[catarleriarly]

"It is wrong to kill. Period."

It may be sad to take a life, but to outright say it is wrong, is an opinion. And, IMO, wrong itself. Was it wrong to kill the S.S. of the Nazi Regime, to free the jews and other captives from the camps, from being gased and systematically murdered? No. It was the only option, a sad one, but one forced upon the Allies by the Nazis. If you have a few hundred prisoners in a camp a few clicks away from your camp, do you rally your troops to go ask them to nicely not murder all of those innocent people? No. You go in guns blazing, and save them from that horror.

And you really should have read the entire thread if you were going to make such statements. I gave very specific, in the moment circumstances. What would you do if you were that teacher? I would hopefully pull the gun from the bottom drawer and try my best to alleviate as much suffering from the children as possible by taking out their attackers.

I believe in logic, and protecting the masses, and the innocent ones therein. When a few decide that a race or ethnicity is not worthy of life, and are not capable of being turned from that viewpoint, do you protest them all the while they set those innocent, beautiful people to the firing squads? No. Well, you can, but I like to think i'd be better then that. You can't always cling to a precept that was given for every day life, and not for special cases such as the holocaust, Islamic Terrorism, and the genocide being done in Africa, you have to think of it in a wider range, taking into account the many lives being taken by an insane few, a few who cannot be talked to about it, who can't be protested, who will not stop but by force alone. You have to think about the impact being done to society as a whole. Your right, it's wrong to make the choice to kill, but it's not wrong to kill when the choice is being made for you, with no alternatives.

You never did answer that question, that particular scenario, Victorious. Would you have sit by and let them kill/rape every last one of those younglings? And if not, would you feel like a coward as you witness, first hand, the horror they would have inflicted upon them?

Was it wrong for the men of those villages who wanted nothing more then happiness, love, and safety for their children, to fight back and kill as many of those genocidal maniacs as possible? No. It was sad that the choice was made for them.

I think perhaps there is a clinging, an attachment, an indoctrination, to the first precept. The Buddha did not have genocide in his days. There was noone killing another, bent on wiping out an entire race/ethnicity, simply because they were who they were, their genetics. I love the Buddha, and what he taught, but he was also a very logical and realistic man. He would have not enjoyed the holocaust, but he would also have understood what we had to do, the people we had to kill, to free those people.

When it comes to evils such as the holocaust, there is no choice for pacifism, unless you would like to simply sit back and watch the destruction. Imagine where we would be today if we did that to the Nazis? Well. I would be fine, i'm supposedly apart of the Master Race, you however, would have been either enslaved or killed.

Perhaps the 'intention to kill' comes into this too, like Element had mentioned/quoted. We never intended to kill those people who are out there using genocide to wipe out entire ethnicities, they forced our hand, by not leaving any alternatives.