What Is Peace?
What Is Peace?
Tim O’Connor – Center for the Preservation of Humanity – 11/19/2023
Everyone wants peace, right? We want to be free of the strife and stresses in our lives so that we can have peace of mind. Most people do not go around looking to make war, most people want to live their lives without threats of imminent physical harm hanging over their heads. We have constructed entire civilizations, legal codes to address violations, and ethical guidelines within institutions to promote peaceful relationships between mankind. Religions, to greater and lesser extents, offer a guideline to live with one another peacefully, including those who do not share our beliefs. It seems that everyone is promoting peace but there are very few who promote a peace based on justice, accountability, and, dare I say it, the capability to make war should the need arise. Instead, peace is being promoted by demanding narrative compliancy, applying the ethics of appeasement, and destroying the ability to wage effective defense should the need arise. Under the modern interpretation of peace, lawlessness is the destination. We will not have peace nor will we have civilized societies if we continue to carry on this way.
When I say that I am peaceful, I mean it. I have the ability to go to war. I have a choice to make to be peaceful or to wage war. Without the means, the idea of peace is meaningless. If the ability to make war is not an option, then the idea of peace is really a fact of inability. Far too many people these days believe that peace can only be achieved through disarmament efforts. And those efforts are not limited to firearms and munitions restrictions and bans. Even more important than the means to make war is the ability to communicate messages of peace while the option remains to be overtly hostile and hateful. Our speech is being disarmed more broadly and effectively than even the ability to possess firearms.
Try this to see how it works. Go to a social media platform and post Genesis 1:28, Genesis 9:7, and, if you happen to be feeling really froggy, Leviticus 20:10-21. Then pose the question about how we are supposed to be fruitful and multiply if we are engaged in non-reproductive sexual relationships. There is no argument which can be levied against G-d’s very clear intentions that humans have sexual activities to reproduce. So, those in favor of sexual activities outside of G-d’s teachings have limited options. One option, the peaceful option, is that they can accept the factual argument, repent, and seek the face of G-d. They avoid doing this like they would avoid the plague. They are left with two options – go to war against G-d by claiming He doesn’t exist or go to war against free speech by claiming the one pointing out the fact of G-d’s teaching is a hateful bigot who shouldn’t have their speech tolerated. Often, the two wars are engaged in simultaneously.
It is not a peaceful conversation to be told one is a hateful bigot who believes in fairy-tales because the lifestyle choices of a bunch of degenerates state that must be the case. The same is true of those preaching against the existence of free-will, the benefits of capitalism, and the value of the lessons G-d gave us to live by in the Torah.
I recently engaged in a social-media conversation with a so-called Christian who, like most Christians, wanted to solely focus on the non-red-letter texts of the New Testament. I read aloud Hebrews 10 from the Complete Jewish Bible. Having read the King James Bible cover to cover, exploring the New Testament in the CJB is a bit of a new experience (I do need to sit down and read that version cover to cover) which is why I read it aloud. Honestly, I am always kind of fascinated when I read the CJB’s New Testament. The host immediately banned me from participating as soon as I was done reading because the host hated the inclusion of the words Torah (verses 1, 8, 16, 28), cohen (verses 11 and 21), Ruach HaKodesh (verse 15), Adonai (verses 16 and 30), and parokhet (verse 20). Instead of trying to deepen their understanding of the New Testament by studying its origins, the host just silenced me entirely.
The host should never, ever, make the claim they are peaceful. That host is engaged in war against anyone who they have deemed ideologically impure. What’s important in the war on speech is narrative compliance. In Christian circles (depending on which of the 40,000-plus denominations one is engaging with) it is mostly demanding that the Trinity is true, Jesus IS G-d, and that we are living in the age of the New Covenant. Nevermind that none of this is supported by the Bible, their narrative is the most important thing and the truth suffers under it. Similar phenomena surround conversations with Muslims claiming that Jesus was Islamic, that G-d isn’t real, that the earth is round, that the earth is flat, that being gay isn’t immoral, patently false historical claims made by revisionists, governmental systems, economic systems, or that all of the problems in the world are because of a singular entity or ethnicity. It’s not about truth, it’s about narrative compliancy and the only way to enforce false narratives is to go to all-out war against speech itself.
I spend a lot of time on the war speech because it is the way we communicate the thoughts in our heads. Those same thoughts, combined with passions, means, and our hearts is what drives us to actions. When there are public demonstrations with thousands chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” I have no problem with them gathering and chanting it peacefully. The problem I have is with the fact that protests featuring those degenerates are not peaceful. They are making war against the free-will of people in the vicinity of what I describe as riots. The chant they scream is one demanding the brutal deaths of 9 million people. And the reason they are chanting at all is because the response to the actions of these degenerate’s cousins in Gaza, Hamas, left over 1,200 Israeli citizens butchered, burned, tortured, kidnapped, and raped.
