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And yet prison populations are growing. Poverty is increasing worldwide.Quote:
Well, violence in the world, anyway, is decreasing, according to this presentation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk
And every year we donate massive amounts of currency for creating new weapons of death.
Yes please tell me more about this peaceful world of yours. :rolleyes:
As if I haven't heard that one liner before.Quote:
Hyde your ideas are not good ones.
I'm not hopeless. I believe the entire world to be hopeless.Quote:
What I mean is that if you are hopeless, then you will not even try, so it's a dangerous enemy.
There's a difference.
Hope is fleeting.Quote:
Some people in the history of the world have lived trying to give hope.
my life is what I make of it, and how I deal with it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Hyde
I typed up this whole thing and got logged off. That really stinks!Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Hyde
When I read your response all I could think of was how you sound like my kids when they loose their shoes.
“ They’re lost! I’ll never find them! Maybe somebody stole them. I’ll have to go to school with no shoes and I won’t be able to go out for recess without my shoes. Just think of how dirty my socks will get! It’s not fair! I put them up and now they aren’t there!” It goes on and on, but I thought I’d spare you the rest. I say go look in the closet!
The point is that the world is not perfect and life is about more than total happiness. But saying how bad things are and how nothing can be done to improve is so defeatist. It’s the same attitude that keeps my kids from seeing their shoes in the closet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Hyde
It's everywhere we choose to make it happen. As I said, I have zero conflict in my life. When I have a problem I work it out. We don't battle or feel contentious in my family. I don’t struggle with my neighbors, not even the couple that causes trouble. What would be the point of that? I don't need an adversary. There is a difference in debate, discussion, and resolution, but these things can lead to peace. Name calling and false accusations begin I don’t care to participate. If enough people just refused to be involved with conflict there would be no conflict. The world doesn’t have to be 100% pleasure and happiness to be perfect. Sometimes we have to find happiness and peace in adversity.
I wonder if you feel powerless to make changes in your own life or in the world. Maybe that is why see things as hopeless. I do not feel powerless and therefore I have hope.
No offence mother hubbard but your last post I find to be so metaphorical and idealistic that for a person like me who only converses with empirical clarity such comments are pretty much un-replyable.
Not offended Hyde, not at all. It was a little Pollyanna:D . I think there are some points in there that you could address if you chose to. Maybe, and this is what I prefer to think;), I just made such a fantastic argument that to response can be made! :p
I must agree with Hyde that people will always be greedy and selfish to some extent but I think war is preventable on a large scale. With increase in globalization there is just too much at stake for a large powerful nation to attack another one. They would not risk the economic alienation and their investments. Thats why the westernized countries can only attack those that arent part of the league. Eventually when western cultures dominates all, would any wealthy country attack each other? There will still be skirmishes in impoverished nations but I think there would not be any major wars. OF course if thats not what you mean by some sort of world peace then.
I agree, war is a part of human nature. If history has not already proven that, then I do not know what will. They destroy each other, they destory other life, they destroy the very thing they need to surivie. The idea of World Peace might be nice and fluffy, but it is simply not realistic. I do not beleive (even if the world survies long enough) that it will ever happen. There is no indication of this. War, strife, crime, violence, these are all the makings of the human race. Never has there been a time when these things did not exsist.
Even back in ancient times, there may have been some communtities that were more peaceful then others, but there were still tribal wars, over women and territory.
"Civilization" really has not gotton all that civilized, they just came up with bigger and better ways to kill each other, and everything else.
Why in the first place do we simply say that peace is the opposite of war? Why are we making it seem as if we have only absolutes: absolute war, or absolute peace?
I don't agree.
Conflict, I believe, is inherent in human nature. War is a manifestation of this conflict, but not the sole manifestation. War is a conflict gotten out of hand.
Peace is a notion that involves not the absence of conflict, but the ability to move on despite the conflict. As far as world peace goes, yes, there will never be world peace. I agree to that. But that doesn't mean perpetual war.
someone started this thread with the desire to know other people's ideas about peace and how it can be attained and look, we started arguing, fighting with definitions. and stopped being peaceful. why don't we hug each other, present each other with flowers and smile? that way we will stop being verbose and peaceless.
(alas! those will only be cyber-hugs!)
lets be good to one another. as the Good Book says, love is the answer. it is better to be sinned against than sinning. we are only humans. we live, drink, eat, drink again, and do a lot of silly things and then die. why make life more complicated by going to the war? we've got 'call of duty', haven't we?
Then again it would be boring if we all just agreed on everything all the time. A good argument makes things interesting and spices up life.
Even in times of so called national peace without massive wars there is always many conflicts being fought.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohmyscience
( Class warfare for instance, crime, blackmail,scandals and ect.)
Humanity as a whole has never been in a state of peace nor will it ever see such a state therefore peace is a comfortable illusion.
Hyde! that is not true.. if we humans r creating all these wars & r destroying the world that doesn't mean we r right & that doesn't mean that there is no Peace..
