Can Killing People be Justified

‘If I should ever seek death – there are several times when my progressive condition challenges me – I want to guarantee that you are there supporting my continued life and its value. The last thing I want is for you to give up on me, especially when I need you most’

To conclude my section on euthanasia, I think that if somebody really wants to die, then I don’t really think that we have any right to stop them, but if they haven’t said that they want to die, then it isn’t up to us to decide that for them. However, I would also say that it would be impossible to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to euthanasia, as there are many different types of it and positive and negative arguments for both. Euthanasia will always remain a hotly debated issue, and it seems unlikely that it will ever be definitively resolved on a global scale.

________________________________________________________________________

Part 2-Capital punishment

Capital punishment is a hotly debated topic in many countries. Lots of people believe that it is right and proper to order the execution of someone who has committed a heinous crime. But are we really justified in giving out these sentences? Can we really say that we are doing the right thing? Lots of people would say that we are not, in direct opposition to the other “lot of people” I looked at earlier.

Firstly, I won’t deny that there are a lot of reasons for capital punishment. To begin with, many people would

____________________________________________________________________

Part 3-Religion

Religions throughout history often seem to have quite similar ideas about killing people. Most of the current major religions have a firm belief in not killing people. For example in Christianity, there is the ‘thou shalt not kill’ commandment. Other religions, such as Buddhism, also believe that killing people is wrong. However, for every religion based upon the principles of not killing people, there has been one bloodthirsty one. For example, the religion of the ancient Aztecs involved hundreds of deaths daily, in order to keep the sun coming up and down. The druidic practices of the pagans also involved many sacrifices, although not quite on the same level as the Aztecs.

Killing people does feature quite often in many religious themed myths and legends. In the religion of the ancient Greeks, wars were often glorified as contests between opposed gods. All sorts of mysterious deaths plagues and famines throughout history have been explained as the wrath of the gods (although this does lead to some quite fundamental convictions, but this is not the place to write about those).

Conclusion

To conclude, I think that it is really very difficult to give a general answer about killing for all religions, although there is practically nothing that can be applied to all religions. I think that all we can definitively say is that some religions approve of killing, although these have mostly long died out, and some religions disapprove of killing, and these make up the overwhelming majority of modern day religions. This is probably due to the fact that it is considered genocide to sacrifice people of other religions in today’s modern society.