War and Peace - Nietzsche vs. Jesus

Here follows another argument taken from the philosophical forums. Again, the italics are mine.

Jakob wrote:
Nietzsche didn't think world peace makes man happy, or that it justifies life. He might have had a point -

There was a time when mankind was at peace with his neighbor. That was during the Stone Age, when, like all other predatory animals, we instinctively did not trespass on our neighbors hunting territory. Our sparse numbers helped to make the maintenance of peace possible. When our success during the Stone Age increased our numbers, crowded hunting territories forced us to invent agriculture and domesticate Natural plants and animals. Towards the end of the Bronze Age our success at agriculture increased our numbers again and when our expanding herds started eating neighboring clan's pasture, the aggression began - first via clan vendetta. When crowding got worse during the Iron Age of national industrial development, the level of violence escalate into total war. Thus war was part of the price we paid for human development. Nature Herself reacts to over-crowding via violence. Take lemmings for example. All our wars have been over territorial needs. We could not have avoided it if we had wanted to.

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if peace was so important to us, we'd probably have attained it already - we're self indulgent enough.

All the eras of territorial warfare are now over. They have to be. Peace has become absolutely essential for the first time in our developmental history. Nietzsche was not around to realize that we would arrive at a total extinction capability. If he had known about the A Bomb, I am sure he would not have repudiated the message of Jesus. The stark reality we all face today is that if we continue to react instinctively to over-crowding on a global scale, then thermo-nuclear war is inevitable. Zero population growth is not going save us from the exponential effects of the population explosion, in fact that policy is already reaping grotesque results in India and China. The reason for the evolution of this this huge brain has not been to invent WMDs that can wipe out all life on the planet, but to turn our world into a cultivated Garden of Eden. We can use our amazing technological abilities in a peaceful manner to accommodate more and more people in less and less space. It can be done if we stop wasting most of our time, energy resources on wars and policing ourselves.

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It's a lot harder to make an atomic bomb than not to make one.

Making an A Bomb is one thing, dropping it on two cities filled with women and children and incinerating tens of thousands of them alive is quite another. I appreciate the fact that the invention of ever increasing;y efficient military weapons has always been at the forefront of mankind's technological development - which is the very tool we need for efficient planet management and the large scale engineering projects that will be needed to make it work - but as said, with great power comes great responsibility.

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Violence is part of existence - and a fundament of Christianity, let's not forget that. Christ's message wouldn't have come across if he hadn't been crucified.

Violence was part of our development after we graduated out of the infancy of our Stone Age, into the childhood of our Bronze Age and the rebellious teens of the Iron and Steel Ages. But we are now in the Nuclear Age and we need to grow up and act like responsible adults. We need to get busy steward this planet as a single family estate and stop fooling around playing soldiers in the childish playground

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Anyway, my reference was to your idea that Jesus was wise. That sort of contradicts your idea that wisdom comes only with age. Jesus was a young wippersnapper, is all I'm trying to say.

He was, and unmarried to boot with no kids of his own to be responsible for. His wisdom was focused on the one aspect of life that was predominant in his time - war and Rome's military might and Roman occupation of Israel. All of us can have clear insight into serious dysfunctional family issues when we are young. At 12 years old Jesus saw that love for the neighbor was the only ultimate defence against endless divisiveness and war. He was brilliantly wise in that arena for sure, but not wise enough to preach the message in a way that would avoid ending up in his Crucifixion. But as fate would have it, by sticking to his message even while he was being tortured by his neighbors, his message survived the Ages. The great problem with the Christian ministry is that it has invested to much of its energy in trying deify the messenger by killing off other claimants to the Divine ear, while forgetting the message of peace itself.