The silken thread

Some clever chap wrote, upon the declaration of American Independence, that all men where created equal. This of course did not apply to black men or the native American men, I also note no mention as to whether Women where considered equal. It's taken the Americans two hundred years to accept that all Men are equal and women for that matter. In this they have done a damn sight better than my own country, it's taken over eight centuries for us to accept these concepts.

Today wicca and witchcraft, while not perhaps widely respected, are accepted faiths. Yet a few centuries ago we hanged people we thought where witches because they where 'evil'. Another practice labeled as vile and evil was homosexuality, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to hard labour for it and yet today, English law protects gay and lesbian people and legitimises their marriage. Hell the Greeks had come to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with gay people a few thousand years ago and we only legitimised gay marraige this century!

It's amusing a country can label something wrong, make laws to ban and punish it's practice and later on completely change their minds and create laws to protect that same practice. Everyone knows that killing is 'wrong', the law states that should I kill my neighbour for playing music too loud I face a life sentence. Yet a soldier is perfectly allowed to go to a foreighn country and kill people, since this is merely 'doing his duty to queen and country' and thus not murder.

We codify good and evil, we legislate right and wrong and when it doesn't suit us anymore we change and ammend the rules. A couple of hundred years ago, marrying a 12 year old and getting her pregnant was common sense. After all the life expetency was pretty grim and a woman had to start having babies as early as possible. Try that today and you will get locked up as a paedophile, funny how things change.

Perhaps a hundred years from now we will be back to hanging witches and putting gays in prison, or perhaps we'll find a whole new collection of practices that are deemed acceptable that we have banned today.

You see the concepts of good and evil, right or wrong are essentialy meaningless. We will fight wars and wipe out whole races to prove a point and we will conveniantly re-write our own laws to get away with it. In Germany, in the 30's, killing people was a crime so they just stopped considering Jews as people, pretty simple really. Convince yourself they are animals and wipe out the whole damn race, wipe out the slavs while your at it aswell.

How many people in America consider Muslims to be of less worth than a white Christian? More than anybody would be willing to admit I'd say. In the second world war the Americans took great care to hit military and industrial targets, flying during the day and taking great casualities to ensure the right targets got hit. But us Brits, we didn't care, we burned cities, we wanted to hurt the Germans, wanted to kill them and their women and their children. This wasn't wrong, no, the Germans killing OUR women and children was wrong, we where merely getting vengeance. It's a different thing altogether, honest.

We see this thinking everywhere, 'they' do something wrong but when 'we' do it, it's perfectly acceptable. We are nothing but damned hypocrites. Good or evil, right or wrong, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference as we'll just change the definition anyway.