Thoughts, Prayers & Art

A Reckoning for the War-Makers and the Sleepwalkers

You will not bomb your way to peace.
You will not drone your way to safety.
You will not bulldoze children’s homes and call it defense.
You will not flatten cities and expect anything but rubble to rise.
No scripture—no sacred text from any tradition has ever blessed that lie.
Not the Torah.
Not the Qur’an.
Not the teachings of the Buddha, the Vedas, the Gospel, or the Gita.
Every faith worth following cries out against the machinery of death.
And yet here we are, again
knee-deep in ash,
hands raised
not in prayer but in permission.
What kind of peace is born from a bomb?
It is not peace.
It is silence.
It is fear.
It is trauma that will birth the next war, 
the next martyr, 
the next mother screaming into the dust.
You think you’ve ended the fight
but you’ve only buried it in bodies.
And the earth remembers.
From the Depths of Wisdom Traditions:
Judaism calls us to tikkun olam, to repair the world, not destroy it.
The Talmud teaches that to save one life is to save the whole world.
What then of those who take lives by the hundreds, even thousands.
Who shatter communities from the sky?
Islam says: “If anyone kills a person…it is as if they have killed all of humanity.” (Qur’an 5:32)
Where is your humanity when the innocent die for your security?
Christianity follows a Christ who did not conquer with the sword 
but with a cross.
And yet how quickly Christians 
forget that the Prince of Peace
never dropped a bomb on a village or justified it with prayer.
Buddhism teaches that hatred 
does not cease by hatred, but only by love.
Yet hatred funds budgets.
Love is left unfunded, underfed, and unarmed.
Hinduism reminds us that ahimsa, nonviolence, is the highest duty.
But we have elevated profit over peace,
retribution over righteousness,
and we dare call it holy.
So here is your mirror.
Look into it.
See the blood on the hands of your nation, your votes, your silence.
And then ask yourself:
Do you want peace?
Or do you just want to win?
Because the path to peace 
is not paved with scorched earth.
It is carved by the hard labor of empathy, truth-telling, and reconciliation.
Peace is not weak. 
It is warfare of a different kind.
It is refusing to dehumanize.
It is holding grief 
without resorting to vengeance.
It is speaking the truth in a world 
drunk on propaganda.
It is choosing mercy 
when the mob demands blood.
If you want peace,
you will need to sit 
at the table with your enemy.
You will need to listen until your ears bleed from the stories you never wanted to hear.
You will need to repent
not just for what you’ve done,
but for what you’ve allowed.
The saints of every faith
the mystics, the martyrs, 
the monks, the prophets
did not kill to build peace.
They bled for it.
They stood unarmed before empire.
They built communities of resistance and hope.
And many of them died with love on their lips.
That is what peace costs.
Not steel.
Not bombs.
But soul.
So choose.
Right now.
Because there is no neutral ground 
in the face of war.
Will you be complicit in the myth of peace through domination?
Or will you become a sanctuary,
a rebel for mercy,
a disciple of holy disarmament?
Because the Kingdoms of this world are at war.
But the Kingdom of God
of Allah, of Spirit, 
of Truth
is rising from below.
In the rubble.
In the weeping.
In the ones who refuse to kill.
You will not bomb your way to peace.
You will only bury the truth.
But truth is a seed.
And even now,
it is breaking through the blood-soaked ground.
Let it grow.