Love of power, religion and poverty; what do these three statements have in common? These three statements are, what I believe, the causes of war and is separating our human population from achieving world peace.
Peace. Overestimated, underappreciated, and above all: believed to be impossible. It’s true some say that this world will never know peace. “When the power of love overpowers the love of power, the world will know peace” (Jimi Hendrix). This statement is as true as it gets for this technologically advanced world of today. A lot of humans want power, no matter what the power is over, or how high the stakes will be. Many individuals are obsessed with power to the point that they will do practically anything to achieve it. Power within my eyes is wanted by the grandest of fools.
Religion: it has been said that it is easier to live without the consequences of reality. Believing there is a higher power makes it okay for us to make mistakes because He will come again and clean up the mess we made and die for our mistakes. Maybe there is a higher power, and I believe so, but what fascinates me is that there are so many religions, and many revolve around a higher power, whether He is named Jehovah, God, Allah, or Jesus. When you think about it, he is the same person or God. I think that different religions are so beautiful. I love getting to understand and learn about the different interpretations of how our planet was made, and how our human race was created. Learning about these different religions and beliefs is something we all need to take the time to do. Being educated about those two will help us become connected, or help us get a better understanding for our different religions.
Another reason that peace is so hard to accomplish is because of poverty. Some of the different places in the world that have the hardest times with war and violence are the places that suffer the most with poverty. For example when I visited Ghana last year I talked to a lot of the people there and they explained to me that many of people in Ghana who commit crimes and go around stealing are the individuals that are at the bottom of the social status chart that have nothing to live off. Also in Ghana there is a group called the “arm robbers”. These people range from the ages of 16 and older, and these are the people that suffer most from poverty. They are so poor that they will use violence to try and get practically anything valuable from other folks even if it means either wounding or sometimes even killing an individual.
Our solutions to resolving this issue of war and violence within our planet are alleviating poverty and we can do this by asking everyone that is “wealthy” to be generous and distribute their prosperity to others. Lastly we need to use religion not as a divider but as a unifier. If we are able to achieve these then our world would have a better chance of eliminating war and violence and achieving peace.