Don’t Kill Me, I’m You

Here’s something I was thinking about while reflecting on this dreadful Israel/Palestine ‘conflict’ (or, as I prefer to call it: ‘The suffering of mostly unarmed civilians who are being held hostage by a very small cartel of heavily armed religious psychopaths that hold influence in their democratically elected Government being assaulted by a heavily armed military nation whose Government is influenced by a similarly small cartel of religious psychopaths that have no problem murdering said hostages because they believe in a the correct version of the divine sky pixie and think they have undying support from the international community because of the attempted genocide of their people that occurred 60 years ago allowing them to break ceasefires at will, act unilaterally across the region declaring wars on whoever they feel like and in a both funny and saddening way starting to become and act like those same monsters that tried to exterminate them from the face of the planet all those years ago’), that led me to reflect in a wider way on the futility of human conceit:

Regardless of what faith you believe in, whether we came from a big bang or a supernatural finger poke into dirt, we are all made of atoms. We, the entire species, the entire planet, every object in existence, are all formed from the same building blocks. In that sense, the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, the fear of other creeds, beliefs, races or beings out there is stupid, because it’s just part of me out there. My atoms are not unique. Before me they were dirt, water, air, rabbits, gazelle, puppies, coke cans. As I exist I consume food, alcohol, oxygen, medicine while I expel faeces, urine, skin cells, hair cells. Atoms leave and atoms re-enter. We are all made from the exact same stuff. I am a part of you, just as much as you are a part of me. We are all part of nature.

So the idea that you need to be comforted with the idea of an afterlife, or you need to be comforted that yours is the superior race, or that you have to be comforted that you have a right to this land, is ludicrous, because all that awaits you after death, all that awaits you in a different race, all that awaits you on that part of land, is you. The same building blocks across the universe. You are intrinsically tied to it. Doesn’t that make the killing of other people – for any reason - or the destruction of the environment, or malevolence towards animals, seem kind of stupid?

In killing each other, all we are doing is killing ourselves.