ENDING WAR
An American historian, Will Durant, writing with his wife Ariel, tells us that there have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war. [ The Lessons of History , 1968], World War I resulted in 10 million deaths; World War II in 55 million. The United Nations recently reported that there are more than 35 major ongoing conflicts in the world today, and that there have been more than 250 major wars since World War II. Rabbi Jonathon Sacks in Not in My Name –notes the ongoing conflict between the three Abrahamic religions – Islam, Judaism and Christianity, also that the bible is filled with violence. Modern scholars view the account of Cain killing Abel in Genesis occurring at the beginnings of agricultural civilization; not the beginnings of man, but it is indicative from our earliest of times, of man’s propensity to violence. The story may also be based on a Sumerian story representing the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers. War h...