(September 17, 2013 at 1:56 pm)Zone Wrote: You can have some kind scale of importance determined by the level of intelligence of an organism. An ant would be low on the scale of what we would care about as they're probably not even consciousness nor would they feel pain or emotion. You can also factor in how much we like an animal and if it does anything useful or is a pest. All very utilitarian but it works.
The problem with this is, it's how genocide fans like John can say "well, humans are less intelligent than God, so what's the problem?".
The intelligence and capabilities of the killer are just as big a factor as the intelligence and capabilities of the victim. We generally frown upon the idea of, say, a mentally retarded person being charged for murder in the same capacity as someone who is not, just as we consider the murder of children more heinous than the murder of a fit adult.
Our limitations in both the physical and mental realm make it necessary, sometimes, for us to kill other beings, the key words being 'limitations' and 'necessary'. As evidenced by this discussion, there are people who believe that killing is acceptable as punishment for any behavior, but someone with a basic respect for life would look even at the killing of ants and bacteria as an unfortunate necessity, and avoid it whenever it's not strictly necessary. Going out and looking for anthills to destroy is not any less a psychopathic activity than going out and looking for humans to kill, even if ants are not as intelligent as humans.
Intelligence may justify necessary killing in some circumstances. It never justifies any killing which is not necessary. So, when you have a god whose omnimax capabilities make it impossible for him to ever kill anything, even the simplest organism, out of necessity or even by accident, his every kill is absolutely a cold-blooded murder. The fact that God is a fantasy aside, a person who defends (hell, glorifies) such a concept is a someone I really don't feel comfortable existing with in society.
