Why “Creating Hate?”

Why would anyone write a book about “hate” — especially “Creating Hate”?  

Good question.

I volunteered on a religious tolerance hotline and many of the things I heard accepted as true by callers were so obviously, in my opinion, false. There are generalities about: Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, born-again right-wing Christians, “new religions” (isn’t any religion less than 3,000 years old, relatively new?), and there are accusations such as, “everybody knows” and ideas like, “this is just the way they are” and other unwarranted concepts.  There is list much longer than this.

Over the course of five years and after answering more than 5,000 calls, I developed some thoughts about how some of the concerns that seemed so groundless came into existence (not via a bolt of lightning — that’s for sure), so thought I should put them in a book for others to read and ruminate on.