Time & Perspective Quote by Neale Donald Walsch

Walsch goes straight for the throat of moral hierarchy: the claim that religion didn’t just preach goodness, it smuggled in ranking. The line’s clever move is its bait-and-switch with “ironically enough” and “sad part,” softening the approach just enough to make a sweeping accusation feel like lament rather than attack. Then he detonates the word “better,” a term so everyday it usually escapes scrutiny. By reframing it as history’s most destructive idea, he turns a common aspiration into an ideological weapon.

The intent isn’t to argue theology so much as to indict the social technology that religious institutions have often perfected: defining virtue through contrast, saving some by condemning others. “Better” is the quiet engine of exclusion - the logic behind holy wars and heresy trials, but also colonial “civilizing missions,” caste systems, racial pseudoscience, and modern culture-war moralizing. The subtext is that violence rarely begins with hatred; it begins with a story of superiority that makes hatred feel like duty.

Context matters because Walsch writes in a New Age-inflected, post-institutional spiritual tradition, skeptical of gatekeepers and allergic to doctrines that sort people into worthy and unworthy. He’s not denying that religions have inspired compassion; he’s arguing that once you elevate a group, a creed, or a lifestyle as “better,” you’ve built a moral ladder that invites someone to stand on someone else’s neck. The quote works because it targets the seemingly benign word that makes domination sound like self-improvement.