Posts Tagged murder

Date: May 4th, 2011
Cate: society + culture, things to think about

good at math, feels bad.

Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a random group of inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible protestors of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim in an honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indians himself.

If Jim accepts, then as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all. Jim, with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that nothing of that kind is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against the wall, and the other villagers, understand the situation, and are obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?

Futility Closet: A Good Deed

The closest TV Trope I can find for this is the Cold Equation:

A spaceship has been damaged and is Almost Out Of Oxygen (or food or fuel). But then someone calculates that if they had one less crewmember, they just might make it back safely…

As a quick overview, the people in question don’t deserve to die, nevertheless it seems that their fate is certain, if you choose not to cooperate. However, if you play along and fire the shot, you net one life, even if it means committing murder en route. Which means the answer is simple – you save a life by accepting, so that’s what you should do – but that’s just the beginning of the implications.

The terrible thing is, it doesn’t even matter if you confer with the prisoners, because all of them but one will die anyway, and the captain hasn’t even offered you the chance to pick the survivor – for that matter, you don’t get to pick your target either. There’s no way to make this a better situation, is there?

Emotional torment, is what a situation like this is. It’s something to throw at a character in a story, not a person in real life. I don’t even like thinking about it.

Date: April 23rd, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

Dying is the last thing I plan to do.

Either by design or thought
we are doomed to know our own end

- “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” by Lou Reed

Mortality is probably a good thing to cover in the Mortality Blog. Death is a fact of life (so far as we know) and it’s a pretty depressing one -- the boon of self-awareness comes with the bane of knowing we are all going to die.

(okay, bad video, yes. just pop it out and let it play in the background.)

Shatner’s song makes light of our common destiny, which I support -- because there’s really not much else you can do about it. You can sit around and fret about inevitability, or you can accept it and try to pack in as much living as possible before your time is up.

My beliefs, such as they are, are balanced on this tiny little pearl of truth (if you’ll pardon the flowery prose) -- that after you die, it’s over. It’s totally and completely over, you cease to exist, maybe everything else ceases to exist, but it’s a moot point, because even if reality continues without you, you’ll never know it, because you’ll be dead. And everything, and everyone dies.

This simple little fact drives the instinct to survive and procreate -- to try to spread out as much as possible before entropy catches up. If you truly feel that you’d rather be dead than alive, even in an extreme situation, there is something terribly and fundamentally wrong with you. Life, any life, any terrible life of pain and misery, is incalculably more valuable than the absence of life.

The idea that a life of torture is better than no life at all is probably a luxury that I can afford, having lived a life of comfort (likely mostly undeserved) thus far. It’s the only belief I hold strongly enough that I would consider imposing it on someone else. Which is why abortion, war, and capital punishment are all extremely uncomfortable issues to me -- existential angst bothers me like nothing else I’ve experienced, in a manner that seems profound and untouchable, impossible to deal with directly, better relegated to a deep dark corner of my mind that I rarely purposefully venture. We’re not talking Thanatophobia - I suspect I’m far too ‘well-adjusted’ to have any seriously irrational phobias. Still, just thinking about it causes anxiety, speeds up my heart, makes me grit my teeth, makes my thoughts swirl around and keeps me uncomfortable until I can come up with something else to distract myself.

Since there ain’t anything new under the sun, Ernest Becker has already described my outlook in Terror Management Theory. You can read the wikipedia article yourself I’m sure, but this first paragraph is exactly what we’re talking about:

Terror Management Theory (TMT), in social psychology, states that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality. The theory purports to help explain human activity both at the individual and societal level. It is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker‘s 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues all human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound—albeit subconscious—anxiety in people (called cognitive dissonance) that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, how well someone adheres to a cultural worldview is the same concept asself-esteem; people measure their own worth based on how well they live up to their culture’s expectations.

How convenient that there’s an all-powerful all-knowing invisible being who can save you from death; or that you’ll be re-incarnated after you die in this life and live another; or that you’ll ascend to godhood and get virgins or whatever. Yeah, so much for religion. This is why it will take an act of god (or something) to make me a believer -- otherwise, Occam’s Razor leaves me with Atheism, because I can’t see religious belief as anything other than “The terror of absolute annihilation,” and I can’t help feeling that I’m more willing to face reality than religion’s advocates. There is no god to save us from death. It is terrifying, yes.

