Life or Knife

To:  Every Human Being, from the ordinary person up to the emperor.

MY DECLARATION

I stand for the absolute value of LIFE, it doesn’t matter the time, the place or the situation I’m in.
I consider the killing as the theft of a life: it’s not in our possibilities to give it back, therefore it’s a theft no price or punishment can refund.
I acknowledge the existence of an aggressive tendency within myself, and I assert I could have the necessity of defending myself or fighting for what is right in my opinion, BUT I strongly believe that killing should be considered no more as the best or the most effectual answer to any kind of problem.
I know I could be able to kill accidentally, beyond my intentions, or in some occasions when I may lose control, BUT I can’t wish it in any circumstance: if it happened, I’d consider it as my worst mistake.
I claim my personal right not to have to kill: innocence is an essential right and I want to preserve it until the end of my life.
I cannot accept the definition of a just killing: real justice, for others as well as for myself, cannot provide the killing but should inflict a fair punishment within the limits of the respect for life.
In the end I firmly believe that the capacity of solving any kind of problem without killing could stop or reduce the violence spiral that went on for centuries: more than that it could be the real chance of a giant evolutive leap for human societies.



WHY SIGNING THE "Life or Knife" PETITION

As long as there is someone who will kill, no one can feel safe.
Every individual who lives on Earth has the right at least to protect his or her own life.
To be human means to be born mortal by definition, but to kill someone voluntarily violates the fundamental right of every one to live his own life (anyhow one wishes or can within the limits of his society's rules) and to die as nature forsees.
Any economic, social, political, or cultural motive can not at all justify the killing of another human .
Killing is a very severe error and absolute theft: stealing the life of a man, one removes from him irreversibily all possibilities.
Life is potential’s energy: each woman and man has the right to be born, to grow, to grow old and to die, realizing, within the errors and improvements, her or his own identity within the limits imposed by nature.
And moreover it is unexceptable that a considerable part of human resources are used for the purpose of killing other humans, instead of being intended for improving the living conditions of those who live on our planet.
The intention not to kill could be the mental and cultural attitude that could permit the beginning of a worldwide project in which one respects the fundamental rights of all members of Humanity.
Nobody asks, as in an utopia, to magically stop war or discord: but we can claim that conflicts happen without putting in jeopardy the life of another and that one fights, one retaliates or defends without killing.
Honestly, the actual conditions are not able to promise such an advantageous development and at the same time they do not permit one to attempt to do so.
Anyone who supports that this situation is the better way is no more credible:
how many thousands of years do we have to wait to declare the failure of this course?
What must still happen to make us change this course?
Whatever it be, we feel the necessity of a new solution and believe that it must be found together, thanks to the participation of each individual without any distinction of age, sex, nationality or religious belief.

We started with the simple question: why does each one of us claim that killing is bad and yet we continue to do it from the dawn of Humanity?
It seems that we have not yet adopted an alternative strategy to face the problem of improving our living condition and thousands of unsuccessful years have not yet caused us to consider a feasibly, different life.
In each age and each latitude there are or there were conditions that deemed killing correct or necessary: conquests, revolutions, vendettas, wars, capital punishment, exterminations, genocides, and the demands of defense have always specified an allowed or necessary solution in the killing of the enemy or of the victim.
At the base of this consideration and attempting to understand the reasons of respective positions we wondered : how did we arrive at the condition so extreme of requiring such an action?
In our opinion, the big problem up to the present has been our inability to manage a relationship with an enemy or current threat.
The first characteristic of the enemy is that it doesn’t exist the possibility of communication: dialog and comparison.
The enemy is the element we normally use to identify the GOOD on our side and the EVIL on the other one.
The GOOD’s main aim is to defeat and eliminate the EVIL, therefore killing can result necessary to get to the point.
In these cases, communication is interrupted by the immediate necessity of punishment, elimination or revenge: apparently, the death of the enemy (EVIL) seems to be a sudden solution.
But here comes a paradox: if killing could solve the problem in a definitive way it shouldn’t have any consequences.
On the contrary, as we can see every war, every vendetta, every execution, every killing becomes the cause for more killings.
That means that the problem is not completely solved by killing and, more than that, it produces a chain reaction and the creation of new problems to solve.
If we don’t consider very few historical episodes, human beings never adopted a way that totally excluded the chance of killing the enemy.
Why should we give up and renounce to try the way we never really tried?
The answer sounds easy: it’s impossible to change every People’s mentality and culture.
At the same time, nevertheless, we’re still medically fighting against every disease and we still cry for our dead.

So, why can’t we try to give hope a chance and try an alternative path for our lives?

Thank You.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The Life or Knife Petition to Every Human Being, from the ordinary person up to the emperor. was created by and written by Lorenzo Scoles (losco@rocketmail.com).  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.