11/16/2015

Is existence a perpetual struggle? Is life a war?



A young father once imparted a principle to his little son: "Son, remember this. You don't have to fight to be a man."

Many years after, the now adult son confides to his aging father: "Dad, you were indeed right. One doesn't have to fight to be a man. And as I grew up into adulthood, life also taught me that sometimes you've got to fight when you're a man."

Is it possible to deal with violence without using violence itself?

Creatures all as we are with self-preservation as primary instinct and with a strong tendency for insatiable superiority complex, in the perennial struggle for [whatever form of] domination among all races and peoples of the globe with their different ideologies (beliefs, doctrines, philosophies, and the various forms of "isms"), it makes no difference whether an individual's ideology is extreme or moderate or whether it is theistic or atheistic. Inevitably, people's capacity for tolerance to ideological differences will eventually reach its limit and then conflicts start to build up, and ultimately violence sparks. Violence begets violence, and when this happens, people get caught up in the vicious cycle of violence for violence -- consuming everybody in the process.

It is ironic that resorting to violence (even the so-called justifiable righteous violence) which is supposedly intended as solution against violence could only offer more violence as its guarantee.

Isn't it disappointing and frustrating that resorting to violence only destroys the beast's body but not its soul? You can't bomb an ideology out of existence. Bombs may kill adherents of a certain ideology but bombs are unable to eliminate the ideology itself. Will whiping out all adherents of an ideology off the face of the earth kill that ideology?

What will kill a beast's soul? Who can kill it?