The value of human life in general is an easy transitive relation to make, empathy making it simple enough to jump from “I don’t want to die,” to “they don’t want to die,” and “I don’t want them to die.” Survival instinct extends in an inverse pyramid from self, to family, to friends, to peers, etc. On a very basic level, I don’t want anyone to die, and it seems so simple and easy to me that I can’t help being a little baffled by people who disagree, and justify murder.

If life is the essential element, then to deprive someone of life is the most vicious and terrible act you can commit, an expression of the darkest part of humanity: a life of self-awareness and free will, including the choice to erase another person from existence. If the prospect of my own mortality is my deepest fear, the idea that my death could be a result of another person’s action is buried directly above -- and if a man can kill another man, he can kill me. So when we start talking about whether murders and rapists and traitors deserve the death penalty, or how young a person can be and still be aborted with impunity… it scares me. Since the fear of death is already there, that slippery slope leads straight from strangers to peers to friends to family to myself, and when I’m lying in bed at night in the dark and I can’t stop thinking about that last moment of consciousness…

One sees one’s own death
one sees one committing murder or atrocious violent acts

- “The City In The Sea / Shadow” by Lou Reed

So that’s awful. I mean, there are other things that worry me, but this is the only one that really matters -- I’m worried that we still don’t put enough importance on the value of human life. I’m afraid of dying, and I’m afraid that other people aren’t as worried about it as I am, when it’s the only thing anyone should really be worried about.

Date: March 12th, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about
1 msg

obligatory dead baby joke

foreword: Hey, look at all those fallacies fly! Look upon my rhetoric and despair! In my defense, I’m talking about the way it makes me feel, though, and this is a blog post; so the only person I’m really arguing with is a strawman who doesn’t mind it when I use throw around appeals to emotion. My prose wanders into unfair territory only because I like stringing words together and this is something I feel strongly about.

I don’t like abortion. Here’s why: abortion is murder, and murder is reprehensible. I could probably put together some syllogisms for this if you’d like, but if you’re into that sort of thing you could just as easily do it yourself. Onward to explanations.

Maybe I should do the mortality post first? Spoiler alert – the reason this is the ‘Mortality Blog’ is that I’m making a (perhaps futile) attempt to deal with my fear of dying by treating the subject a little more casually.

Anyway, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that the idea of people dying makes me uncomfortable. Wouldn’t I be a psychopath if I didn’t care whether other people lived or died? Maybe I care too much? Are there some people that just need to die?

Again, maybe I should do the post on the worthwhileness of human life first.

In the meantime, I have the following insight to offer: my problem with abortion stems from my deep-rooted problems with people dying, let alone people being killed. Which brings us to the point of contention - have you already figured it out? – how old do you have to be before you’re considered a person?

Okay, okay, that was a loaded question, no fair. Knowing about logical fallacies makes it okay to deliberately use them as an attempt to interject humor into an otherwise fairly humorless conversation. Somewhere between a twinkle in your parents’ eye and a certificate of live birth, a person appears. The question is, at what point does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a human being?

In the beginning, we’ve got some sex cells, a genome half’n'half cocktail, with daddy’s sperm on one hand, and mommy’s eggs on the other. Are the separate sex cells people yet? I don’t think so. The chances that a petri dish full of sperm will ever develop into a human being has to be awfully close to 0%. It’s probably fair to say human life begins a little further down the line.

Let’s move on to other more exciting words – penetration, ejaculation! Thousands of joyous sperms wriggle their way towards fertilization. They’re on their way, the egg is waiting at the other end of the obstacle course. But is it soup yet? That’s getting trickier, because if you just wait, there’s a chance that the alpha tadpole will cross the finish line, the touchdown will be converted, and any number of sports metaphors I’m probably doing a terrible job of pretending I understand will set things on the right track for birth, 9 months later. Personally, the fact that the sex cells are still separate makes me think that this isn’t yet a human. It’s two halves of a whole, which will likely hook up, but it’s not necessarily going to happen. It’s a chance of a chance of a chance. At this point, spermacidal lube and whatnot is still in play, and maybe none of the swimmers will make it to the other end of the pool. Sports metaphors are nothing but glibness, coming from me.

