… You’ve succeeded at breaking through my rationality. I am so horrified by this line of thought that I cannot even begin to try to pick it apart. I’ll have to let this fester in my subconscious mind for a while, until all the screaming dies out and productive thought can take place.
The premise, inimical to the modern ear, that makes all of the above rational is ‘nothing matters but my people. Nothing.’ The problem with that principle is not obvious, however. We’re talking about a period which long predates the earliest emergence of the idea of a common humanity. That idea is hard won and hard kept and not at all obvious. I only half believe it myself: I’d drive a bulldozer through a crowd of people to save my baby son. I wouldn’t hesitate one tiny little bit.
ETA: But it’s not as if they didn’t think about this kind of thing quite deeply either. Once you forget about the relationship the bible has to modern religions, I think you can see it for the extremely interesting and profound book that it is (when it’s not being super boring, anyway). The bible, especially Genesis, is anything but moralizing. It’s very much a story about what it means to be part of a family, and this isn’t all happiness and roses. The first thing that happens to the mythical original family is fratricide, though the characters of genesis do slowly, over generations, figure out how not to destroy each other the first chance they get. The bible chronicles a profound struggle with morality and identity in a world (by our standards) so deadly and strange we’re often just unable to believe it. The bible’s status today as a fixed and univocal moral tablet is both absurd and irrelevant to the actual book.
And these are the people we understand and identify with enough to hold them to moral standards at all. The Babylonians were...like aliens. There’s a period before the Persians came where the following is all we know.
1) The most fertile region in the near east was suddenly and totally depopulated.
2) Every religious object in the entire region was moved to Babylon and covered in sacrifices.
There’s no report of a plague, or famine, or anything. That’s all we know. A decade later, the Persians came and took the city without any real struggle, and that was the end of Babylon.
I’d drive a bulldozer through a crowd of people to save my baby son. I wouldn’t hesitate one tiny little bit.
What’s worse, going through another pregnancy and another time and resources teaching and caring for a new child, or murdering a truckload of people to preserve the one that already exists? Unless these are exceptionally evil people, the answer should be obvious.
… You’ve succeeded at breaking through my rationality. I am so horrified by this line of thought that I cannot even begin to try to pick it apart. I’ll have to let this fester in my subconscious mind for a while, until all the screaming dies out and productive thought can take place.
The premise, inimical to the modern ear, that makes all of the above rational is ‘nothing matters but my people. Nothing.’ The problem with that principle is not obvious, however. We’re talking about a period which long predates the earliest emergence of the idea of a common humanity. That idea is hard won and hard kept and not at all obvious. I only half believe it myself: I’d drive a bulldozer through a crowd of people to save my baby son. I wouldn’t hesitate one tiny little bit.
ETA: But it’s not as if they didn’t think about this kind of thing quite deeply either. Once you forget about the relationship the bible has to modern religions, I think you can see it for the extremely interesting and profound book that it is (when it’s not being super boring, anyway). The bible, especially Genesis, is anything but moralizing. It’s very much a story about what it means to be part of a family, and this isn’t all happiness and roses. The first thing that happens to the mythical original family is fratricide, though the characters of genesis do slowly, over generations, figure out how not to destroy each other the first chance they get. The bible chronicles a profound struggle with morality and identity in a world (by our standards) so deadly and strange we’re often just unable to believe it. The bible’s status today as a fixed and univocal moral tablet is both absurd and irrelevant to the actual book.
And these are the people we understand and identify with enough to hold them to moral standards at all. The Babylonians were...like aliens. There’s a period before the Persians came where the following is all we know.
1) The most fertile region in the near east was suddenly and totally depopulated. 2) Every religious object in the entire region was moved to Babylon and covered in sacrifices.
There’s no report of a plague, or famine, or anything. That’s all we know. A decade later, the Persians came and took the city without any real struggle, and that was the end of Babylon.
What’s worse, going through another pregnancy and another time and resources teaching and caring for a new child, or murdering a truckload of people to preserve the one that already exists? Unless these are exceptionally evil people, the answer should be obvious.
Those aren’t accurate descriptions of the options.
You’re the one who lay down this thought experiment: it falls upon you to also accurately describe the options.