Everyone who has responded to me about this subject is either looking at it on personal or historical level, and I understand that as those are the examples that are people are most close to, either on a personal basis or on a level on which they learned about past conflicts for or against their religion, or thru academic study.
I'm asking people to pull back from that if possible and look at this on a Macro-evolutionary scale..
Ethics and humane thinking about the effects of war, I assert, evolved both in conjunction with the increase in our capacity to kill more efficiently on a grander scale and from the religions formed in the last 5000 years---which on a evolutionary scale given the million plus years of humanoid development is but the blink of an eye.
So I am asserting that ethical/religious thinking was really a human evolutionary development designed to counter the ever increasing destructive capacity of the human form that was rooted in biology.
This form of thinking is also rooted in biology, the brain, but its innate ability to be self aware has told it that it needs to put in a check on biological drives for conquest and destruction through the development of ethical concepts and systems of organization that put a check on this. This is our rational self trying to assert itself over the biological impulse.
The Christian concept, as taught by Jesus, not as practiced by sectarian churches and nations, embodies this. Love thy enemy. That was totally revolutionary concept. And the fact that it appeared 2 millennium before the appearance of WMD's gave it time to permeate our thinking on what ought to be the basis of our relationships with each other and other nation states. We at least have a body of thought, in the Western Civilized world, that illustrates how we ought to behave even if we don't always behave that way.
The very fact that we have treaties about the treatment of prisoners in war and the treatment of civilians therein is part of this concept playing itself out. Not to mention our treaties about the reduction of nuclear weapons. 2000 years ago I don't think much of this was in place.
I think the world needed a concrete example of the destructive power of our atomic genie to make it realize the consequences of this being used. It is instructive that some 68 years after their employment we have not had a nuclear weapon used, and also have outlawed the use of electronic impulse radiation weapons which had the enticing ability to kill humans, but leave the infrastructure of their habitation and industry intact. Also the same has been done for chemical and biological agents which have the ability to kill on a mass scale.
So we are getting there--moving toward a rational society/planet rooted in ethical concepts first denoted in man's religious development as our brains take on the task of directing our evolution in a self-preserving direction.
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