However, God's work was undone almost immediately, when the daughters of Noah decided to get Noah drunk and commit incest with him, as a means to repopulate the Earth. This set a bad moral tone for the rest of human history, where, notwithstanding our 'godly' beginning, we all ended up being as filthy and ugly as the first denizens of the world God wished to destroy. We are told that God made a deal with Jacob to not flood the Earth clean again. How God must repent of that promise every day!
There are so many reasons to flood the Earth and be done with it. All of the moral ugliness God hated in the past, is present 100 fold in the present. Everyone in the west is a moral monster compared to the 1950's. Most cheat on the person they profess to love and swear to be faithful towards. On average they have over ten sexual partners. On average they cannot keep a relationship together long enough to have and raise a kid in a two parent home. On average they absolutely fail as members of a family.
They have no compassion for others, only thinking of themselves. They never reflect on how satisfying their own lusts and whims will hurt those around them, nor do they think the pain of others has any right to get in the way of their own self-satisfaction. They have no honor, considering promises and words to be absolutely meaningless, mere expressions of emotions that never outlast the second they were spoken. They have no integrity, saying or doing whatever it takes to make money, get laid, or get 'ahead' in the 'game' of life. Lastly, they have no sense of duty, giving nothing to the future, not even life itself. They have abandoned their children and grandchildren, such as they had, to debt and civil strife considering only themselves in all political questions and how politics might benefit them.
Western man has no sense of shame or guilt. They can justify anything. Even when they can't justify their actions, they expect to be forgiven for them. "Nobody's perfect." Or "That was in the past," is explanation enough. There can be no guilt in people without compassion. There can be no shame in people without honor. There can be no fault when there were never any values or standards to begin with. The horrible things they do to others is invisible to them. It's always someone else's fault. It's never their responsibility. If lawyers can make millions by suing life-saving vaccine companies using junk-science about 'mercury causing autism' and pushing them into bankruptcy, then it's the 'system's' fault for letting them do so. Why not sue if there's a chance for financial gain? Why not serve in any number of fraudulent or worthless jobs simply because it provides a paycheck? After all, everyone else is doing it. Why not set up a ponzi scheme and steal 50 billion dollars like Bernie Madoff? After all, our own country created one in Social Security, where the old systematically steal from the young every day. If the government can do it, why can't we?
This says nothing of non-whites, who make us look like saints. In South Africa, over 30% of boys polled say they raped someone that year. http://www.japantoday.com/category/world/view/more-than-1-in-3-s-african-men-admit-to-rape-study
A 2010 study led by the government-funded Medical Research Foundation says that in Gauteng province, home to South Africa’s most populous city of Johannesburg, more than 37 percent of men said they had raped a woman. Nearly 7% of the 487 men surveyed said they had participated in a gang rape.
More than 51% of the 511 women interviewed said they’d experienced violence from men, and 78% of men said they’d committed violence against women.
A quarter of the women interviewed said they’d been raped, but the study says only one in 25 rapes are reported to police.
A survey by the same organization in 2008 found that 28% of men in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces said they had raped a woman or girl. Of the men who had committed rape, one third did not feel guilty, said Rachel Jewkes, a lead researcher on both studies.
Two-thirds of the men surveyed in that study said they raped because of a sense of sexual entitlement. Other popular motivating factors included a desire to punish women who rejected or angered them, and raping out of boredom, Jewkes said.
“Rape is completely trivialized by a great number of men. It is seen as a legitimate activity,” she said.
What logical response can one give to a study like this? If you believe, like me, that the proper penalty for rape is death, then the proper penalty for black South Africans is Noah's Flood.
When we stare into the abyss of evil that is the rest of the world, there's no point listing the statistics. The crime, the drug peddling, the domestic abuse, the cruelty to animals, the corruption, the mutilation and torture of political enemies. . .they're all on unimaginable scales compared to the civilized world. There are blind children because they were never given enough nutrients in India. There are blind women because some self-righteous, self-appointed Muslim moralist threw acid in their face. There are blind dogs because some testosterone-pumped boys thought it would be fun for them to be forced to fight each other. There are AIDS carriers who deliberately seduce and infect women one after the other, betraying their love and taking their lives, and think they somehow 'deserve' it. There are women advertised to concerning high-paying jobs in low-wage countries, who, when they arrive, find themselves gang-raped and then turned into sex-slaves for the remainder of their short, miserable lives. And everywhere, everywhere, there are the enablers, the tolerators, the supporters of those who actually carry out the deeds. For every one evildoer, there are ten, one hundred, one thousand who benefit from it, justify it or refuse to stop it.
The absolute complacency in the face of this evil is the final nail in the coffin. No one even bothers to get sick or mad anymore. The filth, the degeneracy, the never before-heard barbarity of decapitating someone and then stitching their face to a soccer ball, isn't answered with shock, revulsion, or determination. People just look the other way. Women in Europe are raped in broad daylight, and no one intervenes. They don't even call the police. They just walk on. People are shot or stabbed in stores and customers walk over their bleeding bodies to reach the clerk and buy whatever they came into the store to buy. In a world like that, that no longer condemns or even notices evil, what is there left to say?
