by Thaxton Lewis

Created on: September 07, 2008

Human beings are not obligated to be or do anything.

If you can convince enough people that killing strangers is okay, they will do it, even if they believe that killing a person is wrong.

How can they do that?

After they dehumanize their targets, then they can socially and acceptably murder them.

It really is that simple. How do I know that?

Ever heard of the Crusades. How many times have people of various religions killed others because they worshipped a different God. This somehow made it acceptable to kill, rape, and destroy others.

This dehumanization process of others in order to feel superior is inherent in all human behavior and cultures.

Whether at the work place, on the basketball court, in the voting booth, wherever a human being is, their is a sense of self satisfaction at being better than those people.

And this thought process, intrinsic to humanity, lends itself to the dehumanization of others and allows for their decimation at our hands.

No questions asked.

After all, who could think of killing someone else and feel good about that thought, unless that thought entailed stripping that person of any life, any sense of being human.

Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, the the artist who was starving that dog, argued that he did so because tens of thousands of dogs were starved and no one did anything.

Yet, when presented in an art gallery with the presence of the animal, no one fed it, tried to feed it. They just complained that the artist was sick.

And what of all the other starving dogs, the tens of thousands that died.

Is the end of their lives any less sad or sickening because you did not se eit happen.

I am not justifying what he did, and their seems to be a controversy as to whether the dog escaped and was fed when the gallery was not showing him.

But this misses the point. The point I wanted to make in bringing this up is that there are child sex slave groups, pedophile groups, all sorts of crazy and scary things happening on this planet, and many have an out of sight, out of mind attitude about it.

Human beings are only moral in a context. Strip away religion and police, and they would be even more depraved then compared to what they are now.

The fear of God and the fear of what others will think of you is what keeps a human being moral, along with the social conditioning that occurs all your life from watching your parents and the actions of your community.

And even then, with all these control elements in place, people are still crazy.

Behind closed doors, children are sexually abused. People are drug addicts and rape victims and rapists.

Priests, who are supposed to be a fellow humans direct connection to God, violate the trust of their young charges, and in order not to violate a vow of celibacy rape a child, or several children.

Why not just find a nice young lady and do that, why be so morally depraved?

People, regardless of their jobs or what they have to lose, people who should be obligated to have a standard of decency acceptable to all due to their postion in their respective communities, have stifound ways to not be moral.

To have a strong moral grounding, in the end, comes down to the individual.

Regardless of other influences and factors, at the end of the day it all comes down to what you can go to sleep at night with.

If you can live with what you have done, then you obviously do ot feel any moral obligations.

No one is obligated to be moral.

But the world is a better place when people choose to be moral, as it regards valuing human life, which most of us only do in a certain context.

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