It Depends

A couple weeks ago I was playing golf on a nine-hole cow pasture with a few guys from the Old Man’s League. After the round we sit around for a bit and chat. Somehow we got on a subject that prompted a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War to mention an interview he saw on TV of a guy who deposed a half dozen or so German Gestapo who participated in the horrific gassing of Jews during the Second World War. The interviewer commented that he must have been “looking into the face of evil” to which he replied “no I was looking into the faces of men”. This conversation prompted me to think about another comment I heard month ago made by a conservative congressman. The topic was torture and when torture was criticized, the Congressman not only approved of it, but proclaimed that the men doing the torturing on behalf of our country are heroes. The sixths of the Ten Commandments, given to Abraham by God which all three Abrahamic religions; Jews, Christians and Muslims, subscribe to, says “thou shalt not kill”. This seems rather straight forward and unambiguous. In Wikipedia the sixth commandment is listed as using the word “kill”. However, in some Biblical sites on the Net I looked at, ”kill” becomes “murder” which opens the door to killing under many circumstances where under law, it is not defined as murder. Though In some religious groups, “thou shalt not kill” is taken as a command from the Lord. The Christian Quakers and some Sufi Muslim sects take this commandment literally. There are also other sects, including the Non-Abrahamic Jane of India, that have a prohibition against killing under any circumstances and the Jane even takes it a step further prohibiting the killing of anything. Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that the Lord really meant “murder” and killing of our fellow man under some circumstances is condoned. For instance, killing an enemy in war, wrongdoers as defined by a given society or to protect one’s family and property is acceptable in most cultures. In some cultures killing for honor, homosexuality and adultery is acceptable. Ending suffering through euthanasia is becoming more widely accepted in Western Countries. It gets more complicated because it is not the act and circumstance but who is doing the killing. A soldier on our side who kills hundreds of enemy soldiers is a hero while a soldier who kills hundreds of our soldiers is a demon. A murderer is a monster but the executioner taking the murderers life is only doing their public duty. About a month or so ago President Trump (not a fan) was being interviewed about Russia. When the interviewer brought out the fact that Putin kills, he responded something like “so do we” .The acts of our “special” units from the CIA, Special Forces or Navy Seals are heroic, whereas the same acts perpetrated by operatives from Soviet’s KGB or Germany’s Gestapo were heinous. We watched the killing of Osama Bin Laden on TV and cheered while others cried. We watched the beheadings by ISIS in horror while its followers celebrated. We rightly criticize the interference of the Russians in our politics but don’t blink an eye when Israel, through the American Israeli Political Action Committee becomes the strongest lobby in Washington with great influence on our policies as they relate to the Middle East. The Quran has an explicit prohibition against killing of innocent civilians but radical Muslim groups like ISIS somehow find within the same Book justification for doing just that. Leviticus 20:10 says “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death”. There are other sections of the Old Testament that get into more detail of punishment depending on circumstances such as was the woman a slave and was she your slave. The one I like is the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus, when seeing a woman about to be stoned for adultery, says “let you who are without sin cast the first stone” The philosophical question of whether morality is absolute or relative leads to questions about the nature of evil. Immanuel Kant, a German 18th century philosopher, argued that there is a set of moral values that apply to everyone. The examples cited above indicate that our society as a whole, obviously does not subscribe to Kant, and even the Scriptures support the notion that everything is relative.