So, somehow, I don't think the Cs, or the Cosmos for that matter, has the same "it's so holy" view of human life that you are expressing here.
Clearly, we must kill to eat; so does the Cosmos. And placing humans above every other form of life seems to me to be hubris. Nature itself doesn't value life that way because it has it in abundance: there is never a shortage. So, in the end, is it life itself that is so valuable, or is it SOME life that aligns with nature and fulfills its aims?
As Gurdjieff said about good and evil, when you have an AIM, what is good is what gets you to that AIM, and evil is what prevents it. I think that is similar to what the Cs said above that "good guys and bad guys" are only thus depending on perspective.
I might be somewhat off topic but that brings to mind something I read awhile ago.
THE RELIGION OF THE FIRST CHRISTIANS
It is possible that more than one religious hero have contributed fragments to the
traditional figure of Jesus. The Unknown Noble have never been a few and feeble folk.
They are born in every village, and lie in nameless graves all round the globe.
Every day they emerge from the wombs of obscure mothers ; every day they go to sleep under the coverlet of the earth, blessed by the tears and love of friends, but unrecorded on marble and unmentioned in the public place.
If, at any turning-point in moral history, the consciousness of a new religious need becomes widespread and coincides with the appearance of noble natures who can utter the common sigh, the common joy, the common resolution, then a heroic myth will spring into being, and expand into sublime proportions.
It will be a myth in its lack of personal and local accuracy of detail; it will be a reality in its testimony to the emotions of the people.
It will be an historic impossibility ; it will be a sociological truth.
Jesus was the voice of the people ; the history of their soul ; the picture of the Christian proletariat; the key to their psychology.
Treat the gospel, if you will, as an entire legend. It makes no difference.
Legend or half-legend, it was conceived in sincerity and believed with passion, and, for that reason, may be accepted as a sure index to the mind and character of its adherents.
I venture to assert that our study of Christian origins must take the fresh turn I have thus indicated, or become unprofitable. A disciplined mind cannot now receive the Christian gospel as historical ; but neither can it remain contented with the mere proof of its mythical beginnings.
Mythical structure is not the ultimate fact in the Christian or any other supernatural religion.
The ultimate fact consists in the moral sentiment which chose the myth for its vehicle.
What is the meaning of the myth ? Assume that Christ never performed a miracle, or rose from the dead.
That is not the end of our research.
The Christ-myth is not the essential point of interest.
The interest gathers round the people who embraced the myth, or the half-myth.
Their religions temper, and not the dogmatic form of their creed, is the final goal of our study.
We seek, not the narrow and personal, but the broad and popular significance of the gospel.
What were the social forces which it conveyed? What were the human grief, gladness, and anticipation which it imaged ?
And because we approach the gospel as a token of the emotions of a community, and not as a display of individual moral prowess, we shall speak, not of the religion of Christ, but of the religion of the first Christians.
They yearned for a homely and dramatic expression of religious kinship, and the figure of Jesus, beckoning tired wanderers and labourers to his bosom, supplied the need.
Here was no awful Republic governed by philosophers; here was no cold principle of conformity with nature ; here was no exacting regulation of habits and observances.
But here was a kind of hospitality — a friend blessed with abundance offering a shelter and a welcome. To represent Jesus as extending this invitation was but a concrete and poetical means of declaring that this neighbourly and cordial sympathy was the very substance of religion.
For where honest souls, however poor, come together in mutual respect and love, there dwells the inward peace, and in the joining of hands the toilsome hewers of wood and drawers of water find rest unto their souls. These poor people loved each other; that made the new religion.
Christian love was the cry of the poor ; as if they said to the philosophers, " You have made a system of morality, and left us out. But our hearts also can love justice; for we can love each other."
Christianity was the great sob, the great sigh, and also the great smile of a proletariat that was learning its own human dignity.
Then, again, the gospels teem with prejudice against the learned and (to use the current phrase) upper classes. This feeling against the upper classes is not a wholesome democratic conviction that the possession of wealth lays the owners open to special vices of luxury and tyranny. It is an uncritical, sweeping vehemence which includes all rich men and officials under the head of villains.
Is it the hero who
makes a noble people?
Or a noble people which
makes the hero?
https://archive.org/stream/religionfirstch01goulgoog#page/n4/mode/2up
