Shared Peace

When I got up and was drinking a cup of coffee, there was news on the radio about conflict between the United States and China.

Yesterday, I visited a Catholic church. In one of the books of theirs that was in the pew, which had in it hymns, prayers, and a guide to the mass, they said that they couldn't invite non-Christians to participate in communion, but hoped that non-Christians would join them in praying for peace and world unity. 

I was impressed. Well done, Catholic Church. I totally agree we should all pray for peace. However, I arrive there by way of a different route.

I don't believe that peace is divinely commanded by an omnipotent deity, or that human conflict is somehow a temporary departure from that deity's will. In my view, it is plain (to the point of being self-evident) that--while not having any normative implications--conflict is as much a part of the universe as harmony and that one or the other has no greater realness associated with it, as you would expect to be the case if concord and discord were, respectively, aligned and misaligned with an omnipotent creator deity's plan. In fact, some conflict is such an ingrained part of life, most people don't even notice it. For example, they say nine billion animals are killed for food each year in the United States.

Nine billion creatures that want, but for anything, just to live. How many people even bat an eyelash? 

What this means, in my view, is that the relative amount of peace we have at any given moment depends on the speech, actions, and desires of individual people, as well as the collective speech, actions, and desires of individuals, as mediated through the groups they form (families, clubs, businesses, schools, cohorts, local political units, sub-national political units, nations, etc.)

I pray to Concordia for harmonious relationships among families, harmonious relationships among friends, harmonious relationships within groups of people within societies, and finally for harmonious relationships between and among societies and nations.