It is always terrible to see how humanity, generation after generation, finds its greatest aspiration in war, murder, and destruction. In the annihilation of part of itself. One might say, “It’s not my fault. It’s the other who is my enemy, and therefore I must crush him like a poisonous plant.”
This is the same argument used by Cain when questioned by Yahweh after spilling Abel’s blood, who gave the surprising answer, “Who made me my brother’s keeper?”
People do not want to understand that humanity is one family, that we are all of the same blood. To kill is to kill oneself. Killing a mother is killing one’s own mother. Killing someone else’s child is killing one’s own child; killing an old man is killing one of our own old men.
But humanity continues, with phrases such as “we will tear them to pieces,” which is so reminiscent of infamous “we will break the Greeks’ backs” and we know how that ended.
“You shall not eat the eagle, nor the sparrowhawk, nor the kite, nor the raven” means: do not join or be like men who do not know how to obtain food through hard work and sweat, but steal unjustly from others and spy while they walk around innocently and watch who to rob out of greed. They are like these birds, the only ones who do not procure their own food, but idly perch and try to devour the flesh of others, pestilent in their wickedness.
So it is written in the letter of Pseudo-Barnabas from the first century AD.
It seems to us that the wonderful world we live in is far more violent than the one described by the unknown author of the letter.
All the theories we believed would save us are falling miserably. The law serves only to persecute citizens but not the powerful, and there is no longer any reason among nations that attack each other with the sole rule of military force. Liberalism, which promised us freedom and wealth, is now only a means of enriching the elites. Everyone is against everyone else. Virtue is disappearing, and without it, man is more like a kite, a sparrowhawk, or a crow.
All we have left is hope, and that is a divine virtue. But at the same time, we must recognize that the entire Enlightenment path, which believed that reason would lead to universal peace, was wrong and has proved illusory. Indeed, reason has been alloyed with the desire for power and is creating monsters, drones, and lethal missiles.
They did everything they could to prove that religion is a thing of the past, that it is dead, that Christ is a toy like those found in grandparents’ attics, with which they played as children. And while they were doing this, night was falling, and the freedom they thought they had achieved was only a virtual fire: in reality, they were losing strength and elegance, their skin was becoming a rigid shell, their hands were becoming antennae and gills, their limbs were becoming chitinous and multiplying. And there are those who enjoy this or perhaps cry out.
Will we continue like this until the end of history?