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girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen. It’s women who endure domestic violence at home, from their frustrated and violence driven warrior husbands. And it’s women who bear, and feed, and raise the children, raping warriors leave behind. But those issues never get negotiated. Those issues never come to the compensation tables. Those issues, the issues of women and children they’re left to support in the midst of war, as a result of war, are never redressed by peace treaties, never dealt with by male mediators, never factored in to the cost of war, never considered in the determination to go to war, never even counted as victims. Indeed, women have a place to fill, and a stake to claim, and a role to play in the world’s pursuit of peace. Indeed, women have a right to participate in the decisions that lead to the waging of war, to judge the strategies! They have a right to judge the strategies that are becoming the instruments of war and to suggest, no, to demand the feminine alternatives of listening and seeing and caring and relating and reaching out and feeling for the other that lead the world away from war! It’s time for women to take as much responsibility for maintaining the life of the world as they do for bearing the life of the world. Otherwise, we raise one world to destroy the other. Otherwise, we make a mockery of the very spiritual responsibility we say we hold to bring life to birth, in us, within us, around us.
with war? The important thing to remember is that religion itself is meant to be only a means to sanctity, not an end in itself! Religion is at best, the Sufi Master says, a finger pointing at the moon! Religion itself then, consumed more by the national, then the universal, more by the cultural than the cosmic, more by religiosity than real religion can become both an instrument and a purveyor of war. When we stop, you and I, at the level of religious rights and rituals, religious rogues and parochial rules, and call those things religion, call those things, our things, absolutes, we stop far short of the divine! We missed the moon entirely. When we stop at the level of denominations, throw up dogmatic drawbridges and fill the moats between us and other people with theological acid, on a planet of peoples, made plural by our creating God, we failed the creator who made this many-ness , is never the less, always, always one. Then we make our religions God and our God puny! Then we make, then we make our religions dangerous! Real religious people know, that creation in all of its diversity, is the face of God’s presence in the world. And so, all of creation, all God’s creatures must be reverenced tenderly. Violence against the other, violence on the scale that’s practiced, now, and here, and by us-- by us meaning the United States of America-- by us meaning the globe, over two hundred wars in the twentieth century alone. And these wars of ours responsible for sixty million—sixty percent of the one hundred million war deaths since the year 1700, defy all the definitions of religion we’ve ever had. And over ninety percent of those ungodly deaths, remember, are now civilian innocents whose number of wounded are not even counted, let alone compensated. Months after the war in Iraq had begun, a high ranking American official was being interviewed by TV commentators in New York City. Sir, one of the reporters said, could you tell us—you’ve told us how—you know how many American war dead we have in Iraq—Could you tell us how many Iraqi war dead there are? And one of the highest men in our government looked straight into that television camera and said, that is a number in which I have absolutely no interest what so ever. Ask yourself then, what of the feminine is missing in this government’s attitude toward how you impose a democracy on people who don’t want it? Only seven percent of our bombs in Iraq, our own government certifies, were defined as precision bombs. And only two to four percent of those, so-called, precision bombs, the military certifies, were accurate. And even the so-called accurate ones, in urban settings, destroyed property and people for miles around. Wipe out of your head, that fallacious picture of a bomb dropping through a smoke stack in the middle of a city! Surely, that kind of indiscriminate killing of defenseless slaughter, call it a collateral damage to justify your carnage, if you can, is clearly a sin against the sacrament of life! We stand, you see, we religious people, this religious nation, on the brink of human extinction boasting that we seek the God of Light. And so, we have millions of dead, trillions of dollars used for destruction rather than development, millions of civilian refugees homelessly roaming the world today, over thirteen million of them internally displaced, hundreds of thousands more of them on the roads, and all of them in rape camps, we so genteelly call refugee camps, by very nice people! Where women are unprotected and war maddened military guerillas and paramilitaries and even international aid workers, the UN itself admits, prey on the girls that were left behind. All of them, all of them, all of them, give a lie to the claim, that we are religious people. Whatever our president proclaims himself to be, he is definitely not Pro-Life! Lights (so bright in her eyes) The point is clear. Violence has simply run its course. War is now total, which means that war, as we define it, and we dream it, and doggedly go on making up moral reasons, God help us, moral reasons to approve of it, is now obsolete. It not only threatens the planet, it exhausts the resources of the very countries that declare it! And so in the end, don’t be misled for a minute. We will all lose this war, even if we win it! War is much more than military conflict now. It is social annihilation. It is the displacement of the innocent, the destruction of the beautiful, the defilement of the , and the disfigurement of the soles of the young, wounds from which the human spirit never really recovers, unless and until, religion rediscovers spirituality! Religion, history shows us, as often used in the service of the secular and determined by voices like the secular society around it, that are predominantly, if not always, male. Spirituality, on the other hand, is about enlightenment, the ability to see beyond all the things we make God, to find God. We make religion God and so we fail to see Godliness in religions other than our own, though goodness and holiness are clear and constant everywhere! We make human color and gender, the color and gender of God! And we fail to see God in the one who comes in different shades and other forms than ours, though all of our scriptures are clear about equality and all those theologies are sound. We separate spirit and matter as if they were two different things, though we know that matter is simply fields of molecular force made dense by the same energy that is the basis of everything. We are one, then, with