shanmonster | Genocide from the Religious Standpoint (An Off-the-Cuff , Completely Thoughtless Write-Up)

This entry is dedicated to snowy_kathryn, who is writing a whopper of a paper on this very subject.

In the beginning, there was no genocide. Instead, there was the opposite of genocide. What's that called? Probably genesis, or something like that. Anyhow, God created the heavens and the earth and the blah blah blahbitty blah. And then Adam and Eve spent their time gawking around at all the funny things in Eden, because it was all completely new to them. Since they were created fully formed and containing a tabula rasa of a brain, they were the stereotypical country bumpkins looking at all the fancy skyscrapers. Only instead of skyscrapers, they were seeing things like trees and clouds and bumblebees and dinosaurs and stuff.

But I digress.

Skip on ahead a few hundred years, past God's day of rest, all the Original Sin bits, and onto the time of Noah, and bear in mind that genocide is wrong. It's bad. The only time it's acceptable to kill a people is when you don't like them, and then it's acceptable only to the killers (the killees are seldom known to approve). And to top it off, genocide is a tricky stunt to pull off. You need the political oomph, you need the tenacity, and you need the firepower.

God had all three. Well, he opted out of the firepower this time around, and went with waterpower. He used firepower later on against those pesky Sodomites and Gomorranians, but I digress again.

Luckily for homo sapiens, Noah was a likeable sort. And so God decided not to sin and kill absolutely everybody. And luckily for the animals, most species had their own furry/feathered/scaled version of Noah, and they got to survive in pairs or sevens, depending on how often they bathed (clean animals got to go in sevens, and pigs got to go in threes; just ask Ham).

Certain animals, however, were genocided out of existence, like dinosaurs and unicorns (depending on who you speak to, of course). They were not pleased with this arrangement, and to this day, their ghosts continue to haunt folklore, museums, and very bad movies. Certain types of people were offed, though. God drowned the whole lot of those dratted Neanderthals. They were just too hairy, and God wasn't into hairy people (just ask Esau).

Now since God created people in his own image, and since God was into genocide, it only goes to follow that there would be at least a few humans who'd exhibit similar tendencies. Sometimes these people thought they were closer to God than the people they were killing off. Sometimes they thought they were God. And who among you, if you were an evil dictator with Jedi powers, wouldn't zot off a few people who pissed you off? Tsk tsk. That's miniature genocide. Bad, bad, BAD! Who do you think you are? God?

Fortunately, due to the powers of science, we can now reverse some genocide. In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs were brought back from extinction by the careful manipulation of amber and chickens. Cloning was introduced with a sheep named Dolly, rare species have been stuffed into not-so-rare animals in embryo form and yanked back out once their surrogate mothers were tired of being pregnant, and humans, with the help of the Raelians and Star Trek technology, may be cloning extinct peoples like the Beothuk and the Atlanteans.

The only problem is, we're running out of room. For every person who dies, something like fifteen hundred more are born. Right this very instant, there are a gazillion people on Earth. If we start reversing all that genocide, we'll be stacking ourselves on top of one another.

But killing them all and letting God sort them out is wrong. So what are we to do? We can't just keep overpopulating the planet. When people get too crowded, the urge to kill rises, and things like war escalate, and everyone knows what war brings: cheesy action movies featuring muscular men who talk funny and don't emote.

The solution is simple: start populating other planets! An intergalactic diaspora is the only sure way to defeat genocide. If the Hitlers of the world don't know where you are, they'll have a heck of a time killing you.

The end.