Conflicts and wars unfold because of man’s ignorance, missteps and greed, not God’s. How self-indulgent and arrogant is it to label a war “a mission of God’s”, as if we know what God thinks, or that he needs our vulnerable flesh to correct the sins of mankind and re-impose his order through our sacrifice. He, who runs the cosmos and creates galaxies from some invisible perch far beyond the comprehension of our tiny flesh-encapsulated egos, needs our intervention? Is the whole purpose of conflict, as some would have us believe, to participate in a God-sponsored earthly cleansing of the wicked to hasten their arrival to Hades and prove us worthy because we had the “courage” to spill the blood of the delusional? What a medieval, cruel and uninventive God this would be indeed! Do we not find countless examples in our own life where by engaging in destructive behavior and repeating the same mistakes we finally awaken to some realization and lesson learned - the pain and frustration driving us deep within to see what we had convinced ourselves to be true was in fact not? Must then destructive conflict bring a similar higher understanding that its solution lie not in the ordinary un-evolved approach of responding in kind, but in somehow transcending it? Every sacred text speaks of brotherly love, gentleness and peace as the means to salvation. Would the road to it passing through planet earth be any less demanding for us than the devout? Does he ask more of some than others? No, God is not a randomly vengeful God. We bring vengeance upon ourselves as a cause and effect reaction to our own infantile unwillingness to look beyond ourselves and use our intellects to reason away ignorance. Shall we be placated by what has been done for centuries because it is the norm - worn out, one-dimensional beliefs beaten into us from childhood lifetime after lifetime? It is what we find ourselves believing with the utmost certainty, that which ruffles and shakes us to the core in disgust for one suggesting we dare question it, that is in need of introspection and change the most. Truth never angers and the arrogant cannot possess it. Are we to regard religious words of dubious origin any more valid than others, or a substitute for our own higher thinking? For are they not just words, the sponsors of which remain obscure and long demised? I contend inquiry is not a sacrifice of principles; it is a bolstering of them. We find either what we believed was insufficient, or that we were right all along. Either way, our true success and enlightenment is measured by our level of peace and contentment now, not by desperate attempts at convincing ourselves and others we know what is true, while using non-provable groupthink to obscure doubt that the exercise of our higher intellects would reveal as nothing more than soul-calls to greater understanding. Faith can be no substitute for reason, but only an extension of it. Reason must take us just far enough that the leap to conclusion is justified. However, this necessitates we leave our comfort zone to discern the subtly true. Thus do we fear discovery might shatter a lifetimes worth of false belief and shake apart our fragile world - a fate our tiny fear-driven egos cannot fathom at any cost. Therefore, we remain closed under the guise of openness, choosing a version of faith that will challenge us the least; not because of actual, but maniacally self-deceptive, self-imposed limits that insure this destruction of false self shall never occur. How jealously we protect what we think we know at the cost of what we might learn. Every fallen society that believed itself great has in retrospect erred in some grand fundamental way. What is ours? Perhaps it is this: How dare anyone invoke the will of God to justify a war born of political realism, self-interest and divinely justified force under any circumstances. Humankind’s challenge is not some romantic notion of good and evil, where a minimum of behavioral and moral codes is adhered to, while we till our tiny plot of land and chivalrous knights roam the countryside to vanquish “evil”. This is but a mere fantasy, an illusion of freedom. True freedom is of the heart and soul, to learn the lessons of past conflict and align ourselves with the Holy and Wise Ones. These are the true battlegrounds within every human being. Practice of the real principles of Christ and the example of all great souls of all religions is to refuse to strike out under any circumstances. Turning the other cheek is Christ‘s, Buddha’s and Moses admonition to us, yet we ignore it. For if we truly believed in a hereafter that promised everlasting elevation for the good and damnation for the bad, why would we possibly defend this tiny bulb of flesh that inevitably must separate from us eternity? Glory of war is a deeply deceptive manner of aggrandizing the survival instinct by those in whom great courage has preceded knowledge. The perpetuation of this myth comes at the expense of real soul evolution. Faith can often be a dangerous crutch for those unwilling to look any further into the subtleties of the universe. The archaic notion of a struggle between good and evil suggests God is somehow vulnerable or that he is so unimaginative as to reduce the mystery of the universe to parables fit for the comprehension of early adolescents. World peace will come like everything else, as inevitably as the eventual extinguishing of the sun; slowly but surely through individual peace, won by thoughtfully unscrambling Divinity’s messages encoded for us everywhere, within and without beginning with each and every priceless moment. In this way, is evil overcome by love, and in our perfection of it, violence becomes unnecessary. Evil is a tool of God to guide us out of delusion; it demands our higher response as a test, urging us to look within and stretch every concept and belief that defines us. It is an exaggerated reflection in us of what remains to be emotionally reconciled within. When a greater threshold of people realizes this, we will cease to be outraged by its existence and seeming injustice. The essential reason for it - non-understanding - will be eliminated along with it. Certainly, in this moment in time, like many past, where the great thinkers and sages of the world remain the minority, we are not ready at this stage of our evolution to forgo all conflict. We are not prepared to allow would be conquerors carte blanches to the soil we proudly proclaim physically “free” in the name of non-violence. It would seem simply insane. Nevertheless, as we move forward from the spiritually inert, a few lone voices such as Mahatma Gandhi will continue to surface when humanity needs them the most as examples to guide us to this, our eventual goal. These saints show us that true freedom is of the spirit not of the sword and that conflict, no matter how seemingly well justified never brings peace, but only its illusion. Persecution serves God’s purpose only in enlightening us and continues in direct proportion to our own limits on self-expansion. We pray and are sad for those who courageously sacrificed their lives in battle. It does not mean, however, we dishonor them by questioning the process that resulted in their untimely demise. A man killed in battle may awaken on the other side to realize his raw undirected courage may have been better aimed at enemies within, the true source of bondage. Every war is noble only when its lessons are learned - that the purpose of war is to drive us to greater self-understanding that will someday render it obsolete.