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Note: This is an entry for Andrew Findlay's contest titled, "Save the World". This contains my own thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Do not send cruel and/or preachy mail to me because of this. Thank you.
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Many people look at what's going on around them everyday and offer no real suggestion as how to fix it, even if they think a great one up. Some people off these suggestions, but are silenced because of a lack of action. Many forward thinkers have excellent ideas on how to save this planet, and many of these ideas would not take a lot of money, power, or time. Most of them aren't even an inconvenience.
But it means admitting that we are wrong, and it means sacrifice. Incredibly large amounts of sacrifice.
Almost all of the crimes in this world are now punishable with jail time. So in these prisons we have thousands upon thousands of people "locked up" for a short span of time, where they can again be released out into the world to commit crimes again. Sometimes more violent, hostile crimes than before. The system is broken, this much we can tell, but can anything be done to fix it? What? The answer is simple, albeit a little grotesque, and a little hard to swallow. If the crime is worse, make the punishment more severe. And I'm not talking about longer jail sentences and larger fines. I'm talking about bringing back corporal punishment. Pain, torture and loss of limbs. If someone steals a stereo in California, he will mos likely go to jail for a year and pay a fine. Then he will get out of prison, and return to the lifestyle he left. Prison solves very little, and they are becoming over crowded and very lax. When given the option of the military or prison, many will take prison happily. The military demands work, sweat and maybe even blood. Prison demands that you sit there and think about how you're going to get back at the world after you get out. What if instead of going to prison, a sterile environment was set up and carefully, but slowly and with no anesthetic, two of his fingers were removed? Perhaps a tattoo in a sensitive and visible place that stated his crime? If it was known that these punishments were in store, crime would go down considerably. I'm not just guessing here, or going by something I read in a book. I have actually sat down and had these discussions with people who I know personally that have been in jail, have almost gone to jail, or have had family go to jail. Jail or prison, either way, it's not enough. If we, as a global community, could get together and agree on methods that were clean and precise yet terrible, a better way of life would follow. But all this would involve being able to stomach seeing another human being in pain, and to purposefully cause another of our species to suffer. Those that dole out the justice in the world are more the sympathetic type, and couldn't handle it... those that could, sadly, are the ones that would most likely need it.
Second and lastly, the driving force in this world. This is something that is already taking place, I just wish it would speed up a bit. Religion is very much the backbone of the way of life for just about every country on the globe. I'm not just saying this because I am, in fact, not a Christian, but I am highly religious. It's not just the Christians, it's everybody. We, as a world, need to turn our eyes from the sky and back to our lives around us. Having a moral code is very important, and if you wish to regulate them and dish them out to your community once a week, that's fine. But saying that there is some benevolent (or evil, who knows?) SPIRIT or great invisible THING out there that is telling us to set ourselves on fire, throw ourselves off cliffs, drive swords through our stomachs or kill a million of our fellow men is just plain WRONG. If there was a religion that could be shared the world over that promoted love and self-enlightenment but talked loudly AGAINST killing anyone for ANY reason (your religion or not) then I would be one of the first to sign up for the Priesthood and world mission work. But no such religion truly exists. Some of them come close, but for now, there is no such thing, and it's sad. The primary religions today are either drawn into themselves and not acceptable on a global level, or preach more about what's WRONG other than what's right. Kill him, he refused to worship like you! Kill them, they won't convert! Kill them ALL, they look different than us, and have different skills! Go tell them all about this terrible place they're going to go to if they don't BELIEVE! You see? There is so much hypocrisy abound in the whole concept of "organized religion" that I find it all nearly impossible to stomach. Love thy neighbor, as long as he thinks like you. It's not okay to covet any of thy neighbor's, unless he's from a different faith and has no wish to convert to your thought process. In that case, urn down his house, kill him and take everything you want. If we all, as a SPECIES, stopped worrying so much about what we can't see I bet we all would focus a lot more on what's going on around us everyday. Feed the starving children because you want to, not because it's written in some book supposedly passed down from "on high". As I said before, the world is already moving in this direction. It is widely believed in underground circuits that sometime in the next 20 years the doors to all of the Vatican's secrets will fly open and the face of Christianity will be remarkably changed, almost completely destroyed. This is not my wish, but what then will happen to the planet?
So if someone makes a happy living off of hurting other people, let's hurt him... but not because God told us to.
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