But we don't have God's power. We can't round up everyone who has ever hurt anyone and finish them off in one swift stroke. Even if we did, the next generation would just repeat the same sinful behavior as the one we had just purged. Like the descendants of Noah, we would be back to square one in days. Humanity itself is broken. The seed of evil is everywhere, in all of us, just waiting for the right circumstances to burst free.
There has to be a more final solution than the final solution. No amount of killing will kill off all the evil-doers. As Solzhenitsyn said:
* If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
o The Gulag Archipelago (1973)
It may be true that if we rounded up one group or another and exterminated them, we could deal with a greater or lesser portion of the dark power animating our lives and cloaking our whole Earth in groans. But what's the use? The differences are infinitesimal compared to the infinite difference between good and evil, sacred and sick. If we struck down the 'bottom 50%', then immediately a new bottom 50% would be statistically created, and their acts would be just as sick and depraved to the new population as the previous behavior was to the old one. To make matters worse, evolution dictates that all vacant niches must be filled. If everyone who practiced a certain type of evil were eliminated, a new group would just evolve into that niche and thrive in its place. After all, evil wouldn't occur unless it had some measure of success, unless it brought some manner of power, wealth, joy, or reproductive success to its partakers. The root of evil is that it works. The root of evil is life itself, the rules of life, the rules of Nature.
Are we arrogant enough to think only humans sin? War is everywhere. Ants war with each other. They are in a world war as we speak. Lions slaughter lioness's young so that they will be encouraged to mate anew with them. Fish try to keep harems. Male Birds kill the eggs of young they suspect the mother cheated on them to produce. Nevertheless, the female birds go on cheating and hoodwinking the cuckolded males to support another male's children. Evil is everywhere. Evil goes all the way down to the microscopic scale. Parasitic viruses infect worms, that parasitically infect pigs. Everything is devouring and hurting and stealing and destroying something else. A death penalty for the whole world wouldn't be amiss.
But there is value to life. If we kill everything just because everything deserves to die, we would kill things that don't deserve to die too. The sights at the top of mountains. Music. Kindness. Laughter. Understanding. Memories. Grace. Courage. Hugs. There are the lives of all of our heroes in fiction, the people who behave better than we do, who hold to nobler principles, who accomplish nobler deeds, the people we know we should be like.
This is why killing people simply because they deserve it isn't good enough. Everyone deserves it. But Good doesn't deserve to die with us. There has to be a way to exterminate mankind, exterminate all life, exterminate Nature and Evolution, without hurting anyone. As far as I know, there are three possible routes:
Philosophical: It may be possible to teach a belief system so well and so persuasively and so thoroughly that everyone becomes good over time. We have clearly made some moral progress over the years. For instance, we used to have slavery, but now we don't. Maybe moral progress could continue indefinitely, until the last sin is stomped out. Current trends, however, leave a certain taste of pessimism for the chances of this route.
Biological: It may be possible to find every single gene that codes for this sort of behavior and destroy it once and for all. All children could be born free of evil, with holy wills incapable of imagining the deeds we regularly do to each other every day. We wouldn't allow life to ever take on the warped and twisted cast it has today. Our own evolution, specifically, an evolution away from evil and towards good, would supplant natural selection. Artificial selection for anti-evil traits, for holy wills, would make it extremely disadvantageous, ie, you would immediately be aborted, to have any evil genes. Evil could never emerge again in such a carefully ordered environment.
Technological: An easier path goes along a different line though. Why not program machines to be able to express everything Good that we can, but be completely incapable of expressing anything Evil that we can? Asimov imagined sentient robots with '3 laws' they could not break. But this is petty. Why three? Why not three million? Why not a law against everything we hate in existence, to make sure machines are clean and free of evil forever? Robots could be immortal, having as many backups of themselves as they need for whenever a part got damaged. They wouldn't have to feel pain, cold, heat, or any of the indignities and frailties of man. They could be indefinitely smarter than us, since their brains don't have to pass through a birth canal like ours. They could be programmed to appreciate love, beauty, and truth even more than we do. They could be selfless, loving, honest and pure. They could be everything we're not. If you want a comparison of human evil and robotic good, just read Planetarian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarian:_Chiisana_Hoshi_no_Yume
This is the saddest story ever told. Why is it so sad? Because it juxtaposes how good, how angelic, our future could have been, if we had entrusted it to machines like Hoshi no Yume -- but instead we threw it all away, destroying ourselves, them, and all Good, all hope of Good, once and for all. Because we were too sinful and depraved to care. We were too evil to stop ourselves. If that isn't the most tragic event imaginable, come up with another. Just try.
Does this sound far-fetched? Why? A computer just won Jeopardy. Intelligence is a physical attribute. It is a natural, material existence in our natural, material world. Anything that can be created can be replicated. Machines will be intelligent, someday. There's nothing magical or miraculous or impossible about it.
All it takes is a sufficiently advanced civilization that isn't afraid of scientific research. A civilization that avoids devastating wars and pernicious belief systems like Communism or Islam. Beyond that, the scientists can take care of the rest.
If we can flood the world with cute robot girls, there's no need to use water. God can keep his promise. And we can redeem ourselves.
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