The events of October 7, 2023 are still roiling the world. While there are many other fronts on which humanity in general is being attacked, this one event in particular is the one dividing everyone. They are dividing us along the lines of what peace is and what people think peace is. Many people who claim to be for peace have come to the forefront and shown themselves incapable of and/or recalcitrant towards actual peace instead wishing to have a peace which will result in perpetual violence. Israel, for as much as I dislike their entire system of government, is doing exactly what should be done to the violent actors who perpetrated October 7. It is all of Palestine demanding the Jews be exterminated by deciding that history only starts in 1948, or 70 AD….
Under the historical revisionism of the perpetrators of violence, the actions of Hamas have been endorsed because of the belief – an incredibly wrong belief – that modern Israel is an apartheid state. That belief is forced to ignore the fact that Gaza was given autonomy in order to foster peace. It is another instance of appeasement which never has and never will work. The Israeli’s themselves should be well aware of the inevitability of violence rising from attempts at appeasement, yet, they seem to have forgotten the way that works out in the end. The idea that a terrorist group which has avowed itself to murdering everyone who opposes them – especially Israeli’s and Jews in particular – could peacefully coexist next to the people they have targeted for extermination is nothing but appeasement. But, the world applauded the effort. Now that it has gone sour and the fruits have been realized the Israeli government is forced to make peace through eliminating the violent in Gaza.
A claim could be made over who owns the land but it is one which shows the perpetrators of violence in an even worse light. The people who inhabited Canaan in the Bible were cannibalistic, worshiped idols exclusively, and went out of their way to show their hatred for G-d. They actively sought to do violence to G-d but, lacking the ability to war against Him directly, resorted to desecrating the land, made abomination the norm, and celebrated the most unholy aspects of their violence-filled way of life the most fervently. These people – the forefathers of the people in Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon (to name a few) – are the same people who went to war against G-d in the first place. They committed violence against His creation to do it. Whether or not linkages by blood have been passed down from then to now – billions of people once more have the same ideas to do violence against G-d by exterminating what He created. And others have an idea to do what is righteous in the eyes of G-d by following his word. Because we have free-will we can choose which of these overly-broadened categories we are going to pursue. We can even abruptly change course by changing our hearts and minds.
Even in Egypt, when the pharaoh's heart was hardened and he refused to let the Hebrews go, Egyptian people turned towards G-d and fled the pharaoh's armies as they pursued them. The same, I pray, happens with these modern progenitors of lies and violence. All of the people wanted peace – the Egyptian’s wanted it just as badly as the Hebrews did. The difference was that the Egyptians were beating the snot out of an enslaved people on a daily basis to effect their peace and the Hebrews, at G-d’s behest, were taken from their bondage and eventually set free. If the Egyptian’s were not violent in the first place, G-d would not have had to perform the seven plagues against Egypt. The Egyptian’s used their free-will to perpetrate violence and all the Hebrews wanted to do was to be in peace.
When they arrived in the promised land G-d had already noted that none of them, with two exceptions, would actually possess any of it. They didn’t trust G-d while they were in the desert. They saw the inhabitants of the land G-d gave them to possess and their trust in G-d fled as they feared the inhabitants. Yet, when the Hebrews did enter the land, they conquered. Many try to state that this was an act of genocide perpetrated by G-d. This is the only claim the people of who call themselves Palestinian can make which has even a drop of legitimacy. And even this claim is nonsense. The people of those lands were committing extreme violence against G-d’s creation with that as their intention. The Hebrews, in this sense, were G-d’s display of wrath towards the evildoer’s of Israel’s and Joshua’s days. When the Hebrews strayed from G-d, His wrath flared against them, too. When they repented and again lived in obedience, they were again blessed.
The point is that peace, as defined in the Bible, will only be achieved by following the Ten Commandments in general. And humanity, for all of it’s achievements in all sorts of fields and developments and technological feats, has decided to ignore them because they constrain their desires to do things their own ways. Those ways are violence towards G-d. I can already hear multitudes screaming that following the Ten Commandments isn’t what they believe and that they don’t apply in today’s world. But, they do. What is written next is not a form of hate speech or an act of violence against non-believers, it is an act of love and a desire to have a human future on this earth. From Exodus 20, here are the Ten Commandments which all of us are supposed to keep:
Then God said all these words:
א 2 “I am Adonai your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the abode of slavery.
ב 3 “You are to have no other gods before me. 4 You are not to make for yourselves a carved image or any kind of representation of anything in heaven above, on the earth beneath or in the water below the shoreline. 5 You are not to bow down to them or serve them; for I, Adonai your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but displaying grace to the thousandth generation of those who love me and obey my mitzvot.
