The Politics of Peacekeeping

Week Three:

I thought it is fabulous to see so many religious leaders out there participating in interfaith dialogue. What is true, is that whilst a religious cause is stated as the reason for why many violent conflicts start, if one delves deeper, it is usually a political conflict over land, resources or exclusive political policies or corrupt political activity. Osama bin Laden’s story is told in one of the week 4 readings When Hatred is Bred in the Bone: Psycho-cultural Foundations of Contemporary Terrorism, and more or less Osama was rebelling against his family that were loyal to what he saw as a corrupt sovereign regime. Shows how research and learning really are valuable. Anywhere where there is a power struggle, politics is always involved, because politics is all about power.

When we surrender to divine will, divine will being found within ourselves there are no power struggles. We know that in all honesty the divine source knows best and can see the whole picture, whilst we in our human bodies cannot see the whole picture and really do not know what is best. Whilst I follow divine guidance from within, there is also a group process that can be used to gain and follow divine guidance from within that does not include using the scriptures of any one faith to inform the decision making process. The decision making process is not democratic because the decision making process moves beyond democracy. Everyone gets to participate in the process, but the divine source makes the decision. No arguments, no conflicts and the decision made by the divine source is presented to everyone participating in the process equally. There are of course two requirements, 1. a multifaith preistess or preist that can sit quite comfortably in any religion and has been trained to create sacred space, 2. each participant must be able to sit in silence in order to spiritually cleanse and purify in order to recieve divine guidance. This process requires faith and is a process I have learnt from within. It wasn't a five second flash of divine insight, but divine insight gleaned over many years of spiritual healing and sitting in a place of learning.

Both the article Religion in World Affairs as well as our postgrad reading Netpeace and the Cosmopolitan Condition: Multi-faith Movements and the Politics of Understanding, make the point that secular politicians and secular political theorists are against including religions in Cosmopolitan democratic global governance, because religions are seen as playing a problematic regressive anti-cosmopolitan role. Habermas, a political theorist supports the inclusion of multi-faith religion, multi-actor peace-building and interfaith religious dialogue and states that religions actually play a part in strengthening cosmopolitan global governance. For me this is really pleasing to see, at least there is one political theorist who is not exclusive and is inclusive of religion. I spent 6 years in a university studying social sciences, in which many of the subjects I studied were political. The hatred and prejudice expressed by the secular lecturers towards religion, really demonstrated to me that these lecturers whilst teaching against prejudice, hatred and rallying for inclusion of all voices at a political level, were not really reflecting on or seeing their own prejudice or hatred, they were projecting their own prejudice and hatred onto the religions. (just a bit of Carl Jung there)
This is where the spiritual healing process is really important, spiritual healing helps us to look at the darker side of our nature in order to transform the darker aspects of self into light. Healing between the political and the spiritual is really required at this point in time, if we as a mass conscious group wish to move forward into more peaceful times. At present we have forces of violence to keep the peace, the police force and the defence forces (seems a bit incongruent doesn’t it), but it is actually spirituality and religion that are meant to be peacekeepers of society. That is meant to be the role of religious leaders, three big cheers we are finally getting religious leaders that are actually fulfilling their purpose on this planet as keepers of the Peace.

Blessings Angela Bardon

I don't know how my Shamanism assignment got onto this blog spot, I thought I put it up on the Trance and Shamanism Blog Spot, it was written last semester for shamanism. Peace and Blessings Angela Bardon