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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July 13, 2014
They say “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” but we kill all the time: plants, animals, and other humans. What does our biology tell us? What do our ethics tell us?
Sermon: Thou Shalt Not Kill
Many people talk about the Ten Commandments with great passion and reverence. We have been talking about them for about six months now, once a month, bringing our free UU minds and hearts to this traditional moral code. Today we’re on the sixth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” This is one of those that people recite so piously and break so blatantly. We kill plants and animals for food, of course, but almost no one thinks this particular commandment is asking us not to kill for food. We kill in wars. We use the death penalty for certain criminals, usually the blacker, poorer ones. Texas accounts for 40 percent of the nation’s executions. These are the instances in which we ignore the Commandment most egregiously.
There are people who take it literally. Pacifists take it to mean that the ideal is not to kill anyone, at any time. When the Amish who suffered tragedy when a man with a gun ordered the boys and women out of a schoolhouse and shot the girls, they did not balance their hurt with hate. As a pacifist community, they publicly forgave the gunman, and they reached out to comfort his family as well as the families of the girls he killed and wounded.
The folks who are more passionate about the Commandments being displayed in courthouses and schools are the same ones, usually, who are in favor of the death penalty, against abortion, pro war. It’s an odd mix. People say it’s cheaper to kill criminals, that tax payers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for them, the rest of their lives — but the way our appeals system works, it’s actually less expensive to feed and house people for life than to execute them. If you do that, you also have the option to set a person free when new evidence, another confession, or DNA reveals their innocence.
In ethics classes at seminary I heard the argument that the Commandments are for individuals, that nations cannot be held to the same ethics. You can say “turn the other cheek,” and it might be a spiritually deepening idea for a person, but how can you turn someone else’s cheek? If you are a leader of a group, how do your ethics shift as you think about your responsibility for others?
Most of us are not pacifists. I would prefer not to kill, but if someone were doing active harm and I could stop them only by killing them, I might. I would prefer to stun them, tie them up, and take turns with some of the people in this congregation talking to them about how disappointed we were with what they had done. They might beg for death after a few days….
Most Biblical scholars say the Commandment isn’t a prohibition against all kinds of killing. Most of them now translate it “Thou shalt not murder.” That narrows it down, but then the high school debate team shows up and peppers us with questions: what is murder, and how is it different from killing? Is the death penalty murder? Is it murder when you kill someone in self-defense? What about killing in defense of another person?
What about killing in a war? Does it need to be a war that is a just war? Is there ever such a thing? When is war a just war? WWII, to stop the Nazis, has been called “the last good war.” We killed and were killed in Iraq for a purpose few people supported, and now we are taiking about how to get back in. Most ethicists will say that killing in a war, if done according to the rules of engagement, is not murder. Anyone who has been in a way knows, though, that the lines blur, and mistakes are made.
St. Augustine said you have to have soldiers, but they should be reluctant soldiers. I know we have a lot of soldiers who are reluctant to kill. That’s as it should be. It appears that the higher up in the military you go, into the halls of the Pentagon, the people who have actually been in wars are usually reluctant to go to war except as a last resort. That tells you something valuable right there.
Biblical scholarship tells us the commandment doesn’t baldly read: “thou shalt not kill,” it’s “thou shalt not murder.” One scholar even said it should be more accurately read: “Thou shalt not murder within thine own tribe.” Now we’re getting somewhere! That makes more sense, with all the murdering and mayhem that went on right after the Hebrew people were given that Commandment. The people to whom the Commandment was given wasted little time before they were killing the folks on the other side of the river, in the land they felt had been promised to them. The god they worshipped gave the Commandment and then, weeks later, was commanding them to kill all the residents of this town or that one, to kill people who had broken some of the other Commandments, to kill a child who wasn’t obedient enough. They were killing foreigners who were on land the Hebrew people felt they’d been promised by God.
“Thou shalt not murder,” or “Thou shalt not murder within thine own tribe” gets murkier as we go. Different cultures’ ideas of what kind of killing is justifiable seem to be evolving. Morality does seem to evolve. Child labor, enslaving people, domestic violence, all are less and less acceptable in our culture. Despite the fact that most people like to think that values are eternal and that without a god who tells us how to behave “anything goes” what we find in historical experience is that values are relative and are created by people.
We can usually tell when someone has a sense of right and wrong, and we are alarmed when we meet someone who doesn’t seem to have that sense.
Edward O. Wilson’s book “The Biological Basis of Morality.” Edward O. Wilson is currently the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
He says “Moral values come from human beings, whether or not God exists… ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of biology and culture.”
Wilson says that there came a point in human evolution when the earliest humans realized that our survival depended upon our willingness to band together and cooperate rather than each trying to survive alone.
The down side of our inborn propensity to moral behavior is xenophobia. What he means is that cooperation mostly occurs within groups, tribes, or nationalities who define themselves and their well-being often in opposition to other groups, tribes, and nationalities. “Thou shalt not commit murder within thine own tribe,” remember. This is part of the human dilemma: We are predisposed both to cooperate on the one hand, and to assert our personhood or grouphood on the other.”
When we make someone “other,” or “less than,” then it’s easier literally to kill them. What we have to watch out for is thinking that a certain kind of person is not like us inside. We are called to look at any human and think “my family.” It’s fascinating to watch some people react to the unaccompanied children on the border, seeing them as they would see their own children, and see other people view the children as germ-ridden invaders, coming to ruin our lives. Some of us live in South America and have a problem with gang violence. Some of us live safer lives. Some of us live with gangs here in Chicago or LA or Austin. Some of us have the resources to help.
Edward Wilson says the more we learn about our common origins, the more we will realize that we are related with a common origin and a shared future. The Bryan Sykes book “The Seven Daughters of Eve” uses mitochondrial DNA, only passed on through the mother, to trace the seven “clan-mothers” of western European people. Apparently there are nine clan mothers for the Japanese, possible only 29 genetic mutations on the primal mtDNA of the first “Eve.” Race, then, is not a scientific way to categorize people, even though skin coloration does have a tremendous effect on people’s lives, in this culture and most others. We could find out which clan mother we were related to, and then we’d be surprised at the colors of our relatives. We could probably all go back five or six generations and be surprised by that, though! Perhaps if we all get our mtDNA checked, we will wear t-shirts with our clan number on it, or the name of our clan mother. We will greet relatives with a shout. We wouldn’t shoot a #12 if they had their #12 t-shirt on over their army uniform…. That’s a cousin. Then again, maybe we won’t use it to feel like kin, we’ll use it to say “clan 26 RULES and clan 14 DROOLS!”: then start wars over that.
I don’t know how to change my own nature, much less human nature in other people. I don’t know what to do about immigration and the violence faced by many children like our own children. I don’t think that it is possible to come up with the single, final answer forever and ever amen. I also give up on the conceit that there is no truth, and that no one can know anything. Be responsible for what you know. Practice seeing all humans as your sisters and brothers. Let’s figure out how to be a voice that will help humanity evolve into a group that sees killing one another as unthinkable.
I love the poem by the Unitarian e.e. cummings:
“may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
“may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s Sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
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