Ethic of Reverence for Live

On my drive to work this morning I heard a news story about 2 teenage girls who murdered their teenage friend as an experiment. Here are some of the things they said:

"We just did it because we felt like it, it is hard to explain."

"I knew we had wanted to kill someone before."

"We knew it was wrong, but it didn't feel wrong at all, it just felt right."

"She started not being able to get her breath, and we just kept going."

The prosecuting attorney, Simon Stone, said one of the girls had prepared for homicide by killing two kittens.

I'm usually suspicious of slippery slope arguments, but in the area of respect for all living things I would encourage you to always take a firm stand in favor of life. Lack of respect for life leads to all types of unkindnesses and immoralities. The current consensus might be that economics is the measure of all things, but much more moral decisions result when an ethic of reverence for life comes before the measure of dollars and cents.

Albert Schweitzer was a Nobel prize winner, medical missionary, and philosopher who died at the age of 90 in 1965. Dr. Schweitzer, when considering the deep and conflicting questions of life, was given an epiphany that he considered his more important contribution to humankind: the ethic of Reverence for Life.

Here are a couple of quotes from Dr. Schweitzer that are worth contemplating:

We are ethical if we abandon our stubbornness, if we surrender our strangeness toward other creatures and share in the life and the suffering that surround us. Only this quality makes us truly human. (Sermon, February 23, 1919; quoted in Albert Schweitzer: Essential Writings)

The presupposition of morality is to share everything that goes on around us, not only in human life but in the life of all creatures. This awareness forces us to do all within our power for the preservation and advancement of life. The great enemy of morality has always been indifference. As children…we had an elementary capacity for compassion. But our capacity did not develop over the years…To remain good means to remain wide awake…So I tell you, don’t let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters. (Sermon, February 23, 1919; quoted in Albert Schweitzer: Essential Writings.)