need for control, not a need for love or understanding. Historians agree that much violence in human history has been religiously based, the predictable collision of two absolutely certain or dogmatic worldviews. Those views can be relied on to give us certitudes about our superiority, our judgments, and our actions, and they are also our most reliable justifications for scapegoating others. In light of such thinking, punishment becomes a moral mandate. If we are the loved ones and the “best,” then the ever-present other has to be punished or eliminated. These are the obstacles to love that must be shaved away in all of us.
— Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, p. 154
Photo: Cliffs of Étretat, June 23, 2026