    9

    9

    One result:  from our best qualities come our worst.  From our

    urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart.  From

    our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest

    atrocities.  From our commitment to ideals come our excuses to hate.

    Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to

    don a selfless disguise.  We have failed to see that our finest qualities are

    often the generators of the actions we most abhor--murder, torture,

    genocide and war.

    For millennia men and women have looked at the ruins of their

    lost homes, at the people precious to them whom they will never see

    alive again, and they have asked that spears be turned to pruning hooks

    and that mankind be granted the gift of peace.  But prayers are not

    enough.  To dismantle the curse that mother nature has built into us we

    need a new way of looking at man, a new way of reshaping our destiny

    and undoing the secret pleasure we take in the shedding of blood.

    We must build a picture of the human soul that works.  Not a

    romantic vision that nature will take us in her arms and save us from

    ourselves, but a recognition that the enemy is within us, and that nature

    has deposited it there.  We need to stare directly into nature's bloody

    face and realize that she has saddled us with evil for a reason.  And we

    must understand that reason to outwit her.

    For Lucifer is almost everything men like Milton imagined him to

    be.  He is ambitious, an organizer, a force reaching out vigorously to

    master even the stars of heaven.  But he is not a demon separate from

    nature's benevolence.  He is a part of the creative force itself.  Lucifer, in

    fact, is mother nature's alter ego.

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