Military: a manifestation of ignorance

What our ancestors did in their time to earn the label Industrial Revolution and have it immortalised as a peer point of progress is no different to the rapid expansion of the rich and the rapid oppression of the poor in the current age. The only difference is the rhetoric. Today it is the spectre of Global Warming that is making the poor people suffer, yesterday it was the spectre of disease and before that it was the spectre of Lions roaming the streets of Rome.
The hyper activity of people pursuing fame, fortune and posterity has created first our cities, then our transport systems, then the means to mass production, then the global markets, then the global politics, then the science of control. All the while the gap between the rich and the poor has steadily widened; with magicians in the middle placating the conscience of the rich with data charts that show conclusively the poor need educating.
Hidden behind all this hustle and bustle is a militant spirit, an iron will to succeed, that needs to grab what it can on the pain of death before the doors close at some ill-defined spot in the future when all of life’s opportunities are lost forever.
The madness of busyness, of pursuing dreams about possessing an untold quantity of atoms and dust, has created a world system of aggressive opportunism and stultifyingly egocentric goals that is militarily political, militarily economic, militarily educational, militarily philosophical and, ergo, militarily cultural.
To convert dreams into reality, to bring into existence a future that you have imagined for yourself or for your community or for your nation, it is necessary to control those around you by insisting on their conformity and acquiescence to your will. The path of less resistance to realising your goal means anyone who gets in your way becomes an obstruction.
The engine of this very aggressive and egocentric human endeavour is fuelled by the belief that life on Earth is a temporary experience that needs to be filled with every possible sensation of happiness before it expires. The Industrial Revolution poignantly illustrates this point: that a belief system based on lies will always bear bad fruit. The bad fruit is war and the industry of war; the competitive, nihilistic, bombastic activity of one upmanship.
The reason for war is simple. Based on the belief that life is short, the whole of cultural development becomes a focussed activity of getting as much as it can out of this life before it disappears. Anyone who obstructs this development is going to experience the militant characteristic of the corporate will of the body politic that believes in this religion of materialism. A body politic that uses violence to move obstacles out of its way is nothing more than a glorified bully of the first order. A punch drunk bully that sees obstacles as an individual, a neighbour, another tribe or another nation. A militarily equipped culture is a culture of punch drunk bullies ready to oppress those who are unwilling to live a life that lines up with theirs.
A belief system like this therefore is the primary cause of war. It is why God came to us as a man in Christ Jesus to refute this belief system as an unworkable set of ideas, pointing out in a prophetic way the consequence of pursuing this kind of belief to its bitter end. In fact, rocket science is not required to understand what precisely will occur as a result of holding onto a belief system such as this. It is a belief system, a belief not a science, that states your origin is unknown but it conceals from you a hidden clause that also states, “Believe this if you want a restless life full of unfulfilled yearnings and dreams, always under siege from others who, like you, believe you must be moved out of the way as an obstacle to their ‘progress’ in life”
What is required is the Light to be switched on in the subterranean world of half-lit minds thrashing about in the darkness of a flesh centred existence and for that Light to shine in the darkness and overcome it. The Light already shows that salvation from war, mutilation and self-destruction is not achieved by combating it with war, mutilation and self-destruction. But those who persist in this way of the flesh will never know the Light. A closed mind is a mind with eyes shut wide that refuses to see the truth even when it barricades itself against the door. God tries to break through our stubborn unbelief so that we can be saved from destroying each other.
Jesus cried out aloud, “When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no-one who believes in me should stay in darkness.”