ג 7 “You are not to use lightly the name of Adonai your God, because Adonai will not leave unpunished someone who uses his name lightly.
ד 8 “Remember the day, Shabbat, to set it apart for God. 9 You have six days to labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Shabbat for Adonai your God. On it, you are not to do any kind of work — not you, your son or your daughter, not your male or female slave, not your livestock, and not the foreigner staying with you inside the gates to your property. 11 For in six days, Adonai made heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. This is why Adonai blessed the day, Shabbat, and separated it for himself.
ה 12 “Honor your father and mother, so that you may live long in the land which Adonai your God is giving you.
ו 13 “Do not murder.
ז (14) “Do not commit adultery.
ח (15) “Do not steal.
ט (16) “Do not give false evidence against your neighbor.
י 14 (17) “Do not covet your neighbor’s house; do not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox, his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
I can hear those religious claimants saying well, that’s only for the Jews, that doesn’t apply to me. ‘I’m under the New Covenant.’ some say. ‘G-d doesn’t exist so those don’t matter’ others will say. ‘That’s not what Allah, Brahma, Buddha, or the experts say so those aren’t important’ some claim. Even some of the People of the Book convince themselves that some of these don’t apply to them. Well, I will contend that, at least these, apply to every single person on earth. It is violence against G-d to not follow them and it bears it’s fruits in lawlessness.
Even if you choose to reject the first four Commandments out of hand due to the delusion that G-d doesn’t exist, violating the final six will constitutes violence against one another on this earth. Following the final six will result in peace here on earth. Following the first four will allow G-d to bless the peace he wishes for us. The Ten Commandments (themselves a summary of the 613 mitvot in the teachings of G-d) are the barebones minimum of what Yeshua spoke of in Mark 12:28-31 when he stated that loving G-d completely and loving our neighbors as ourselves are the most important rules to keep. The Ten Commandments are a summary of how to love G-d and our neighbors. In other words the Ten Commandments are peace. Violence towards G-d and towards our neighbors come about by deciding to ignore one of these Commandments.
And that doesn’t sit well with the claimants of creating peace because they have decided to ignore what peace actually is. Peace is a state which occurs when these Commandments are followed. Peace is assaulted by the violence of those who reject G-d and His ways or who cherry-pick through the Commandments and discard the one’s they don’t like. Thus, peace is also defending against that violence. Those who claim peace should be bestowed on those who are warring against G-d by decimating everything G-d created – DNA, mankind, the 10 Commandments – have a really warped view of what peace actually is. What is described in Matthew 24:12 and Isaiah 5 is what is happening right now. We are living through prophesy because the concept of peace as defined by men with ungodly agendas have redefined what it is.
Peace as it is defined today is devoid of any moral underpinning to effect it. Any action which comes about to defend peace from the darkness and depravity of violence is shunned by the loudest of the advocates for peace. Maybe they are temporarily forgetting that peace is the absence of violence? Maybe, instead of remembering that defending peace is only possible through strength, they have decided that the ideals of peace need to be applied no matter what threats one faces or what acts of violence have come to pass. Thus, we end up with disarmament efforts, diplomacy based on a desire to appease enemies who want to slaughter everyone else, and a state of lawlessness.
The two major wars which have broken out in the last 2 years – Russia entering Ukraine and now Hamas slaughtering Israeli citizens – have really shown me that peace is not much more than a platitude. Why is Russia in Ukraine? One reason is because the West wanted Russia to invade. The West intentionally provoked Russia for over a decade knowing that sooner or later the threat of the West on the doorstep of Russia would lure them in. The West proved itself to be less peaceful than even Russia in this affair. Russia has long held the policy of making sure the West did not expand onto it’s borders for their own peace. The West knew that their actions would push the Russian’s geopolitically into the arms of China, gravely disrupt food production both out of Ukraine and because the fertilizers produced in Ukraine and Russia would become far more scarce, and drive up the price of oil and the US and Europe to go to avowed Marxist dictators in places like Iran and Venezuela to secure sources of oil.
Now that Ukraine, and by extension the West, has lost it’s war, the West seems itchy to start a full scale war against Iran. What better way is there to start a war than to give Iran billions of dollars fully aware that it would go straight towards violent actors in and around Israel? Now that Israel is retaliating against those who slaughtered their citizens while attempting to minimize civilian casualties, everyone and their mother seems to be out in the street demanding Israel stop defending itself. Israel is doing what it should have done in 2006 when Palestinians voted a terrorist group which denies Israel’s right to exist. Instead, Israel stood by it’s version of peace and allowed the Palestinians in Gaza to do their own thing because they mistook appeasement for peace. Now, finally, they are fighting to instill peace in the land by defending it against violence.
