The Hypocrisy of Killing

"If Satan ever laughs, it must be at hypocrites; they are the greatest dupes he has; they serve him better than any others, and receive no wages." Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon

When it comes to killing, among other pastimes, mankind recognizes no bottom to the depth of depravity he is capable of. Since Cain and Able, man has been going full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes in his effort to rid the world of those who threaten him or  challenge him or  disagree with him or just plain don't smell like him.
Once the Age of Enlightenment began its' assault on God - and late 19th and early 20th century deep dish thinkers finished the job - what would one expect?
As Dostoyevsky said, if God does not exist, everything is permitted.
It doesn't much matter whether God never existed or He did and we killed Him.
The fact is, as far as most of mankind is concerned, God is dead.

I can hear you now,
Oh that is nonsense Firpo. Why just the other day I read a poll showing 87% of Americans believe in God and just think of all the good Muslims and Buddhists and Jews and all the other warm and fuzzy people around the world who believe in some god or other.

The fact is most people give lip service -and little else - to God. They shroud themselves in the fog of hypocrisy. This is why killing comes so easily to man.

We needn't travel back to the dim days of Assyria or Babylonia or the noble days of grandeur laden Greece and Rome or the dark ages of lice covered Mongols, bloody Aztecs, and marauding European warlords for evidence of this.
Hell no. In less than 100 years, mankind has managed to kill off nearly as many people as had lived in the previous 1900 years of Anno Domini. Millions dead in the first world war as the good guys crushed the evil Kaiser, with the help of mustard gas, an earlier type of weapon of mass destruction. Then the good guys helped support Lenin and his acolytes establish the marvelous communist empire of barbed wire freedom, absent several more millions who didn't get the memo.
Before you knew it, the good guys were ridding the world of the murderous despot Hitler, a mass murderer par excellence who was outdone in barbarity only by the good guys' erstwhile ally Stalin who had taken over for the former good bad (or bad good) guy Lenin (who was poisoned by Stalin). We reduced the Hitlerian reich to rubble, including the cultural center Dresden along with  a quarter million civilians --what the hell...all's fare in love and war.
Not to be outdone by the European slaughter, the good guys wound things up by disintegrating the civilian centers of Nagasaki and Hiroshima Japan with the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, better to sacrifice another half million women and children than just bomb the evil Emperor.
After all, he was a potential ally in the post war world. As was another good bad guy ally, Mao the Chinese liberator who liberated countless millions (estimates range from a low of 60 million to well over a million) from their property, including their hearts, minds and bodies.

I can still hear you...Oh that was war Firpo and things happen...the price of freedom...that wasn't us...we know better...we're different...all's well with the world...

(In case you can't read what the good guy Churchill says above:
"History is written by the victors."---"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."---"Men stumble across the truth from time to time, but must pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened."---ahh, the redoubtable prototypical hypocrite for all ages.)

Yes, things happen, like the good guys refusing to acknowledge the concentration camps until underground pictures were smuggled out of Europe...and the good guys forcibly returning millions of Russians and Germans to Stalin's clutches rather than upset their good bad guy ally by granting freedom to those escapees from the bloody barbed wire communist democracy and...what the hell.
That's all ancient history too.
All's well with the world and we are different, and...
Do we know better?
(An aside---Where is the god of the 87%? I can't imagine He is the God. Maybe it's the 13% who have a clue.)

Let's just consider the land of the free and America's  87%ers.
Since Firpo was watching Hopalong Cassidy round up the bad guys (he never shot to kill), we have stood by and watched nearly 50 million babies be murdered and not blinked...no, not murder, just a woman's reproductive right; we have fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Yugoslavia, the mind boggles- that's not a country, I just find my mind boggling.
We continue to search for places to spread our good guy culture and version of democracy and always against a people who don't want anything to do with our version of reality thank you very much.
Is Iran next? How about Syria?
We are the good guys and they are the bad guys and just because an obscene number of men, women and children happen to perish in our magnanimous effort to free them, well, that's a shame, that's - how you say - collateral damage.
None dare call it hypocrisy.

(For a nice article on more recent hypocrisy, see:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/04/21/if-you-want-to-go-to-heaven-you-had-better-get-busy-overthrowing-syria-paul-craig-roberts/ )

In closing, a WARNING...Graphic Image follows...by way of choice...in the end there is only one choice...God or god...Life or death...In the next life there will be no happy hypocrites.

This:

(What Einstein said above: "There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.")


OR this: