Photo by Shahzayb Qureshi on Unsplash
It seems that all over the world there is a problem with this thinking. First, we indulge ourselves in judgments. Judgments are useful for making oneself feel better than, but they are not useful for valuing the sanctity of human lives. Judging others fools us into thinking that that there is a “better” and a “worse” human. For those in America (and perhaps in other places) this becomes a valuation.
How do we bring recognition to how the world thinks about human life? How do we get world leaders to recognize that war that kills human life is a crime? How do we change this thinking so that all peoples, particularly those in power, understand the sanctity of human life? Human life must be held over all other values, whether it be gold or the valuation of the stock market. Nothing on this Earth equates to the value of the human life.
“In religion and ethics, the inviolability or sanctity of life is a principle of implied protection regarding aspects of sentient life that are said to be holy, sacred, or otherwise of such value that they are not to be violated. Wikipedia”
Someone told me once that “Ethics is not the powerful committee, if you want corporate power, get on the process committee.”
There it is again, ethics, not so popular and not so powerful in today’s world. If we look at religion, we really lose authority, because of the state of religion today. The Catholic church must review the thousands of claims of sexual abuse and must admit to the thousands of children born from these crimes. So, it is for good reason that the Catholic church has lost moral authority in the world.
We live in a world where millions are thought to be “underclasses”. In America, we must fight and fight hard for the rights of women and people of color. (Not to mention the hundreds of others who are not quite upper class.)
Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash
How do we help humans to prize human life above all else? How do we get from where we are to that place where each and all human life is sacred?
- Get all known leaders to buy into a framework of prioritizing human life as first above everything.
- Make war an impossible path for any nation to take.
- Prioritize the punishment of those who commit war crimes.
- Create a national conversation around the sanctity of human life.
- Acknowledge our human tendency to judge, but don’t allow judgment to be used to harm others.
We cannot continue the world ways as they are now. We cannot continue to judge each other as “less-than” or “more-than”. We make these judgments only as a means of increasing our own egos. It then leads to a whole host of crimes perpetrated against the “less-thans”.
How can we stop using our judgments about others as justification for bad treatment of those others? How do we convince people to leave judgments out of decisions about humans?
Let’s take our judgments out of the way of our feelings for others. Let’s not take our judgments seriously as a means of evaluating the value of humans. Judgments serve no purpose other than to our own minds.
How do we move forward with an undeniable respect for the sanctity of human life? We all, each and every one of us, must take a stand. We must stand for human life, our own, others and every one on this Earth.