Fertilization. My college dropout education and terrible memory for trivia (also a quick look at wikipedia’s article on the topic) tells me that at the moment of fertilization, the sperm merges with the egg, and boom, you’ve got a nice neat set of human DNA (well, ideally, anyway.)

(I’m going to take a moment here to point out that ‘Ooplasm‘ is another – and in my opinion, superior – term for ‘Ovum.’ Thanks, wikipedia!)

So now we’ve got one cell, made up of leftover bits of gamete, containing a brand new strand of DNA, freshly spliced together from mom and dad’s contributions. It’s an embyro!

And as far as I can tell, an embyro is getting much closer to being a human. There’s really only one more ‘right place at the right time’ consideration: implantation. The brave little potential person floats back downstream, passing all the disappointed-looking sperm who didn’t make the grade, and is looking to latch onto the uterus to keep things moving in the right direction. En route, it busies itself mitosis-ing, so we’ve got multiple human cells at that point, each possessing a copy of that person’s own unique DNA.

This is where I feel like we’re entering the territory of ‘life.’ Once the little guy has latched onto the wall of the uterus, it takes a few weeks to go from embryo to fetus. At some point it stops being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells’ and starts being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells that could,‘ or maybe even ‘the brave little human that is.’ Which is why I don’t have any problems with contraceptives – the morning after pill stops that brave little bundle of cells from even bundling, or hopefully from making it to implantation.

But once you’ve got a little embryo latched onto the insides of you, I think you’ve got a life in your hands. That life could’ve come into being through terrible circumstances, it could be a love child or a hate child, it could be an accident or the fulfillment of hopes, it could be a blessing or a curse, but it’s still a life. It’s a human. If you let it alone, it’ll grow up as big as you are. Days after being born, it’ll grab your finger and smile at you. If you give it a few years it’ll even try to start talking to you. It’s gone from ‘potential’ to ‘person.’

If I were to change my mind about abortion, that would be one area to look at: when does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a person. However, you might agree with me on this point, but disagree on the degree to which I take the next one – killing people is wrong.

It’s a topic for another blog post, which is on my to-do list. But for the time being, let me say that I’m of the opinion that killing people isn’t a good thing. Yes there are nearly 7 billion of us, and that might double sometime in the next century, but human life isn’t cheapened by being common or easily obtained. Somewhere at the root of this feeling is the idea that if a person could turn out to be me, could turn out to be you, then who knows who else might turn up. And we’ll never know, if that person gets killed off early.

… and now, the problems.

I’m not unaware of the ‘but what if’s floating around my opinion. I apologize for the intentional double-negative, but like I said earlier, humor in a relatively humorless situation.

“But what if it’s killing the mother?”
“But what if it’s a rape baby?”
“But what if it’d be kinder to put it out of its misery?”
“But what if it has little prospect for any kind of meaningful life?”
“But what if the process of bringing a baby to term will completely derail the life of the unwilling mother?”

I’m just coming up with these off the top of my head, and they’re horrible. They’re absolutely awful questions, the kind that make people cross their arms and huff, “I don’t want to play this game anymore,” during a particularly insensitive round of ‘would you rather?’

#1 – According to Matt Lohkamp, self-defense is a totally okay reason to kill someone. Murder is no less horrific in this case, but I’d be comfortable giving the murderer a nice tight hug and murmuring, “It’s going to be okay. You did the right thing.” If complications from pregnancy are going to kill the mother, she should be able to choose to kill her unborn child to save her own life. Fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide.

#2 – Self-defense isn’t going to work for children conceived of rape. The Futility Closet‘s ‘Duet‘ post today is actually what prompted me to write about this particular subject – it pulls a quote from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” It’s not a perfect comparison, I know. But it makes you think. It makes me think, I guess, if nothing else. If you find yourself responsible for the life of another human being, entirely against your will, what should you do? What if the disgust and nearly indescribable trauma of the act of rape itself taints the normal baby-bonding emotions, to the point where you’re disturbed by your own child? Is it okay to kill the child?

Again, fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. It’s such a terrible thing that attempting to imagine my way through what it’d be like to find myself in that situation makes me extremely uncomfortable, and I’m going to admit I haven’t come up with an answer I feel great about. Maybe there is no ‘good’ answer. I do, however, feel comfortable supposing that the answer you arrive at depends on context. Sometimes some people are going to choose to abort the child, other times other people are going to choose to keep it. Maybe only very rarely will the latter case be seen. But what if, what if?

