When is It Okay to Take a Life?

When is it okay for us to take another humans life? When does life begin? Is it okay to take the life of someone who has taken the life of another human being? These are common questions when we begin to judge the value of life.

Why is it that we can say one life is more valuable than another? In the quest to stop animal testing we see people bombing the houses of researchers taking their lives. We are anti abortion yet we have things like the death penalty and Iraqi war taking thousands a year.

Who decides what life is and where it begins? Should we leave it up to a church? Even if we did that every religion is so uniquely different how would we decide which religion is the right to choose? Then we have Washington decide which crimes are appropriate for the death penalty. Even these can be disproportionate to the crime. Men who rape children will receive less time than someone caught with a pound of heroin.

It is understandable to want to see someone who killed a person you love given the death penalty, but will that make you the stronger person in the end. We praise our selves saying we are such good Christians yet we never show the forgiveness that Jesus taught.

In the war thousands of innocent are killed and we say it is all in the quest for freedom. When we try to use that as a reason to test on embryos, saying that we will save thousands and find cures for things like alzheimer’s disease and cancers we are called inhumane at disregarding the life of this embryo.

A great example of the mentality of America that always comes to my mind is in the movie “Bowling for Columbine” by Michael Moore. In the movie for those that never saw it there is a scene where a woman shows him how to kill, skin and cook a bunny rabbit.  If I remember right she kills the bunny by bludgeoning its defenseless head.

In another scene a deranged black man with a cape is shot by the police as he causes a scene in the street.

Everyone complained about the bunny scene when they wrote to him he said, and he was surprised no one complained about the scene with the man getting shot.

If anyone noticed I worded that very specifically. I wanted you to value the rabbits life over that man. Read over it again and see how easily it is for me to do that. By using words like defenseless and bunny it made you think of a cute little bunny rabbit. Bludgeoning made you think it was just beaten senselessly until it died.

I then referred to the man in the scene as a deranged black man instead of a confused African American. I have no idea if he was stopping traffic or what he was doing. I could have switched a hundred ways either way you can see how much of a differance wording is in the value of life.

In conclusion just take a second look and a different viewpoint from your own, because we all act out in a way that contradicts ourselves and the beliefs we say we hold true. You are either for life or against it you can not place a value on it.