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To finish what I started in Bokurano's first entry...rant rant rant.

The value of our lives is not equal. It just isn’t true. From a broad perspective it might be so, but because we all have personal emotions, our individual views are all in equal. Anyone who says they’re still the same is making exceptions for their own life. I believe that life is important. Very much so. But there is an order to its importance. People might be sad when a dolphin dies, but you won’t find many who cry when a livestock pig is killed. This is because they assign importance to these things. That’s why when faced with a choice between the death of a friend and the death of a stranger, one will always choose the death of a stranger. This is rather paradoxical, but all life is a holon that exists as a part of a whole. If only one of two is going to survive, it does particularly matter to the whole one it is. Though there is nothing that says the other person can’t be someone you care about.

All human beings given life are also burdened with karma and responsibility for how they treat life. You will not find a single person who lives without stealing the lives of others. We eat plants and we eat animals. Even Christ survived upon other living beings. You must accept this and understand it before you sit back and glorify life. Especially not, when surviving today is so simple and matter-of-fact, people tend to forget. They forget what it means to eat a pig. They say all life is equal, but how much life is consumed to keep them alive everyday? This just doesn’t apply to other living things. You can also say this about human beings. The fact that you are alive, means that someone may have died. People should talk about this more, but they are all too concerned about themselves to bother.

I’m not looking down on life at all. I don’t think that meaningless killing is a good thing. But I don’t think that the killing that takes place to keep you and the people you care about alive should be ignored or downplayed either. That is why we have to live for the sake of all the lives we’ve sacrificed. That is the responsibility that all living things must bear. Your life does not belong only to you. It is also the form of the countless lives that have ended to keep you alive. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. You are already supported by sacrifice. So you should be thankful for that, and the use the life you were given to its fullest extent. That karma and responsibility cannot be avoided. And if you say “I’m going to live the easy life” or “I didn’t want to be born”, then you should choose death for yourself, instead of the stranger. It means you can cut down on the number of lives that will be sacrificed for wasted life.