At best, I think I can say that this isn’t necessarily a question of life-or-death (as opposed to #1) – it’s a question of easy-or-uneasy. You’re choosing whether your own quality of life is more important than the actual life of your unborn child. It’s terrible! It’s a terrible decision! It’s a decision no one should have to make, yes, but I’m pretty sure that’s the choice at hand. Should you kill your child so that your own life is easier to live? Let me repeat one last time: fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. If anyone has any insight to offer on this particular point, I could probably use some.

#3 – This overlaps with another subject I should probably consider for the future: euthanization, suicide, that idea that death is ever preferable to life. Oh that’s a sick idea. That rubs me in completely the wrong way. The idea that the bleakness of death would ever be a nice change from the harshness of life just… it wrenches at me, physically. This is so much shitty stuff to deal with in this topic, geez.

Given relative certainty that the life in question will never make it to birth… I would be very close to giving it a ‘maybe.’ A horrible birth-defect that would barely allow the child to live past the first month? “….mmmmmmmaybe,” Matt mused, teeth clenched, face contorted by an elaborate grimace. Let’s enter the world of my imagination for a moment: I am a fetus, and some terrible twist of fate has left me missing most of my head, and all the important things my little head is supposed to contain. Gross. But since this is imagination land, I know then what I know now – that a brief life of pain and misery is preferable to a non-existent life.

But that’s how I feel personally, now, barely a quarter of the way through my own lifetime. So maybe it’s not fair for me to assume that someone else would feel the same as me – and yet, I don’t have any frame of reference for any other outlook apart from: survival is of supreme importance, and a terrible life is always better than a lack-thereof. The trauma of dealing with your child dying naturally, possibly in extreme pain after a heartrendingly brief and tortured existence… you’ve got to weigh that against sending your child to oblivion. Again, it’s not life-and-death, it’s picking between an easier life and a harder life. Personally, I’d like to think I’d pick the harder life, if it meant giving someone else even a short-and-sour taste of life before they met oblivion.

#4 & #5 I have less sympathy for. We’re moving farther and farther outside of the question of ‘a life barely worth living’ and close to “It’s not fair!” ala The Labyrinth. It’s easy for me to sit here with my lack of a uterus and relatively low chance of being raped, let alone impregnated, and say, “well ideally…” – and maybe that’s a hint as to why abortion rolls further towards being a ‘women’s issue’ rather than a ‘human issue,’ but still. If you have to choose between college and a baby, between prosperity and a baby, between peace of mind and a baby… it hurts to think that someone would be selfish enough to choose murder to make their lives easier, and it scares me, because it makes me wonder how far they’d be willing to take that.

I think that’s all I have to say on the subject at the moment – that kind of sums up where I’ve found myself after a few years of contemplation. I’ll definitely take another post to delve deeper into mortality, and survival, because that feeds into this. There is of course one other rather obvious omission from all this – the issue of legality. I’m still not sure how I feel about that, which means in the meantime, I’d rather it was legal, so that other people can sort it out for themselves. I’m not ruling out a future point at which I might reach the conclusion that abortion should be illegal in certain situations – I certainly don’t think that’s impossible, or even unreasonable. I think that there must be such a thing as a ‘frivolous abortion,’ though I don’t want to consider outlier data until I’ve dealt with the more common reasons behind it.

tl;dr: murder is wrong, abortion is murder, therefore abortion is wrong.

Date: November 25th, 2010
Cate: dreams

dream: hardware store nightmare

shopping at some sort of hardware store with James, wandering around, trying to find one particular thing. we were also looking at possible Christmas presents for our family.

then once we found what were were looking for, we went up to the checkout area. suddenly things shifted a bit, and I was waiting in line with uncle Steve. I’d stripped off all my clothes at some point in the store, but was still carrying my pants slung over my shoulder. I was holding a bed sheet wrapped around myself.