The problem is that Israel has fallen into a trap which is designed to draw in the West against an array of nations in the Middle East including Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and potentially several other nations including Turkey and possibly even Egypt. The United States is releasing billions of dollars to Iran and, at the same time, blowing up targets and killing combatants that those funds are supporting. That’s not promoting peace, it is a false flag in and of itself.
All of these events are due to the same cause. It is the cause that Yeshua stated in Matthew 24:12. Right before He noted that the love of many will grow cold due to increased distance from Torah in verse 12, He warned us that there will be false teachers leading people astray in verse 5. Verse 6 warns of wars and rumors of wars, verse 7 promises conflicts between different peoples, races, and ethnicities, as well as earthquakes and famines, verse 9 tells us that those who follow Him will be persecuted with prison, torture, and death. In order to follow false teachings we are encouraged to pay no heed to what G-d wrote in the 10 Commandments. Honoring mothers and fathers has been turned into appeasing their wishes whether wise or not. Murderers are set free from punishment. Adultery is celebrated. Theft is the operating procedure of wealth accumulation from the stand point of nearly all of the corporations and governments of the world. Lying testimony is openly admitted into court while mountains of evidence pertaining to the truth are buried and suppressed. It is far too common for people to envy one another’s possessions instead of figuring out how to get what they desire on their own. We live in the times of violence and lawlessness Yeshua stated in, the beginning of the birth-pangs, meaning all of this will only grow worse.
But it doesn’t have to. We could all begin seriously applying the 10 Commandments to our daily lives. We could begin holding those who break those laws accountable for their actions. But, more importantly, we could follow the first four once again and seek the face of G-d. The more people who do this, the more people who will be peaceful and the less violence there will be in the world. That doesn’t mean that the capability for violence doesn’t exist – it means that we will choose peace unless we are forced to defend against violence and possess the tools to effect the defense. It also doesn’t mean we refuse to recognize the violence intended towards us by groups claiming they want peace. There are lessons to be learned from the Nazi regime, and this is an important one, they enjoyed making overtures of peace official right before they annihilated a nation. The Nazi’s routinely broke all of the 10 Commandments in order to do as they pleased which was to break all of the other Commandments they hadn't gotten to yet. They hated G-d, so they told lies with impunity. They told the lies because they coveted everything their neighbors had. Once they gained control of a nation they raped, murdered, and plundered the people. They testified falsely. They dishonored their mothers and their fathers. Why? Because they hated G-d. Mao was no different. Stalin shared the same views.
The United States has slipped into this legacy of G-d hating murderers, rapists, and thieves too. We see our ‘elected’ representatives on the nightly news wasting money they stole to give to dictators around the world and to fund global greenhouse gas emissions standards compliance. Laws designed to allow thieves to walk into retail stores and loot without consequences are the ‘in’ thing these days. Their official stance is still to find a way to medically rape us with injections. They demand babies be murdered and euthanasia be normalized. They seek any pretext to take children from their mother’s arms and spit at fathers altogether. They lie to get into office, in their business dealings, and about what their legislation actually does.
And they lie about peace. They reject the 10 Commandments and have no concept of peace to begin with. Peace is not disarming the citizenry. It is not accommodating the desires of the envious arriving illegally in our nation. It is not paying to extend wars conducted with no end goal. It is not creating wars based on carefully crafted false flags. Peace, properly defined as a state of being free from violence while maintaining the means to combat violence, will never occur under a system which calls good evil and evil good. Peace for it’s own sake is a doctrine of violence. Our politicians and many other entities have decided that peace is the end all be all. They have not figured out that peace is one of the many fruits of obedience to G-d. And they won’t figure it out until they stop hating G-d.
Teddy Roosevelt was correct when he said “speak softly and carry a big stick.” But, when you have a big stick, the ambitions of men often cause them to use that stick as a bully demands the lunch money of his physically weaker peers. Teddy Roosevelt used US military assets in the Caribbean to force the production of fruit to be sold in the United States. He wasn’t a peaceful man and he used that stick he carried around to bludgeon anyone who opposed him as if he was a caveman demanding the wife of another caveman.
Peace is not pacifism. Peace is not appeasing violence. Peace is following and enforcing the laws of G-d Almighty. Peace requires us to defend against violence. Today we have those who proclaim peace do so to carry out acts of violence so they can pretend to hold the moral high ground when in reality they are the instigators and originators of violence. Hamas is a perfect example of this. The claimants to peace, the ones who preach Israel is an apartheid state and we need to follow international rules (purely evil codified violence) to hold Israel accountable for their actions in a quest to make peace in the face of existential violence, are pure evil. We need to get back to G-d and we need to it now otherwise, under the guise of peace, these G-d-hating fools are going to usher in an age of unprecedented violence which persists until G-d sends His Son to cleanse the earth of violence (using violence, of course) to make peace.
I’m ready for it now and there is still so much more to endure….
Bless G-d and G-d bless.