The causes of a given war are multifarious and at times unknown or obscure. In general they lie so far in the past that the combatants do not really understand what led them down a path of destruction. In the chapter on God as Righteous Wrath we showed some of the origins of a war based upon virtue. “My beliefs are perfect. Your beliefs are not my beliefs; hence yours are wrong. I must convince you of the rightness of my beliefs. If you will not believe, I will do you violence.”
If one pays close attention to the gods of the combatants, in general he can find programs, metaprograms, strategies which depend upon the belief systems operative at the time of the war. War itself is based upon a very peculiar view of the universe: In order to create, one must destroy. No real war has ever proven that war is a creative solution. Human historians worship war as an instrument of change and hence perpetuate this untenable and unrealistic “solution.”
There are those who would start a war in order to profiteer. There are those who would start a war merely because they have a large military investment or because their industries need something to do. For a large industry a war is very useful in requiring an increase of productivity. A war very efficiently destroys that which it creates, thus assuring industry a never ending market with no problems of saturation and no obsolescence. War assures a continuing flow of new money for industrial research and development, in order to pursue the destruction of the enemy more efficiently. The enemy too must be educated to the new techniques and matériel so that the war will not be too quickly ended.
In the old-fashioned sense, God as War, War as an instrument of God as is recounted in the Bible, war between small villages in the Middle East, is not to be compared with modern warfare simultaneously involving several hundreds of millions of people. The old Gods of War are too small for modern human society. The Jewish God is too small. Baal and Maloch are too small. Ra is too small. Kali is too small. And the philosophies of all these ancient Gods and all the other ancient Gods, such as Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca of the Aztecs, are too small.
Documentation of the Spanish invasion of Mexico shows the smallness of two systems in collision. The Christian representatives of the Inquisition moved into the Aztec culture and took it over on the basis of myths created by the Aztecs. The Aztecs predicted that a blond, white God would come from the sea. The Aztecs were using human sacrifice as a propitiation device for their rather horrifying pair of gods, who would destroy the universe unless the Mythes made the human sacrifices. Of about two hundred civilizations the Aztecs’ Maya gave the Spanish the most trouble. The Spaniards arrived and started a “holy” war against what they considered to be these unholy people. They brought their priests, their Inquisition tools, their Machiavellian manipulation of political power, their weapons, and proceeded to destroy totally a previous culture, not only Aztec and Mayan, but many other Indian nations as well. On each side the main God was that of God as War. The Spaniards came with righteous wrath; the Aztecs faced the Spaniards, thinking they were Gods. Neither side won.
If either the Spaniards or the Aztecs had had atomic energy at their disposal, the planet would probably have become sterilized. We no longer can afford God as War. We now have God-like instruments of destruction. Our God must be greater than a protagonist in a human battle.
The basic assumption that “We are right and they are wrong” also must be treated as a delusion. As a substitute for violence we must negotiate; we must bring disparate belief systems into congruence through communication, not through violence. The language barriers of the world must not only be crossed but toppled. The belief barriers of the world must be diminished to the point of triviality. All modern technology must be used to increase the knowledge of all peoples throughout the planet. National security boundaries must be abolished bilaterally. Self-righteous virtue and concerted anger must be denied to those in power. Profit through war must be abolished.
It may be that all the above reasoning is idealistic and totally wrong. It may be that war on our planet is the result of orders sent to the human species from other superior civilizations hundreds, thousands, or millions of years in advance of ours. War may be a laboratory for the development of weapons to be used elsewhere. War may be the supreme form of human achievement. It may be that our short-term view of the destruction of human bodies, of human vehicles, one by the other, is a technique for freeing up essences needed elsewhere in our galaxy or the universe. If we want to continue with God as War, some such belief system as this must be carefully taught to all peoples on Earth. There are various methods for such teaching. For example, we can declare that it is necessary for the Americans and the Chinese to carry on their military research and their testing of new matériel in real wars in order to develop super-weapons which eventually could be used against extraterrestrial invaders.
Further alternatives are that the screams of the dying, the pain, the terror, the panic of war, all telepathically broadcast throughout our galaxy, may be needed as energy—as food or as fuel—somewhere else in the galaxy.
