I don’t mean to nitpick… but it just seems like people kill other people too easily these days. I mean, I can see how killing another human being might be necessary. I can see how it might come up. I have a list of situations in my head that, once the criteria are met, I could take a human life.

The thing is… and this is a thing I hope we can all agree on… my list of reasons that would justify my killing a person is pretty short.

Technically, it only has one thing on it.

I could… and would… kill another human being… if… and only if… they were obviously about to kill either me or some other human being. I would kill to save a life. That is pretty much it.

So why the hell are so many people running around with a list of reasons for killing other human beings that is longer than the freaking Great Wall of China??? You need to break it down into sections just to organize it.

1. GREED

People will kill because somebody has something that they themselves want. Insurance money or the family wealth, a nice piece of land, a shiny bauble, a car, the money in the cash register at the local 7-11 store. Or maybe they want the person the other person is in a relationship with… which brings us to…

2. PASSION

People kill in the heat of passion all the time. You come home and find your spouse in bed with the neighbor. But this is heat of the moment heat of passion. People also kill just to remove am unwanted rival for their affections. Or because a loved one asks them to. Don’t get me started on that mother that tried to have a rival cheerleader killed so her daughter could get on the squad. And this doesn’t really include all those murders that occur during a heated argument that just gets out of hand. Although in a way, it might lead us to the next category…

3. RELIGION

I am always amazed at how easy it is to get people to kill for religious beliefs. Even those who believe in religions that claim to have peace and love as some of their main tenants. It is bad enough that people can easily slaughter other people of a completely different religion, but even people of the same religion can kill one another over slight variances of the details.

This is another of those posts where the crack squirrels in my head came up with an idea and then told me to just start typing… while they all screamed stuff at me and expected me to make some sort of sense of it all. And once again, here I sit, well into a post with no clear exit strategy.

There are just too many reasons people use as excuses to kill other people to list them all or make any sense of them. We kill because our governments tell us we can… and should… and it does sort of seem like more and more people… especially in America… just go off the deep end and listen to the little voices in their heads saying, “kill… kill… kill.”

Well, you know what? I have little voices in my head. I call them the crack squirrels. And they tell me to do crazy blog posts. So I listen. But if they ever tell me to kill somebody, I am going to tell them to shut the hell up.