Im/Moralities. Where do I go to resign from the "human" race?
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Last nite I went onto Netscape.com and saw TWO stories about beheadings of Americans. One was the al-Qaeda beheading of a foolish young businessman who thought he could make a buck by setting up a business in a war zone. The other, alas, was about a Texas couple who killed and beheaded their own three children, ages 3 years, 1 year, and 2 months. I can't stand it.
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Yesterday's story about the Brownsville mother - "mother", who killed her own children; I will spare you the appalling details of exactly how she and her 'common-law husband' did that - did not say why, a year ago, she and her husband killed and beheaded the kids, but at the time they said they believed the children were possessed by demons, so they killed the children to kill the demons.
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While U.S. columnists railed against the detestable beheading of one person in Iraq, the U.S. Supreme Court may forbid the State of Texas to kill the 'mother' who beheaded THREE people in Texas, because she may be retarded, and it's not nice to kill the retarded. The Mexican Government has actually expressed concern lest that 'mother', a Mexican national, be executed by a U.S. state. Hmm. In Iraq, beheading is supremely evil. In Texas, it's just excusable misbehavior by morons who don't know any better.
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Retarded killers are in the FIRST rank of killers who should be executed, as are parents who kill their own children. But insane legislators and judges here won't let us kill these monsters, killers of three, all the while editorialists and other would-be opinion leaders call for death to the al-Qaeda killers of one.
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It's times like these that I despise the entire human race. I feel sympathy for the God of the Jews who so hated the sins of the human race that he supposedly drowned the whole world, including giraffes and cats and hamsters, for the crimes of one species, not their own. But I would never do that because I'm a rational and decent man, not some insane devil-god.
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The world is filled with evil. Of that, there can be no doubt. But what is thought evil seems to vary, in inexplicable ways, depending on whom you talk to. One person's morality is another's immorality, and this feeble-minded species can't seem to agree on even the most fundamental of principles.
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Some 3,400 years ago Moses gave the Jews Ten Commandments, which were intended to give them a handy, easy-to-remember guide to basic morality. Christians adopted those Jewish commandments as tho they were Christian, tho they're not. Alas, they don't even seem to have any relevance to Jews, today.
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Moses killed an Egyptian who was flogging a Hebrew. For that crime, he was barred from the Promised Land. He could look but not enter. Today, his heirs kill essentially every day for the privilege of staying in that same Promised Land. But if Moses was barred from the Promised Land for killing one Egyptian, shouldn't Zionists be expelled from the Promised Land for killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Tunisians, Lebanese, and everybody else that gets in their way? You'd think so. You would, however, never get Zionists to agree to that, would you? So much for the relevance of the Ten Commandments today, inasmuch as Zionism violates at least three of them, those against coveting your neighbor's property, stealing it, and killing him if he objects.
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Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth rejected the Ten Commandments and offered three: (1) Love God with all your heart and soul; (2) Love your neighbor as yourself; and (3) As you would have others do unto you, so too do unto them. That third is the "Golden Rule", Christian version, which puts the mandate in positive terms: one must not merely abstain from doing evil but must actually do good for others.
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You'd think anybody could understand how to act from that simple, straightforward standard. But there's a problem. People who hate themselves and have a death wish may well want to be mistreated and even killed. Psychosis or other maladjustment can twist even the Golden Rule into pretzels.
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Still, it's the best guide we have ever had for personal behavior, a guide any self-affirming person can understand without serious problem. Oh, every now and then you may have trouble with issues like whether you should tell a friend his breath stinks or his boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating on him. But on the big things, the beheadings, it's pretty easy to understand what's right and what's wrong.
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What are Islam's Ten Commandments? or Three Commandments? or Golden Rule? Does Islam have any such things?
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Islam derives from Judaism, thru Christianity. Moses and Jesus are prophets in the Islamic tradition, hallowed as holy men - and Jesus maybe more than that. But where is the morality in Islam?
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Doesn't Islam codify anywhere the most basic tenets of morality? Well, a quick search on Google for "ten commandments islam" led to a listing at http://islam-usa.com/ of the equivalents in Islam of the Ten Commandments. They are scattered all over the Koran, from 2:224 to 62:9.
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Is there no central statement of the most fundamental ethics of Islam that people can see in one short passage and memorize? Apparently not, because Islam is everywhere connected with violence and death, horrible injustices as the rest of the world sees things, on the part of "Islamists" who claim to act in the name of God, doing what he commands. In Algeria, Islamists attacked villages, shot farmers dead for no apparent reason, slit people's throats so they drowned from their own blood, and slashed open the bellies of pregnant women to kill both the woman and the child ripped from her body, all in the name of God.
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Today, Islamists in Iraq are beheading noncombatant businessmen who only want to make some money by helping people reconstruct their devastated country.
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In the Middle East today, after thousands of years of "civilization", Jews are slaughtering Arabs pretty much daily, with missile launches from U.S.-bought helicopter gunships into residential neighborhoods, killing children playing in the street as well as the supposedly intended victims (altho one has to believe that Israel is utterly ecstatic to kill any Palestinian it can, and merely pretends to have killed little kids inadvertently as unavoidable 'collateral damage'). Moslems shoot civilian construction workers trying to rebuild ravaged infrastructure and behead helpless captives. "Christians" launch "pre-emptive" strikes and entire wars that kill tens of thousands of people, under false pretenses.
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In India, Hindu extremists kill Moslems and Christians to impose "Hindutva" upon the unwilling. "Godless" Communists wage guerrilla war against governments and ordinary farmers (usually called, unpleasantly and condescendingly, "peasants") , from Peru to the Philippines. In the U.S., parents slit their children's throats, children blast their parents to kingdom come with shotguns. And everywhere one person steals from another, beats another, kills another in personal aggression.
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What a miserable excuse for a human race the human race is.
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How do so many people justify so much evil? All too often, they say God made them do it. Occasionally they will confess in sobs that the Devil made them do it - and they don't mean to be funny, like Flip Wilson; they're deadly serious, as tho there really is a Devil and he really can compel people to do things they don't want to do. It is as tho people have created an insoluble plot problem in the story of their lives, so invent a malevolent deus ex machina to sweep down and wipe away their personal guilt by bestowing holy immunity upon acts that would otherwise be inexcusable.
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One must, then, wonder if it is even possible to teach this stupid, evil species morality of any kind, if they can always claim that their misbehavior isn't really misbehavior because God told them to do it. We try to frighten people away from evil by threatening them with hell. They turn it around and reward evil with delusional promises of heaven.
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Is there some other species, an intelligent and moral species, I can join?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:30 AM