wingedbeast

Setting: The BHB Orchard. Pevensies, Susan and Edmund, have just walked off to have their own conversation.

Cain: It's all just a result of your standard selective breeding. But, the fun part has been watching nature do its own selective breeding, just creating more and more variation, and, to all I've seen, no indication of some boundary of "kinds", yet.

Peter: You're not upsetting me with evolution. Nothing in my text suggests it and even C.S. Lewis has found the question of whether or not Genesis was a factual account to be of no interest.

Cain: No, it's my mere presence that upsets you.

Peter narrows his eyes.

Cain: Here I sit. A human-created-devil could be formed of human limitation and flawed moral understanding. But, I, even with the Death of the Author to distinguish me from any real Cain that may or may not have existed, stand as the defense of the first murderer in the holy bible.

Cain: To say that I wasn't evil, that there was complexity to the morality of my canon that goes unrecognized, is to say that God didn't act with moral perfection.

Peter: That simply is not the case. God's word is God's word and God's will is moral perfection. There can be no other way.

Cain: I dare to say that there can be another way. I'll even dare to say that it is a better way.

Peter: Whatever way you have can't be binding or objectively true. I can say that the Nazis were evil and that Mother Teresa was good. You cannot.

Cain: Well, I would disagree with Mother Teresa being good, what with warehousing the sick, letting them wallow in their pain, and not even directing them to treatment when she knew their conditions were treatable. But, I can easily call the Nazis evil.

Peter: You are a murderer. You have no standing to judge.

Cain: I'll correct you. I have no standing to claim moral perfection. I don't try. But, I have every standing to claim that mass murder is evil, just by acting on a morality of compassion, or humanism, or trans-humanism, or hedonism (that's the real philosophy, not the common use you get these days).

Peter: But, none of those are binding, none of those are true. They're all just human creations, shifting subjective morality.

Cain: Subjective, perhaps. But, they have the advantage that they've never argued in favor of genocide, before.

Peter: Really? You're going to bring that up, like it's not been brought up and answered a thousand times before?

Cain: Canaanites and Amalekites, specifically the male infants of the former and all infants of the latter.

Peter: This has been explained, time and again, and you still don't get it. God is loving, but God is also just. Those Canaanites had enacted horrific practices and murders. If their adults, even the noncombatants, had been allowed to live, they would have corrupted the culture of the Israelites. The land was promised, by God, and the inhabitants were judged, by God.

Cain: You just said that it's okay to kill people when you believe they've committed atrocities, have an inconvenient culture, are geographically inconvenient, or, since we're talking about infants, have the wrong ancestry. What of those conditions weren't met by the Nazis?

Peter: The Jews never-

Cain: Neither did the Canaanites, not by the best available evidence. It was just a thing that the Israelites claimed in order to justify what they were doing.

Peter: Even if you don't believe that the Bible is God's own word, you can stick to the metafictional rules established and deal with what's on the page.

Cain: Okay, the omniscient narrator of a fiction told, but did not show, that they did these things. Noted. But, every other excuse you had, down to and including that of differing religious beliefs and a fear of having people "corrupted" out of their faiths applies. God isn't too kind or loving to morally accept such horrors, not in those texts. He isn't even too kind or loving to hold back from enacting those same horrors upon, I will remind you, infants.

Peter: If you believe in the salvation of children, God actually did them a great kindness-

Cain: After having cursed their parents and their parents' parents to growing up in a culture that would inevitably doom them to Hell. And, don't even pretend that makes a difference to Divine Command Theory of Morality. God did it, whether they went to Heaven, were annihilated, went to some purgatory, or are, right now, burning in Hell, by Divine Command Morality, it was good by technicality and by nothing else.

Cain: I can say that the Nazis were evil. Maybe it only refers to my own values which have no authority over you, but at least it refers to some values. You can't. You can guess that, maybe, God wasn't in favor of this particular act of torturous genocide, but not for love, not for kindness, not for justice, whatever those may mean in a world where someone can do that to someone else and still be said to be infinitely loving.

Peter: You really do want to turn all of morality on its side.

Cain: I know it's hard for you to see it. It was also hard for Abel to see it. It favors you so highly. It doesn't let you get away with everything, but it makes you the favorite, the one that's beloved over others so that you don't see it when they get less love.

Cain: Your own Animals are told that their only legitimate place is to beneath the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve, even when those sons and daughters had already been engaged in a centuries long extermination. And, you don't see anything limiting in being painted as funny, childish things, regardless of anything they may accomplish.

Cain: You're very privileged.

Peter: I'm not privileged. My childhood was marred by the Blitz.

Cain: Which you were able to escape thanks to family connections to a wealthy land-owner, unlike many another child. And, you got to go to a world that was very much about you, unlike many another child who only gets exactly the opposite harsh lesson.

Cain: You're very privileged in this Divine Command morality. Your ancestors have won the wars that would have decided if God was on someone else's side. Your nation, along with the Allies, won the one that was fought in your lifetime. So, it's very difficult for you to see those not so privileged for anything but what they do for lack of your privileges, that you often don't see in yourself.

Peter glares at Cain.

Cain: That's no insult, by the way. Privilege is invisible in its presence and conspicuous in its absence. You can only really see your privileges by comparing your experience with others.

Cain: But, I hope you see what your sister is doing, here. I hope you, someday, can see what we're all doing here. We're trying to save morality from the good guys, because you've been corrupting it from the start.