Beliefs Create a License to Kill

 

Some Beliefs Create a License to Kill:  The evolution of weaponry meets the Human mind’s identity protector.

For at least 10,000 years human minds have rationalized the killing other innocent people.  And even justified their own death to protect their mind’s belief.    

Now, when this happens, combined with weapons capable of destroying hundreds, tens of thousands, or even humanity, we must all stop and think.

Recent shocking events in Kenya under doomsday cult leader Paul Nthenge Mackenzie offers yet another disturbing example of humanity’s capacity to rationalize the irrational.  

One of our species superpowers is being rational.  Unfortunately, our minds now devote most of its energy and attention to rationalizing.  Creating various reasons to justify some beliefs.  As a social species some beliefs betray our own survival, descendants, and humankinds future.  

Yet there are the “Truths” that we should all “hold” “to be self-evident”.  This wisdom was offered to humanity in one phrase up front in the American 1776 Declaration.  A simple phrase, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’.  Translated into rational thinking… we must protect ‘nature’ and each other, via ‘the golden rule’.   This special rule is the foundation of every major religion plus many indigenous cultures before religions existed.   

There’s no shortage of examples where our minds have overridden our social species spirit hardwired into our DNA over the last 300 thousand years.  Our capacity to cooperate, coordinate, care for, and give comfort to others.  We are also hardwired to compete and even kill to protect ourselves and those we love.    

But Mackenzie, the leader of the Good News International Church, didn’t do that.  He reportedly persuaded his followers that fasting to death would bring them closer to Jesus. Hundreds of people died in this tragedy. At least 100 were children. Both parents and children were starved, beaten for eating, then suffered and died because a leader’s interpretation of religious belief became more powerful than their natural instincts for survival, their obligations to one another, and their ability to question his authority.

How could people believe such things?  Most of us use our intelligence to rationalize this as insane.  He didn’t.  But what is most disturbing is that most of us imagine that we don’t have the capacity to believe in mass murdering others.  That belief only fits someone else.

But from Kenya to Waco to Jonestown… righteousness was rationalized.  Mackenzie’s cult reminds us to David Koresh and his Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and Jim Jones insanity in the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. These tragedies differ in important ways, but each demonstrates how a charismatic leader, an apocalyptic worldview, group conformity, and the suppression of doubt - can produce catastrophic consequences.

People can become so convinced that they possess the truth.  Questioning the leader becomes a betrayal, obedience becomes a virtue, and death becomes a promised victory rather than a preventable tragedy. 

This is a problem across religions, political ideologies, nationalism, racial supremacy, revolutionary movements, and even supposedly rational national-security doctrines.  Each can produce similar results of justifying the mass murder of innocent men, women, and children. Sometimes when this happens in war we call it “collateral damage”.  

Our extraordinary capacity to reason has become our extraordinary capacity to rationalize defending what we deeply believe.   In fact, we can rationalize almost anything when our identity, our community, our fears, or our vision of the future depends on ‘being right’.

Consider that our greatest danger is not weapons.  Or people believing in something they are deeply passionate about.  The danger is becoming convinced that the beliefs or identities of others - puts them beyond the need for evidence, self-examination, compassion, or accountability from ourselves.

Religious prophecy is now meeting modern warfare in a way that extends far beyond isolated cults.

Some Christian Zionists, particularly within parts of the American religious right, interpret the establishment and expansion of Israel through biblical prophecy.  Many believing that the Bible is a real-estate manual – as events in the Middle East are fulfilling predictions about Armageddon and the end times.  This is the belief that infected Mackenzie’s mind.  

Christian Zionism is diverse, and not all its supporters expect or welcome a final apocalyptic war. Most Jewish people, Christians, or supporters of Israel should never be treated as though they share one political or religious outlook.

These times do however confirm Neil deGrasse Tyson’s assertion that there are three types of truth.  Our personal and political truths. Plus, objective Truths.  These three truths rarely sync within everyone’s mind.  But, objective Truths are like gravity and math. They don’t care what people believe or how deeply they believe it. There is almost always costly consequences when objective Truths are ignored.

Nevertheless, we should all be concerned whenever anyone interprets contemporary violence as a necessary step toward a divinely or politically ordained conclusion.

Israel has a legitimate interest in protecting its population from Hamas, whose October 7, 2023 attack deliberately killed over a thousand innocent civilians and took many hostages. Hamas’s genocidal rhetoric and attacks must be confronted. Lethally if needed. But the existence of this murderous enemy does not make every means of defeating that reprehensible enemy morally acceptable.

Hamas destruction cannot justify the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians, the deliberate targeting of noncombatants, or the treatment of an entire population as collectively guilty. The same moral standard must apply to every government, armed group, and human population.  When destruction is rationalized as the only way to eliminate a dangerous ideology, the destruction actually fuels the very logic we claim to oppose.

When that happens some people start believing that escalating violence will solve the problem.  Others fear this could bring about the end of the world—or the fulfillment of prophecy.  This puts all of humanity at risk.

When a matter of personal faith becomes a geopolitical danger, then influences decisions about war, diplomacy, and nuclear weapons, all humankind is threatened.

We will never know which particular conflict will produce Armageddon. But we can be sure that allowing apocalyptic certainty to influence decisions - could trigger a catastrophe affecting billions of people, regardless of their own religious beliefs.