So then I came up against a classic embaressing dream dilemna: I had to get my wallet out to pay the cashier, but I couldn’t do that and hold the sheet at the same time – everyone was going to catch a glimpse of me naked. I was fumbling to try anyway, when everything changed -

“Get down, get down, get down!” the bagger shouted, pointing at me – no, PAST me, I realized, as I spun around, and saw a decrepit old man slowly drawing a revolver with a long barrel out of the side pocket on his wheel chair.

“He’ll shoot you,” the guy continued, trying to warn the old man’s caretaker – the old man nonchalantly pulled the trigger, holding the gun off to one side, there was an explosion, and the bullet richocheted off the floor and out across the store.

We all backed away, shocked, and then I watched him slot in another bullet, then calmly point the gun at his caretaker and pull the trigger – then at the cashier, then the bagger, then me, then uncle steve. He shot at each of us, and we all fell – but he missed me. I curled up at the end of the checkout stand, out of sight for a moment, trying to play dead and at the same time fumble to pull out my phone and call 911…

I was half awake when those last shots were fired, the sound still echoing in my ears, and even though I already knew it was a dream, I still laid without breathing or moving for a few seconds before I could force my eyes open, to make sure that the blurry scene around me was really my darkened bedroom, and not the checkout line with the psychopathic old man.

Date: January 28th, 2009
Cate: dreams
1 msg

police, unlicensed guns and firebombs in my dreams

I don’t remember all of it, but here’s what I do remember: I was on my way up a windind road to a church. There was a residential community situated amongst the hilly area surrounding a higher bluff, and that’s where the church was – very dramatic. Everything was sort of quasi-wild-west, broken down, chipping and fading paint, boards and bricks sort of looking. I don’t know why I was going to the church – and in fact, once I got there, it was time for me to go home. It was getting dark, and it was cold, so I walked hurridly down the sloping lanes, twisting my way through the hills towards the highway below.

Then, in front of me, I noticed a man, standing, staring back behind me. I realized that his face was lit by an orange glow, and as I came closer to him, I glanced back over my shoulder, and saw a gout of flame. The church was on fire! It was on fire, and it was throwing this orange light everywhere. I commented to the stranger that it was weird that it was burning so brightly, and he pointed to the moon – which was huge, and a deep reddish orange as well.

I continued down to the freeway, realizing that it was too late to get home the way I’d planned (whatever that was) and I’d have to choose between walking one direction along the highway back to the city, or across the highway and up to a camping station where I could rent a cabin for the night. However, as I reached the bottom I noticed that the man from before was following me – a little freaked out, I kept me hand on the knife in my pocket as I continued along the highway. Eventually, as I came around a bend I saw red and blue lights flashing – an abulance, and some police cars. Someone had been hurt. I run to see what’s happened, and so does the silent stranger – it’s a heavyset man, soaked in blood, lying on the ground. He looks familiar, but I can’t think where I know him from. The man I met before is inconsolable, however – he obviously knew the victim. He crouches and cradles the man’s head in his hands – and then looks up at me.

Nightmareishly (although in my dream I wasn’t at all scared) his face starts to bleed, red fluid squirting from his eyes, and nose, and mouth, running out of his ears, from underneath his fingernails, and everywhere else, I assume. He dies horribly in front of me, lying in a spreading puddle of blood, draped across the body of the other man.

I don’t know how I get home (to my parents’ house, not the HoytHouse) – but I’m pretty shaken up my the whole experience.

The next day, my family is standing outside their house, watching my brother James ride up and down the street on his little razor scooter – and somehow we’re all holding pistols. Dad has a shoulder holster, and he asks me if I’ve found a good holster for mine yet. I show him my leather hip holster, and he approves. Just then, a female police officer appears, and asks James to see his firearm permit. He doesn’t have one, of course. Next she asks to see mine – I obligingly reach into my back pocket for my wallet, and start flipping through the cards. After I’ve gone through one stack of cards without coming up with it, she gets impatient, grabs my arms, and starts pulling me over towards her car, parked across the street. I protest, trying to pull away, which of course counts as resistance, and she slaps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. She throws me into the car (into the driver’s seat, for some reason) as I try to explain that if she would just look in my wallet, which is now lying on the sidewalk, she would find the card.

