I am putting this question to all the members of Voice For Peace that how can we achieve the peace. How can we make the Voice For Peace the voice of all human beings?

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Thank you very much my dear friend Apolonia for your comment. I am really grateful to you for keeping the Voice For Peace alive. May God the Great give you all the happiness in this life and in the life hereafter if there is any.
Maybe by raising children so they refuse to kill. Learn them to worship all living. beings. How to do that then? I think if a child are seen, loved and confirmed it will have problems to find aggression enough to kill. Violence has a source as well as peace and it´s named "the child within" and no prayers in the world will chance that. if we do not pay more attention to our children we will always have new young soldiers ready to kill or use violence and we will have the society and the world we deserve..
The choice and the prioritation is up to us. It is not God that will give us peace....

God won't give us peace directly, because it's a task to us to learn such lesson... But if we will respect God's rules and if we will teach children about it, peace will prevail.
I've come across some interesting reading recently, as I explore the research into why some peace groups eventually turn to violence to achieve their goals, and others do not. There seemed to me to be so many possible causes for this--frustration with lack of accomplishment, etc.,--that I am intrigued to learn that the research has repeatedly supported the same observation: that originally peaceful organizations turn to violence only after dehumanizing their opposition. Groups that continue to recognize the humanity of the people who oppose them succeed in remaining peaceful. Groups that dehumanize the people who oppose them--calling the police "pigs", for example--often end up choosing violence.

This is an important observation to me, because it's absolutely critical to me that the groups with which I work, and which I might influence, continue to seek peace. I simply don't believe that we can successfully "fight" for peace; we can heal for peace, we can listen for peace, we can speak for peace, we can act for peace, we can practice peace, we can model peace, and we can teach peace ... but fighting is simply not peace.

I have a follow-up thought here, but I have to admit I'm pretty tired right now, so writing more is going to have to wait for later.

Take care, my friends!
Last week I promised a follow-up thought, and now I finally have time to share it.

I really appreciate the people here who shared pictures of children *being children* ... not hiding their circumstances, but not making them into something else, either.

When I did a Google Image search for pictures of children in areas that have experienced systemic violence, such as Palestine, I noticed something disturbing: I found pictures of children posed with tanks, children crying in front of empty bowls, children blown to pieces by war ... but far fewer pictures of children being children. And, that was a problem, because of my concern for building bridges.

If someone is already supportive of a peace mission, then pictures like those I found might tug at their heartstrings and encourage them to send money--and that's absolutely important and necessary. But, if someone is *not* already supportive of peace, then pictures of horrors just make the children in the photos seem more like "the other" and less like "us."

Years ago, a friend told me of her experience working in refugee camps in Africa. The first time she approached a camp, the first thing she heard—from quite a distance away—was the sound of children singing. As she neared the camp, she saw that a group of children had gathered in a ring near the edge of the makeshift shelters, and were engaged in a circle game involving dance and song. These children were displaced, hungry, and had experienced horrors … but even so, children are children, and these children were playing. This is part of what makes their experience different from that of adults.

In building bridges, in teaching people who are not already peace activists to care about children in other parts of the world, we need to show them children behaving in comprehensible ways. We need to see brothers jostling and posing for the camera, a boy who sticks his empty pot on his head while waiting in a long line for water, a girl carrying her little brother. We need to see a mother sitting on the edge of her son’s bed, laughing with him before bedtime. These pictures, and the others I included in the Imagine Peace! presentation, show children as human beings very much like us.

Only after our audience accepts that children from somewhere far away are still part of our own human family, are we able to motivate them by explaining that these particular children live in circumstances that we need to improve. After our audience sees these children—and the adults with them—as human beings, then we can talk about ending atrocities.

The lesson is that if we talk about the atrocities first, we undermine our mission. Children from “somewhere far away” already look different, and it’s all too easy to assume their “otherness” extends so far as to make their suffering meaningless. At that stage, showing the suffering in too graphic detail only ensures that the sense of “otherness” is affirmed, and confirms an already too common tendency to dehumanize those who seem to be different from us.

So, we have to make the human connection first. We have to make sure our audience, when that audience does not consist of peace activists already committed to our cause, sees the people in our pictures as human beings. When they find common ground in the images, when the pictures begin to seem a bit like a family photo album showing ordinary scenes of life in other places—but life not so different from our own, after all—then we can move on to educate our audience about the suffering the people in the pictures face, and about our responsibility to alleviate it.

To show the suffering first, before making the human connection, would be like trying to teach a math student calculus before basic addition—it’s just not going to work, no matter how passionate the teacher.

Thank you very much my dear friend for taking part in this discussion. I shall be praying for your peace and happiness. May God the Great give you all the happiness in this life and in the life hereafter if there is any.
If there is light in the soul,
There will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person,
There will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house,
There will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
There will be peace in the world.

~Chinese proverb
Great posting my dear friend Apolonia. I am really grateful to you for sharing your wisdom with me and members of Voice For Peace. I shall always be praying for your peace and happiness.

Nothing new, just a reminder ...
Thank you very much my dear friend Apolonia for your post. Actually I have been trying to convey my message to the maximum people and seek their proposals for peace in my area Bajaur Agency and whole world. Please join me in www.voiceforpeace.ning.com if you have the time and contribute for strengthening the Voice For Peace. I shall be praying for your happiness.

peace start from out your own heart and you will stay peaceful in the world, because everybody is the creator of peace and love.............. Embracing the Light of Love and Peace
many abundant blessings to you
I L O N A
~~/|\ ~~

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