Don't kill!

“Thou shalt not kill,” is the fifth commandment that confronts us with the inhuman and immoral possibility that a human being can decide to end the life of his fellow human being and eliminate him.

Thus, we find that the Ten Commandments stress the need to observe the love of God and the love of neighbor in everything we do and perform, in order to walk on the path of salvation. This is the reality of the situation with regard to Christianity and every Christian believer, but it is also true with regard to all of humanity, as murder cannot be a moral law, but remains a heinous crime.

Death is the opposite of life. Killing is the opposite of life. Giving life is the opposite of taking life. Who has the power to take lives? Who can kill his own kind or has already killed his own kind? Who allows this number of deaths to increase day by day, and who has the power to stop the bloodshed, but does nothing to do anything? I believe that the answers to these questions, which many people in the world ask themselves, are clear and do not need explanation, but unfortunately no one comes forward to answer them courageously. These are questions asked by every living conscience who feels the absence of truth and justice. The death of one human being is a painful event, let alone the death of innocent and defenseless people! It hurts more than anything. A person of living conscience cannot understand or comprehend the lack of human compassion, or the indifference that remains inhuman to him. Hatred is the opposite of love, and revenge is the opposite of forgiveness. Where does this enormous amount of hatred come from? What drives one man to make another man suffer? It seems that we are unable to stop the violence that we do not find its equivalent even in the animal world, because in the animal world we find a lot of solidarity between members of the same species.

In the Holy Land, the killing of unarmed civilians continues, violence is spreading and the death toll in Lebanon, the West Bank and Syria is rising, while in Gaza, the death toll is unfortunately a statistic that is constantly increasing, even if it is no longer in the news. Thousands of displaced people live in tents and suffer from great hardships, while thousands of survivors face hunger, thirst, heat and cold that has returned a full year after the tragedy began.

Aid is not arriving, or if it does, it is not enough, and yet it is still prohibited. Saving lives has become an extremely difficult task, with medicine shortages and hospitals in shambles due to the continuous targeting. Many are buried under the rubble, and many more have not yet been properly buried. Death and destruction are being sown, human lives, homes, roads, places of support for the body and soul are being lost, and the wonders of nature that God gave to ungrateful and irresponsible humanity are being destroyed. People are killing and destroying themselves for the sake of interest and power. Murder is being committed with complete disregard and indifference to the basic needs of our neighbors, and murders are being committed with indifference and in the absence of any decisive action to stop the war, despite the possibilities to stop it. God was merciful to Cain, forgave him and protected him from those who wanted to harm him.

Not committing murders does not only mean stopping supporting war and sending weapons, but also stopping planting murder in thought and mind first, and stopping supplying arms to parties second. This will not happen except by adopting a new approach that begins with the infancy of children at home, school and on the street, an approach that depends on planting the values of love, truth, justice and respect for the human being as a gift from God Almighty for which man has no merit. On the other hand, this is achieved by stopping creating conflicts to become an arena for marketing new deadly weapons, for which innocent people become a testing ground. However, far from this rosy dream and idealism that conflicts with the greed and power of some masters of this world, the immediate demand and need now and immediately lies in working firmly and seriously to stop the war, and then we will look into how to prevent it from happening again. How can this civilized world, whose countries compete and boast about abolishing the death penalty from their constitutions, fail to stop this war? Do not the innocent deserve a human constitution as well as a divine constitution, in which the Giver of life is the only one who has the right to restore it? Enough war, enough taking innocent lives, this bloodshed will not achieve victory or accomplishment except to increase the burden of its masters’ sin and the weight of their guilt before themselves and before people, and most importantly: before God Almighty, who commanded us: “Do not kill”!