the entire universe. This, and this. We’re not separate from it. We’re all simply in it together, swimming together in the energy that is God. All of us, Afghans and Iraqis, Palestinians and Israelis, Americans and Arabs, Christians and Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims and Jews, we are, each of us, just simply one more tiny sliver of humanity seeking to become more human, trying to become more Godly. But nor then can we ever be by degrading these others. Enlightenment takes us all beyond our parochialisms to the only present presence of God in the entire universe. It ignores color. It disdains gender! It releases gifts and it listens to voices not its own, precisely because they are not its own! To be enlightened is to be in touch with the God within us and around us and all of these others, more than it is to be engulfed by any one denominational construct, however good it may be. God has many faces and speaks in every tongue. The real religious knows that God is radiant light, blazing fire, asexual spirit, colorless wind. God is the magnet of our souls, the breath of our hearts, the very stuff of our lives. God is no ones pigment, no ones flag and no ones gender. And those who certify their God under any of these credentials make a new idol in the dessert! To be religious people, to be spiritual, we must think beyond our religions to the reasons for which all religions exist, to engender the life of God, in us and around us, both here and hereafter, hereafter of course, but here as well. Religion is at base, a cosmic call to cosmic consciousness. We must be conscious of the fact that we can no longer take war for granted. We took slavery for granted once. Ask a black in this room today. But, we have grown beyond that now, God willing. We take war for granted, now, say its natural, even then blindly tell ourselves that life is like that. But its not! Years of aggression studies show us that people do control their anger even under provocation. Years of anthropology show us that there have been cultures who did not practice war. The ancient Minoans, for instance, who populated Crete, for fifteen hundred years went without a war! The Vikings slaughtered and plundered, yes, but their descendents in Sweden haven’t fought a war in two hundred years! Years of game theory experiments show us that people quickly become fixated on strategies that assure fain foe everyone rather than risk everything for anyone and that even when the group gains, would be smaller than the possible profits for anyone who might conceivably defeat the rest of them. In other words, people regularly choose smaller personal gains in order to profit the whole group and themselves as well. We know, in other words, yes, that interdependence—France’s reliance on German tourists, for instance, makes war a lot less likely between the two of them now than ever before in history. War, we must understand, we must preach from the housetops, we must never allow anybody else to change our minds about it. War is not inevitable. War is planned. War is a choice!
a summit of spiritual leaders, both men and women, the United Nations, this international organization, has recognized the untapped potential, both of religion and of women spiritual leaders as well, to be a necessary force in the peacemaking process of a world in chaos. Mark it down! The texture, the composition, and the character of the political and peace making world changed in your lifetime. As George Clemens so put it once, war is much too important a matter to be left to generals. This is, then, a most religious moment. Why? Because religion is fast becoming the most dangerous thing the world has to offer! Now our newspapers speak of Jihads and Armageddon’s and new crusades and biblical land grants and blame God for all of them. Religion has become, in other words, religion worst enemy. Catholics and Protestants, Buddhists and Christians, Christians and Muslims, Muslims and Hindus, religious radicals everywhere, threaten the life of which each of them, ironically, say they stand. Clearly, it is time for women, the other half of the human race, the other face of God, to save both their religions and their nations. Women, the life bearers, must now give to the world the spiritual life this world lacks. Holy one, the disciples asks, what’s the difference between knowledge and enlightenment? And the Holy one replied, when you have knowledge, you light a torch to find the way. When you have enlightenment, you become a torch to show the way! It’s time for women to take their place in bringing spiritual light, to show the world the way in a world that is adoring at the shrine of the God of death, at their expense, at the cost of their children, at the destruction of the globe. It’s time for women to be where they can say, No, No, No, to war, in honor of Brahma, to extinction for the sake of Buddhism, to death in behalf of Yahweh, to massacres in the name of Allah, to crusading reprisals in the mane of Christ! It is time for women to speak a public voice against the wars that men have designed to protect them, without ever putting women themselves at the tables, where a few decide to wage them, or governments refuse to negotiate them. To do that, women must bring to the public arena, values that have been long missing there. The first value is the awareness of our political policies can never be really affective and if they’re not based on sound, spiritual principles, rather than on absolutist, religious precepts. The second missing value is the awareness that the spiritual can never be real if it ignores the political aspects of life. The third value that must finally be recognized is that women have another agenda, a different agenda, and it must be brought to political systems in a world gone mad with arrogance, with ascendancy to patriarchal power, to each of those values, to each of those values, each facet of the Abrahamic tradition that has formed in the West and now threatens the world brings a light to show the way! GO TO PAGE 3 Return to Page 1 |
PEACE and LOVE
How beautiful the world is when we live and work together in peace.
Global Strategy of Nonviolence
Mother Theresa said, “Peace begins with a smile.”
Welcome! A Global Strategy of Nonviolence
FOR the CHILDREN A World-Wide Unity Campaign
A Strategy to Bring Peace For the Children and Stop War
FOR the CHILDREN A World-Wide Unity Campaign
A Strategy to Bring Peace For the Children and Stop War
| (GS of NV) |
| GUIDELINES In 3 years, we the people, can change the world. PLAN ALL 3 PHASES PHASE ONE: Mobilize, in every village, town, and city,in every country! Select Demands and Deadlines One year awareness campaign Starting Event September 11, 2021 +23 scheduled events |
PEOPLE POWER The People must be HEARD, the Moderate Voice We want the children to see an overt exhibit of nonviolence. |
| PHASE TWO: Conflict Resolution and Disarmament PHASE THREE: Programs For the Children |
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| Origination |