She walks back across the street, but rather then looking at my wallet, she takes my whole family inside, then walks right back to me. She tells me to start the car, but I can’t drive it – the front passanger-side wheel is completely busted. The tread is torn off, the little pole that sticks into the middle of the wheel to turn it isn’t even inserted correctly. The hub cap is lying in front of the car. She’s pissed, and goes back inside my house – I manage to open the car door, and circle around to look at the tire. I try to put the peices back together, when suddenly my mom is there – “Why are you helping her?” she asks. I try to explain that I’m attempting to expediate my release, when the police woman comes back outside – but before she reaches the car, a couple of young black guys skate up on their roller blades.

“Is this po-lice bitch giving you trouble, dog?” asks one, circling around. “This is how you deal with the po-lice.”

Abruptly, he pulls out a huge handgun, with some sort of attachment on the bottom of the grip resembling the battery on a cordless power drill, and plugs the officer with several rounds.

“Yeah, bitch, that’s what you get! You’re free now, dog!” he yells to me, skating past her body and collecting the handcuff keyes, then throwing them, along with the weird gun, into my lap. It goes off and fire a bullet into the dashboard of the police car.

So now I’m sitting in a beat-up police car with my mom, with a murder weapon in my lap and my own pistol still holstered at my waist, and a dead police office lying in the street. An ambulance pulls up (just like in Grand Theft Auto, they always seem to know when someone is dead) and the attendant walks cautiously up to the window of the car – I hold both my hands high in the air, and tell him to take the gun off of my lap, and out of my hip holster. He looks scared of me.

So that’s how that dream went. Big and long. Totally referencial too – I was recently chased by a slightly unreasonable cop, I’ve fired a gun before, used a power-drill with a battery attachment like that, I’ve dreamt about the landscape around the crumbling town in the hills and the freeway below before (which would’ve eventually linked into my underground open-car mass transit startion and the secret underground enterance / LARPing dungeon that leads into OMSI) – and I have a knife in my pocket. It was like an adventure. Some of my dreams are almost fairly straight forward ‘what if’ senarios, where I sort of put myself in a situation then work out how I’d respond to it. Is that escapist, or something else? When we get truly immersive virtual reality, I hope there’s a ‘lucid dream simulator’ feature.

Date: June 4th, 2008
Cate: society + culture

is it okay to kill people? [myspace]

This was actually going to be a big long thing, but myspace errored out and lost it. So here it is in brief – I’m pretty sure that it’s wrong to kill. I’m really sure in fact – it makes me sick to think of death, my own or anyone else’s. If there isn’t any heaven or hell to live out the rest of your eternal existence (since God isn’t availble to refute me on this one, I’m going to go ahead and assume I’m right) then this mortal lifetime is all we’ve got – which sucks, I know, but that’s the situation.

And if this life is all we’ve got, just about the worst thing that anyone person could do to another is to take that life away.

There are of course ramifications. Can anyone guess which hot political topics this impacts? Abortion, capital punishment, war, and doctor-assisted suicide. Since all of them involve killing someone, I’m now opposed to them. The only situation in which I would be willing to make an exception is killing in self defense – if it’s your life or theirs, you’ve got every right to pick your own. Survival is our most basic instinct – in fact, I might even argue it’s our highest purpose in – well, life. Reproduction is a close second, with the betterment of our species or something like that coming in third.

But yeah. I had always kind of wondered exactly how I felt about abortion. After thinking it through, I’ve got my answer. Yuck. Killing people is wrong. Killing baby people is really really wrong. And killing them before they even have a chance to become anything more then a helpless little bundle of cells – yeah, that’s pretty much the worst kind of cold-blooded killing. I know, there are so many arguments in favor of allowing abortion – but I can’t even imagine anything (besides that self-defense caveat) that would justify murder. Murder is what you do when you’re crazy.

Which brings us to doctor-assisted suicide. What is suicide? Killing yourself. So that’s obviously not okay. And if a doctor gives a patient who expresses a desire to end their life a lethal does of chemicals, then they’ve committed murder. It doesn’t matter if the other person wanted it, or even if they were asking for it – the simple fact is, up until that point, they were alive, and afterwards they were not alive. Totally absolutely wrong.

And ultimately, why would I think this way about killing? Because I’m completely terrified of my own mortality, and people are crazy – if they start to think that SOME killing is okay, it’s not that big of a leap to decide that MORE killing must be okay. Including killing me, or other people that I like. So let’s avoid that, okay?