Thou Shalt Not Kill.  Really?

Number Six.  It's the easiest commandment:  Thou shalt not kill.   The other nine can be pretty tempting, but the killing commandment is easy to get right.  If you were responsible for someone's death, it had to be a grave mistake or accident.   Or, I guess it'd be alright if someone was trying to hurt you and your family and you had to defend yourself.  Would it be permissible to kill someone if you just suspected they had hurt you or a loved one?   Maybe if aliens dropped out of UFOs and started abducting your daughters, it'd probably be OK to kill them?  Would the commandment allow you to ask someone else to kill for you--like getting a hit-man?  I assume that wouldn't be OK.  What about if someone destroyed your home, your town, your country.  Would it be OK to kill them?   What would you do to defend your religion?  Is it easier to kill someone that doesn't look like you?  Did the commandment mean to include all races, gender and political affiliations? 

These are all slippery slope situations.  But if you think about it, we have others killing for us by proxy.  Our armed forces are killing others so we can maintain our control over fossil fuels to continue our expanding demand for oil.  The oil-drenched Gulf wildlife died for the same.  Mexico's drug-wars and gangs are killing for whom?   Yep, you guessed it.  They're satisfying the increasing drug demands of yours, your sister's or your neighbor's.   We are killing the livelihood of the small farmers so we can have cheap, regulated, mass-produced food.  We are killing free speech by concentrating our media in a few hands.  We are killing our innocence by the flourishing sex and violence (against women?) on TV.   We double kill as we unleash a can of Raid on some innocent, crumb-seeking ants and then throw the can into the landfill.   Ditto for Round-Up.  Have you killed a conversation lately?  I did today.  Bang, dead. 

So, as we start to feeling like killing-machines, what can we do?  Do the opposite--give life.  Work our lives around the tenants of doing no harm by encourage insight and tolerance in ourselves and others.  Sweep up the ants and escort them outside.Grow a tomato plant.   Start a conversation.