It may be that Earth is merely a small portion of some other beings’ laboratory in which they are testing out various ways of exciting various kinds of organisms to high energy states. It may be that the supervisors of this laboratory must every so often dump some sort of destructive antibiotic activity on us, the bacteria, to keep our numbers in control. It may be that they finally have furnished us with the formulae for our own antibiotics. We, as the bacteria in the laboratory they have set up on this planet, are merely living out their instructions. These instructions involve observing how organisms with our size brain can kill one another most efficiently. These superextraterrestrial beings furnish us with ideas of God, of the devil, of prophets, of power, of inflated egos, of megalomanic belief systems in order to play games in their laboratory.
Or it may be that we are just simulation computers at the behest of very much larger computers who are in control of us, and that we are simulating a war they are waging among themselves; or that they have agreed to take sides on this planet, some controlling one side and others controlling the other side. These lesser gods of cosmic war games are undetectable to us because we have post-hypnotic trance orders to forget the fact that we are under their orders. Our simulation does not include the simulation of Them. Our orders say: “Accept the orders that we give you in sleep. When you are awake do what we have dictated and forget that we gave you these orders in sleep.”
Paranoia has two components. We forget that paranoia includes a megalomanic center-of-the-universe arrogance. This state could easily have been programmed into us by Them. The only additional component needed to start a war would then be fear. Fear is easily excited because it has been built into the biocomputer as a survival program. Many things—including the natural forces—can be used to excite fear. Start a hurricane or a typhoon and move it in the right direction across the surface of the earth. Or begin a very large earthquake, or excite a solar flare and cause the particles from the flare to hit the earth’s atmosphere, thus changing the mood of all the earth’s creatures, including man. Or beam secret information into the world’s houses of power—that on the opposite side of the world are your enemies, so go there and kill them.
Such projections of responsibility upon the cosmos in the past were called God. Now we must perform an operation almost out of science fiction in order to simulate the same sort of results. Imbedded in us is a righteous wrath of our own fear, our own megalomania, our own arrogance. When we become angry enough to kill—then is the time to stop, to stand off, to find out how much of our program is biologically determined, how much is determined by communication with others through at-present-unknown channels, and how much is determined by our peer group and by the known physical pathways of communication between humans on this planet. The destroy-to-create simulation either must go or must be carried to its full extreme of totally destroying in order to start totally over somewhere else.
If there is a part of each of us that survives destruction of the human body, where does it go when the body is destroyed? Does it go somewhere else in the universe? Does it stay around here? Does it diffuse throughout consciousness-without-an-object? Does it become a spirit in a hell of its own creation? For Western man research in feedback to the living in any believable form is peculiarly lacking. Maybe we must give up any thought of a life after death, of a saving of one’s soul. Maybe we must have a belief system which says, “If I die in war, that is the end of me; there is no hope of a continuance of my identity beyond this life.” This belief system may effectively put the brakes on our killing of one another through war or any other violence.
It may be that our beliefs in immortality have caused wars, have caused us to hunt out others to kill. Apparently we have wasted our sacred feelings, we have wasted sacredness on illusion. It may be that each living human should be considered as God and hence not subject to the results of righteous wrath. It may be that for any one of us simulations of God as greater than human and yet as prejudiced must be abandoned. With the devotion of national resources to the idea that each human is sacred, that each human is a God, it may be that if the military budgets of the world are diverted to other purposes such as the survival and the education of everyone throughout the planet, we could abolish war faster than by any other means. An appalling amount of the national resources of the United States is tied up in the military machine—military personnel, military matériel, atomic energy, and military real estate.
Except for the Catholic Church, the Department of Defense is the largest organization for the management of humans which the world has ever seen. We might well ask, What are the belief systems that make it possible to organize war and destruction on such a huge scale? How did we achieve such a bias, such a prejudice in favor of destruction? Are we going to continue to worship God as War and hide this worship as if national defense? I don’t know the answer to this question; I raise it, hoping there are others who can at least begin to study the possibility of answering it.