Cult of War

"Every act of creation if first an act of destruction", Pablo Picasso; "Without destruction there is no creation ... there is no change", Oda Nobunaga.

Do these quotes justify conflict, war, death? 

In their defense destruction does not always bring loss of human life with it, but if it were it's hard to agree with them. Humankind is driven by war, there have been less than 200 years without war globally in our recorded history. It is true that war has brought many innovations that we use today and has quite massively advanced technology. War even in culture/religion and myths has more deities than love and peace combined. Here are the lists that I have compared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_deities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Peace_deities and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_love_and_lust_deities. 

What does this say about ourselves? 

We claim to fight for peace but how can you maintain peace after bringing destruction and enforcing a military rule over others. Furthermore, you force them to believe in your gods. In other words, the right to rule throughout history has been given to the strongest military power. There is a cult of praise forged around soldiers. This can be seen best in America. But this is not new, we can see this kind of cult in history at the Aztecs and in the Roman empire only to name a few. Not only do we praise gods of war, but stories are told about great wars in religion as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Heaven. The biggest problem in reality is that once this road to war is being undertaken it's hard to go back. Demilitarization can be an option, but you'd have to trust other countries to do so as well. The spent resources must be retrieved somehow, and this can only be done by enforcing conflict and war. Prevention of war has become preparation for war. It's a rather grim picture for humanity, and I wouldn't be surprised if a war driven nation would manage to also invent an AGI(Artificial General Intelligence) to completely nullify the defenses of another country. I think it will resemble the creation of the first computers and the internet for military purposes. This however might be ingrained in our DNA, as we evolved we became better hunters and maximized our chances at surviving in unforgiving nature. The better the hunters the more meat would be brought the higher the chance of survival for the whole tribe. Furthermore 5 out of 6 ancestor races have died, perhaps these were not as prepared for a human to human encounter or perhaps they went extinct for other reasons, this is sadly unknown, and one can only speculate. We also got lucky that the extinction of the dinosaurs happened, leaving space for evolution for a social mammal, the ape. This and the earliest forms of communities helped us alongside making tools for war against other mammals. Step by step we evolved into homo sapiens and instead of recognizing and appreciating each human with no discrimination we started driving cultures extinct. It is unknown to me if war is justified through religion or if the religion we choose to believe in, preach war. "Holy war" is preached by multiple religions, the conflict derives from misinterpretation of ancient texts. 

Who is to say that "the one True God" doesn't have multiple names depending on culture? 

In a previous post i have discussed about my belief in an All-Father("The deity variously called “Yahweh” or “Lord” or Allah” is thought to be one and the same God.") http://www.ipripak.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/bkreviewsw2005.pdf but I haven't properly explained my view on his existence, form or substance. The reason why we should not portray him is because we cannot even conceive such a powerful being. Our image of God is distorted by our own image. We make him a fatherly figure, as if God would have a gender or a skin color or a long beard. 

Who is to say that all these elements are true? 

One counterargument to this is "She is black", this view of God or "Kali" is portrayed in the Hindu mythology. Alan Watts talks more about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLg4AV60uWY&t=535s. Let's also talk about ethics. 

Is genocide not condemned by religion? Doesn't religion teach us to love the closest to us? 

We seem to forget the simplest teachings, the ancient texts talk about believing in God, but this mustn't be done necessarily through worship or by destroying temples and symbols of other cultures. By doing these atrocities or by performing genocide do you not only entice the other culture to hate and separate itself and even rebel against your own gods? What if the only difference is the name? The ancient texts taught us how to live a good life and how to be better versions of ourselves, even though some laws of God should be revisited we probably will not believe in contemporaneous prophets unless they can perform miracles. We are imperfect, we are not pure, personally, I think this is the fault of society and evolution. I think a big problem nowadays is that some nonbelievers act more responsibly and more considerate towards other humans than believers. They hate and discriminate less and are more charitable towards the poor no matter the religion. Without believing they will be rewarded in the afterlife, so wouldn't these individuals be more fit to ascend to Heaven/Nirvana/Eden and so on? Meanwhile the sects and religions keep for themselves and teach of punishment for the nonbelievers. They only help believers even if the help they could give to poorer nations could help restore a small balance to the world. It is hard to say if religion made the world a better or a worse place, mainly because it has been there since the beginning of recorded history. After all religion is part of our culture and just another thing that makes us distinguish ourselves from others. Leaving some of my cynic aside, religion gives purpose to life and I truly believe that purpose, no matter the purpose, is good. Under this assumption religion itself must be good, but we must differentiate between preachers of religion, especially those who only use small parts of the ancient texts to gain control over the masses and religion. Faith itself can't be bad, but as it happens with every important thing, humans cannot grasp all the information in an objective way or don't want to. 

What does it mean to be a religious person? 

Perhaps it means just to live a good life and be a better version of yourself, perhaps it means to read the ancient texts or perhaps it means to preach and convey others to your religion (although unlikely in my view as this is the exact thing that made problems throughout history and created conflict and war). Leaving more cynic aside, maybe we are not driven at war by religion, but it is one of the reasons that justifies war. A fully objective view would be to see war and conflict just as small parts of economic and political conflicts. The catch is in the interest of the elites. the less than 1% that run the world. Religion, holy wars and defense of your own religion are all part of an intertwined web of persuasion that are used to manipulate the 99%, or more likely the fit to fight that also believe in the preachers of religion. Lastly, do not believe the truths of others, seek the truth for yourself, do not seek justification of actions that contradict your morality from others, decide for yourself if something is right or not. Only when having full control of your life and accepting the possible

consequences of your own actions will you truly be free. And a free person is free to be judged by others, but no judgement should take his freedom away. 

Who is more justified in his actions the conqueror or the conquered? There are so many factors to consider but most important of them all, how is the individual affected? 

Mankind might not be so bad after all, but when we see our closest friends or family members die for no reason other than the will of others how can we stand aside and not do anything. Vengeance is enough of a driving factor to rebel against anything. ““Eye for an eye” makes the whole world blind”. At the same time many soldiers return home never wanting to return to the battlefield, soldiers, veterans that suffer tremendous psychological damage, many times irreversible after having lost their fellow men during wartime or after seeing the atrocities of war. We are evolving, for the past years we have been getting closer and closer to a nuclear war, but mankind will stand tall, and hopefully with a bit of help and luck we will manage to maintain peace and stop war. As a last note, if the money invested in prevention of war would be used for advancing society, we would have a better living much faster, but this, after all, is just, wishful thinking. Movie recommendation for this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej83QvHuiNI