Cain slew Abel.
While I am certainly not a Christian, Religious history is a definet hobby of mine. As often as possible, I try to take the concepts, stories, and themes present in the various religions and apply them, or maybe just consider how they relate to everyday life. In this instance, it's amazing to consider the implications.
Human beings are a deviation, in history. What if, from the inception of individual thought, there was a deviation from our natural, predatory instincts, that created in us the capacity for a type of killing that was wholly different than those that ordinary, natural animals are capable of? Killing, in and of itself, is not unnatural. Other animals kill one another regularly. Humans, however, are the first animal capable of a concious act of killing that does not result in an extension of life or it's means and which would be, arguably, morally inexcusable.
Humans are the first creatures capable of murder.
What the Cain and Able myth seems set in place to explain to us is that people have been capable of murder since their very origins. Indeed, if knowledge was the first sin, committed by the mother and the father, then murder is the second, committed by one of the sons. Knowledge can, by one or more standpoint, be viewed as the inception of individual thought, the understanding of the nature of individual life and individual death. If this is the case, then murder is a variation on this concept. First we understand life and death, and then we control it. The next time you look at all of human evolution, of the way that progress has happened over the decades and generations, of the way that humanity has moved forward, in terms of it's own consciousness and of how the society around it operates, think of this, or one of my mottos:
Murder makes it happen.
Oh children of Abel,
and children of Cain!
if our lives were repeated,
lived over again,
and this pile of dead bodies
that we climb over were gone
would our morals and standards
really be here at all?
While I am certainly not a Christian, Religious history is a definet hobby of mine. As often as possible, I try to take the concepts, stories, and themes present in the various religions and apply them, or maybe just consider how they relate to everyday life. In this instance, it's amazing to consider the implications.
Human beings are a deviation, in history. What if, from the inception of individual thought, there was a deviation from our natural, predatory instincts, that created in us the capacity for a type of killing that was wholly different than those that ordinary, natural animals are capable of? Killing, in and of itself, is not unnatural. Other animals kill one another regularly. Humans, however, are the first animal capable of a concious act of killing that does not result in an extension of life or it's means and which would be, arguably, morally inexcusable.
Humans are the first creatures capable of murder.
What the Cain and Able myth seems set in place to explain to us is that people have been capable of murder since their very origins. Indeed, if knowledge was the first sin, committed by the mother and the father, then murder is the second, committed by one of the sons. Knowledge can, by one or more standpoint, be viewed as the inception of individual thought, the understanding of the nature of individual life and individual death. If this is the case, then murder is a variation on this concept. First we understand life and death, and then we control it. The next time you look at all of human evolution, of the way that progress has happened over the decades and generations, of the way that humanity has moved forward, in terms of it's own consciousness and of how the society around it operates, think of this, or one of my mottos:
Murder makes it happen.
Oh children of Abel,
and children of Cain!
if our lives were repeated,
lived over again,
and this pile of dead bodies
that we climb over were gone
would our morals and standards
really be here at all?