I think it's my job to connect this and this.
The short form is obvious, or maybe it isn't. If we all have one ancestor in common 2,300 years ago, then it would seem clear that killing that ancestor before he or she managed to reproduce would be a much larger act than killing one individual.
The problem is one of catharsis, not morality. We can see the results of murder in our own time, we can't see the results of murders that happened 2,300 years ago. It's the same childish right and wrong that accepts dead children from traffic accidents and shrieks with outrage when children die from human intent. Depending of course on whose children, and whose intent.
How many children died in Haiti last week? How many will die in the months ahead? Take out the hurricane and what you have left is neglect. Neglect is not Biblically punishable for most followers of Abramic religious codes, though there are some in all three who would say it's at that crux that real religious principles begin, the refusal to turn away, when even the law allows it.
But that main point, that among the millions of human lives that began and ended during that same time, that one ancestor held us all between her legs, or carried us in his loins, and that that one death would have changed us, changed what we are and in that sense we wouldn't be, as individuals with these names and faces; someone would be here, but not us. That's a moral point too arcane for the simple-minded spectators, who don't want morality anyway - they want entertainment, spectacle, they want to see punishment and pain inflicted, they want someone to be less than they are, because it's the only quick way they have to feel better.
The human common denominator is falling at an exponential rate.
The short form is obvious, or maybe it isn't. If we all have one ancestor in common 2,300 years ago, then it would seem clear that killing that ancestor before he or she managed to reproduce would be a much larger act than killing one individual.
The problem is one of catharsis, not morality. We can see the results of murder in our own time, we can't see the results of murders that happened 2,300 years ago. It's the same childish right and wrong that accepts dead children from traffic accidents and shrieks with outrage when children die from human intent. Depending of course on whose children, and whose intent.
How many children died in Haiti last week? How many will die in the months ahead? Take out the hurricane and what you have left is neglect. Neglect is not Biblically punishable for most followers of Abramic religious codes, though there are some in all three who would say it's at that crux that real religious principles begin, the refusal to turn away, when even the law allows it.
But that main point, that among the millions of human lives that began and ended during that same time, that one ancestor held us all between her legs, or carried us in his loins, and that that one death would have changed us, changed what we are and in that sense we wouldn't be, as individuals with these names and faces; someone would be here, but not us. That's a moral point too arcane for the simple-minded spectators, who don't want morality anyway - they want entertainment, spectacle, they want to see punishment and pain inflicted, they want someone to be less than they are, because it's the only quick way they have to feel better.
The human common denominator is falling at an exponential rate.