Weapons Have Evolved. Yet our thinking has not.  For thousands of years, humans have developed increasingly effective means for killing one another. Spears became swords, swords became guns, and conventional explosives gave way to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. And now security is only a hope, as humanity faces cyber and biological capabilities that threaten essential infrastructure, some genetic profiles, or potentially amplifying the effects of other catastrophic technologies.

Meanwhile, these dual-use technologies are becoming cheaper to develop or acquire, easier to conceal, and more difficult to attribute to their perpetrators. With Artificial Intelligence accelerating these dangers.

Our dominant mental concepts of national security and ‘peace through strength’ remain rooted in deterrence:  convincing any adversary that attacking will cost more than it can gain.

While deterrence can prevent some aggression, it no longer plays an vital role in international security.  It is an incomplete answer in a world where some actors welcome martyrdom, embrace apocalyptic expectations, miscalculate their opponents’ intentions, or believe that the destruction of the existing world is desirable.

What happens when deterrence confronts someone who does not fear death, a leader believes that divine providence guarantees victory, or a biological, cyber, or nuclear attack is misattributed, leaving a nation with minutes to decide whether to retaliate?  Or, when weapons of mass destruction become accessible to actors who have no interest in preserving the world they wish to destroy?

A strategy built primarily on the threat of retaliation cannot reliably prevent every form of catastrophe. It might stop most attacks, but it only takes one to disrupt or destroy the society it intended to defend.

Peace through fear is an insufficient strategy for human survival. Our human family is larger than our currently divisive/polarizing beliefs. 

Our profoundly lethal psychological tendency is to divide humanity into us and them. Or, believe there isn’t enough of what we need.  Especially, when we identify with a nation, religion, political party, ethnicity, or ideology – and then begin to see those outside our group as threats.

Once that division becomes absolute, empathy can disappear. The suffering of outsiders becomes less important. Their deaths become statistics, unfortunate necessities, or even evidence that our cause is succeeding.

But a Palestinian child and an Israeli child have the same fundamental human needs. A Christian in Kenya, a Muslim in Gaza, a Jew in Israel, and an atheist anywhere else can all experience love, fear, grief, joy, and the desire to live, thrive and flourish.

Our beliefs may differ profoundly. Our humanity does not.

We do not have to agree about religion, history, territory, or political systems to recognize that other people are members of our human family.

Nor does recognizing our common humanity require us to tolerate murder, terrorism, oppression, or other abuses. We can defend ourselves, protect vulnerable people, and hold perpetrators accountable without abandoning the principle that innocent lives have equal value.  The challenge is to resist becoming what we oppose.

Evolving Our Thinking Before We Destroy Ourselves

Humanity’s technological evolution has vastly outpaced our moral and political development. We have acquired the capacity to destroy civilization without developing equally effective institutions for preventing the conditions that make such destruction possible.

We spend enormous resources preparing to fight wars while mostly neglecting the underlying causes of violence: poverty, trauma, humiliation, exclusion, injustice, fear, propaganda, and the deliberate exploitation of human psychological vulnerabilities.

Prevention is not a substitute for protecting people from immediate threats. It is an essential complement to that protection.

Imagine if we applied a comparable level of urgency to preventing war, reducing extreme poverty, protecting the environment, preventing infectious diseases, strengthening mental health, improving education, and building institutions that earn public trust.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework for addressing most of these interconnected challenges. The 17 goals recognize that human health, economic opportunity, environmental sustainability, justice, and international cooperation cannot be separated into unrelated problems.

This is not idealism detached from reality. It is an attempt to address the conditions that repeatedly produce human suffering and instability.

Rotary and thousands of other service organizations already work on pieces of this larger challenge. The opportunity is to connect those efforts, prioritize prevention, and build a movement of movements capable of creating the political will for addressing the many interdependent causes of insecurity.

We need to move beyond treating each crisis as an isolated emergency and begin building local communities and international institutions capable of recognizing and preventing threats before they become catastrophes.

A Question of Survival:

Paul Mackenzie’s followers died because a human being convinced them that a destructive belief offered a path to salvation. Jonestown and Waco remind us that similar dynamics can arise in different circumstances. Modern conflicts reveal that the same human vulnerabilities can operate on a vastly larger scale.

This danger is no longer confined to a cult, a battlefield, or a single nation.

Humanity now possesses weapons capable of inflicting suffering on a scale that earlier generations could scarcely imagine. Yet we remain vulnerable to ancient impulses: fear, tribalism, revenge, unquestioning obedience, and the conviction that our own group’s survival or triumph justifies almost any sacrifice by others.

We cannot afford to wait for human nature to change spontaneously. We must build systems that reward critical thinking, encourage humility, protect human rights, and make cooperation more effective than confrontation.

We need to learn to question our own beliefs as rigorously as we question those of our adversaries.

We need to recognize that our security depends not just on defending borders, but also on protecting the interconnected systems that sustain life and reducing the conditions that drive people toward violence.

And we need to understand that no religious prophecy, political ideology, national ambition, or claim of historical grievance can make the annihilation of our fellow human beings a rational foundation for a secure, free, or sustainable future.

The evolution of weaponry without a corresponding evolution of our thinking is a race we cannot afford to lose.

We are one human family depending on relatively healthy environment, with no guaranteed second chance. No one is coming to save us.

The question is whether we can learn to live together before our capacity to destroy one another overwhelms our capacity to reason.

In just 10 words.  Keep people and nature healthy. Don’t believe everything you think.