Looking at the nature so beautiful .. the greeny hills ,., the blue sky decorated with lovely mighty clouds.. the moon @ the nyt & the stars.. the clamness.. the life as whole is more worthy to spread peace.. to live Peace.. to Create Peace.. We humans r destroying our earth.. we r those who created wars.. so its not impossible to stop it..
and once we do that we will regain our Peace .. It's hard to speard it though in this harsh cruel world.. that ppl struggly everywhere .. but its not impossible..
Hyde your ideas are not good ones. What I mean is that if you are hopeless, then you will not even try, so it's a dangerous enemy.
agree with nikolai....:D
Am hopeful .. and i believe in a better future.. .. rethink about ur ideas... about life .. coz it may lead u to endless darkness.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Hyde
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
OSCAR WILDE
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
Albert Einstein
“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.”
Vaclav Havel
U CHANGE IN UR HEART.. AND WHAT U BELIEVE IN ..IS WHAT HAPPENS...
BEST WISHES:)
After reading your statements on the slavery thread, I was curious to hear more about your views, and the OP to this thread seemed like the place to start. In response to this post, I'll first say that I agree with you that the world has never been peaceful. I agree that there is so much unbearable injustice and suffering in the world that the act of trying to imagine it could crush and break your mind. I agree that the way the world is made is such that none of us can truly exist without at least some tinge of inequality and without at least some shading of guilt because of that inequality. What you are describing are truths that I think anyone who has thought deeply about the ways in the world must recognize at some fundamental level. Certainly this recognition is considered a starting point to most religious and philosophical inquiry. All that you have said is also recognized in the fundamental Buddhist insistence of the recognition of perpetual suffering as the first truth of the world, and in the fundamental Christian insistence that all of us are sinners as a basic truth of the world. Whatever way you want to phrase it, I think you're right that recognizing that the world is a mess and that we are all a part of that mess is both essential to do and horrifying to do. The understanding can be paralyzingly terrifying; the guilt can be overwhelming. The idea of world peace as a practical reality appears truly laughable.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Hyde
Yet I am one of those people you addresse in the OP who believes strongly in world peace. I believe in it in the same way you do, but in different terms. I believe that it is something imaginary, something abstract that exists in peoples' hearts or minds: a "comfortable illusion" as you say, but "comfortable," not in the sense that it lets people off the hook and lets them relax and not care, rather in the older sense of the word comfortable, as something which offers comfort to minds in genuine distress. I believe in the concept of world peace even more strongly because I have recognized its impossibility in the world. Recognizing injustice and suffering is one thing. Being consumed by it is another. Yes, a person could spend his or her life giving into the chaos of the world, giving into the hopelessness of it, but what would that do except to waste a life, and possibly to contribute a little more misery to a world already saturated with misery? At a certain point it becomes necessary to not only recognize that the world is messed up but to recognize that worrying about it is not going to do anything one way or another about that mess. A belief in the idea of world peace, in the notion that on the great level there is a potential for change, can coexist with a pragmatic recognition that nothing has changed. The comfort of a hope for an improbable peace does not exclude or push out the torture of despair for a world that cannot seem to function as a whole without war of many kinds. Yet people need the hope as well as the despair; the inspiration to try to create what peace they can around them as well as the guilt of the peace they have marred around them, either by action or inaction. Perhaps this peace is illusory, but even if so the illusion serves a purpose. It serves the purpose of helping people to believe that some measure of peace within their own lives is possible. It gives people an ideal to strive for so that they won't settle for chaos, so that they won't allow the world to become universally devoid of love and happiness and peace.
Ultimately none of us as individuals are going to be able to do anything that will snap the whole world into a peaceful existence, so ultimately, while we certainly should be aware that the world is filled with suffering, the influence of our actions will only be confined to a certain, usually quite small, portion of the world. What is so wrong then, with someone whose belief in the possibility of a peaceful world stirs him or her to create a small pocket of peace within his or her own family? Or with someone who has spent his or her life trying to do no active harm? Or someone who is striving to act well towards others and to love everyone to the best of their ability, who has done practical things to improve the quality of life for people around him or her? Are these people perfect? No. If you judge people by whether they live up to the ideals they embrace, then you will be eternally disappointed. If, however, you have tolerance for the fact that all people are flawed, that all people fall far short of their own ideals, then you may find that many people are, none-the-less, doing a great deal toward creating some fragment of peace in their own lives and the lives of those around them.
Not everything is warm and fluffy, in fact very little in reality is. History and the present, and the direction the future is going in do not offer any sign of hope or possible change, there have been philosophers sense the begining of man that have contemplated world peace, but has it yet once been realizeid? No! Once relgion was thought as a way to bring peace. Ha! Look how that turned out. It caused more strife.Quote:
Originally Posted by hoope
Though you call his ideas bad, becasue they do not present some utopia dream world that only exisists in the imgination.
But they are plain and simple reality. The ideal has never in histroy become the reality. Becaue that is not the way the real world works.
Peoeple will always find something to fight over no matter what. They will make some reason for it.
ur ideas r a bit scary.. & though sometimes it comes in my mind too..Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
but i try to look @ the bright side.. even though it might be very little...
the world isn't so perfect after all.