If seven years of therapy and countless episodes of Donahue have taught me anything, it’s this: your inner self needs constant reassurance and positive feedback. Just consider how your inner murderer must feel. Everywhere you go: killing is bad. We all know how damaging repression can be. Until we can look our inner murderers in the eyes and say, I accept you as a natural part of who I am, we’ll have trouble.
Now, getting to the point of accepting your inner murderer as a natural or normal part of you is no simple, one-posting kind of thing. Like I said, I’ve been in therapy for seven years and I still am working on self-acceptance. But, as the cliché goes, every journey begins with one step—I think A.A. stole that from Chinese philosophy.
As I figure it, whether you look at things from a Biblical standpoint, or you take the evolutionary view of things, we all have an inner murderer, we’re expected to kill each other.
If we can blame this mess on God, then He set us up to kill. After the first taste of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, humanity’s first sin is murder—although since God hadn’t said murder was a sin yet, Cain’s defense could have had a case (unfortunately, defense attorneys did not exist yet and God was clearly biased toward Abel). And had Cain paid someone to kill Abel, we could say that murder was the oldest profession (but of course, the only other people on the planet were his parents). But anyway, of the first four people on the planet, one is a murderer. 25%. And once Abel is dead, the percentage of murders in society was 33%. No wonder God made murder a sin. Had Cain been a serial killer, the Bible would have been a much shorter book.
So Christians, above all, should appreciate how much killing is part of us.
As for those who find the Garden of Eden story a bit, well, dumb, considering that God’s creation appears to be 4.5 billion years old (so does that mean God is a liar if His creation, earth, convinces people that it is not six thousand years old?), our own history and the actions of our closest primate relatives suggest we are quite confortable with killing.
Could killing really be natural? Well, do animals in nature kill? Chimpanzees form bands and wage war against other chimps. Adults will kill and eat children. (NOTE: our other closest primate relative, the bonobo, seems to favor love to war—they tend to just screw each other to avoid conflicts: see the chapter on bonobos in Free Sex: For Dummies). And it’s not just the chimps. Every time I turn on the Nature Channel or Discovery, a lion is killing its cub, a baby bird kicks its smaller sibling out of the nest, an alligator chews on the little ones.
Have we worn clothes so long that we forget that we’re animals? Maybe that’s why uniforms are so effective in getting us to kill (military, police, postal workers). By looking the same, we forget that individuality that makes us think we are not animals.
See, whether we think we’re descended from Cain (or his brother Seth, the replacement kid) or a bunch of rabid chimpanzess, we’ve got murder in our genes. When you look on the evening news or the New York Times online, and you see all the hullabaloo over murder, take a moment and look inside yourself. Tell your inner murderer, killing is part of life, and be accepting. The more you repress your inner murderer, the more likely you will be to make dumb mistakes when you finally do venture out into the world of handguns and obscure poisons.
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