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Understanding Evil
I saw a tweet for a Chinese delicacy: Yin-Yang Fish.Here is what it looks like:
A fish whose body is deep fried while its head is protected. “Speed is the key — when you prepare the fish, you can’t hurt its internal organs, so when you serve it, it can stay alive for at least half an hour,”
(only click on this link if you want to see the living fish gasping for air).
This is not mere cruelty. It is not sadism. The Chinese have a matter-of-factness about it all.
It occurred to me that this is actually a really good explanation for cultures that do not have the Torah as a foundational text. Because there is no rational reason why humans, as apex predators, should not eat anything else, in any manner they choose. Indeed, consuming animals becomes a way to bring their spirits into one’s own body. Cruelty? Irrelevant.
This is the nature of a society that thinks nothing of harvesting organs from living criminals in order to give them to more powerful people.
This is the kind of place that believes power is its own justification. It is the “Might Makes Right” ethos that dominates every evil society and culture and nation in the world. I can, and so it is fine that I do.
The worldview that produces Yin-Yang fish and harvests human organs and seeks supremacy over all others is pure evil. It is the antithesis of everything that seeks to be good and holy.
Published in General
I don’t disagree with your point, but at a certain point the death penalty isn’t so much an eye-for-an-eye, but a cutting of losses after loss of more than one eye.
That’s not a failure of anyone but the dedicated gouger.
I have noticed that the protagonist in our murder mystery/cop shows never allows the guilty party to commit suicide and the justification is that the guilty party has to ‘face justice’ (note the circularity of the argument).
I truly don’t understand what anyone thinks they gain by this.
There is no greater closure for the victim than the certainty that they are forever safe from the criminal who harmed them.
Please keep in mind that those “criminals” could just be pesky religious minorities.
Hmm, looks like I didn’t remember this one until now:
Probably a carry over from days before refrigeration.