At what level of Life are you less willing to kill without a second thought, or be bothered by it? When do you start saying that killing is the wrong choice?
At what level of Life does the death of that Life give you pause? It’s a question that I think about especially when I’m on my way to Okemos to take care of errands and business once a week. Did I mention that while I contemplate that, I’m typically driving a gas-laden automobile down the roads at some 45-55mph, crushing all sorts of forms of life out of existence upon the roadway at any given instant, snuffing them in the hairbreadth of an instant. That doesn’t include, of course, the ones that are disintegrated against the body of my “metal carriage” upon impact. I’m a killing machine even while I contemplate why that bothers me because people generally don’t really give it much thought as they scurry along on their own way to the teller and the markets for rations and trinkets alike.
Why is it that we don’t really give it much thought, just how many lives we destroy as we merrily rolled on down our lane in our machination. In my case, the shame has gotten to the point where I resent having to drive a vehicle, and spend the rest of my driving time imagining what it would be like to do just that: go to Okemos and back in a horse and carriage, once a week, for rations and trinkets alike.
I’ll be the first to admit that there are times when having the car was far more convenient—and I became a destroyer of Life, wherever it crossed my path. Well, my car’s path, really.
Man just fascinates me, myself included. We’re a contradiction in Nature. We’ve advanced technologically, scientifically, and medically. Yet we continue to eviscerate those advances with a willful spirit to consciously ignore the plight of others around us when we have it within our ability to balm and salve. But I’m afraid we still see ourselves as nations, ethnicities, religions, political affiliations, and on I could name. And for that reason, we continue to hate and kill one another in just about every way available, for every reason we can conjure—from governmental wars where we openly spew death upon our “enemies” to religion’s various fates for those who don’t obey the religion’s leaders.
Cain has come to kill Abel, let the earth drink deep the waters of Life.
And we do this, even now. Overtly or subtly, it is going on all around us, and then rationalized away by the Political pundits, as well as the Religious pundits contentedly rationalizing it away through the doctrines of the respective groups, and teaching the masses that they’ll be given a free ride through the fiery rain coming down from the storms ahead of us—either by rapture, or a special protection reserved exclusively for the group’s members while all the “bad” religions all around them get destroyed.
Maybe you know this already, though.
We may not kill a man, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean we can’t wish he were dead, right? That’s a battlefield that has to be fought on the inside and we’re faced with the same question asked of Cain: “Will you, for your part, get mastery over it?”
It wasn’t Cain’s sacrifice that the Father was rejecting, I daresay. It was what he brought with it when he came to that altar. It was tainting the very thing he was offering up. The Father didn’t want Cain’s sacrifice, even going so far as to reject it.
But that was because the Father wanted His son, Cain, not a sacrifice. What could Cain have possibly brought as a sacrifice to get his Father to overlook the one thing that was driving a wedge between Cain and Jehovah God, getting mastery over Cain. The Heavenly Father was wanting Cain to give up the thing that Cain treasured above his own Maker.
There’s a sound reason why we’re purposely NOT told what that thing was, because every single one of us is either a Cain or we are an Abel.
Every single day.
And the sooner we remember that, the better the odds that we’re going to be motivated enough to master whatever it is that steals our devotion. And maybe, God willing, even root it out.
Most interesting is it to me, when we’re in a religion, that we definitely know how it turned out for Cain, but that doesn’t stop us. from engaging in the same practice. We become so deceived by ourselves and our amazing capacity to rationalize, that we no longer think about it in that way, comforted in the notion that claims that Almighty God will be the one dealing with the infidels, apostates and chaff of Christianity and Christendom.
Even though the Bible makes it absolutely clear that we must NEVER call down evil on a fellow Man or Woman.
There are groups of Christians who do that every other weekend or meeting through the rehearsal of their religion.
If you’re not with us, you’re against us, and of the Devil.
So speaks the Doctrine.
It’s like we just can’t help ourselves. Spoiled children grasping, no clinging to our passions. We will not step back, even if it takes us ultimately to our undoing.
We’re that stubborn, aren’t we?
But there’s something else we’ve forgotten, too.
If we take a Life, we take everything that Life would ever be after that moment. And we may have adversely affected other Lifes that were tied to that particular Life you snuffed out of existence today.
What an evil thing. If any person that raised a hand against a fellow human stopped to realize that they are striking down every person after that fellow human, child, grandchild, heirs, would we be so eager to kill them?
Perhaps so. After all, the hatred which can rise up in the hearts of Men has often demonstrated a powerful, unstoppable willfulness to wipe out an entire group of other Men.
But what about things that aren’t Men?
A fly, a moth, a butterfly, a bird… when do we finally take notice that we just killed something? An ant, a mouse, a squirrel, a raccoon, a dog, a deer…?
It’s an interesting question, I think. We do, it seems, tend to favor larger Lifes than smaller ones, which we must rationalize somehow as less of a worthwhile Life, in most cases even insignificant.
We feel far worse about some deaths than others, too. If we squish a mouse with our car or truck, our response is definitely different from if it had been a chipmunk, for example. Or a squirrel. Or, a cat or dog.
Why do we feel less bothered if we deliver a massacre on our roads here and there if the victim is a bug than if it was a duck and her ducklings crossing the road? Life is Life, right?
