Cain Killed Abel Quotes

On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.

Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?" Abel answered. "I don't remember anymore; here we are, together, like before." "Now I know that you have truly forgiven me," Cain said, "because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.

Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground--a story so sad that even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of his laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his creator.

Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.

I especially loved the Old Testament. Even as a kid I had a sense of it being slightly illicit. As though someone had slipped an R-rated action movie into a pile of Disney DVDs. For starters Adam and Eve were naked on the first page. I was fascinated by Eve's ability to always stand in the Garden of Eden so that a tree branch or leaf was covering her private areas like some kind of organic bakini. But it was the Bible's murder and mayhem that really got my attention. When I started reading the real Bible I spent most of my time in Genesis Exodus 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Talk about violent. Cain killed Abel. The Egyptians fed babies to alligators. Moses killed an Egyptian. God killed thousands of Egyptians in the Red Sea. David killed Goliath and won a girl by bringing a bag of two hundred Philistine foreskins to his future father-in-law. I couldn't believe that Mom was so happy about my spending time each morning reading about gruesome battles prostitutes fratricide murder and adultery. What a way to have a "quiet time." While I grew up with a fairly solid grasp of Bible stories I didn't have a clear idea of how the Bible fit together or what it was all about. I certainly didn't understand how the exciting stories of the Old Testament connected to the rather less-exciting New Testament and the story of Jesus. This concept of the Bible as a bunch of disconnected stories sprinkled with wise advice and capped off with the inspirational life of Jesus seems fairly common among Christians. That is so unfortunate because to see the Bible as one book with one author and all about one main character is to see it in its breathtaking beauty.

I wonder what God must have thought then / When He saw the work of Cain's hand / That the first baby born on the planet / Grew up to kill the third man.

He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. ‘This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don’t let it get complicated. Gray it ain’t. It’s black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.

Then she repeated what God told Cain after he killed Abel: “The blood cries out from the ground.

I think I can,” Lee answered Samuel. “I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I’m feeling my way now—don’t jump on me if I’m not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there—the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world—and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul—the secret, rejected, guilty soul. Mr. Trask, you said you did not kill your brother and then you remembered something. I don’t want to know what it was, but was it very far apart from Cain and Abel? And what do you think of my Oriental patter, Mr. Hamilton? You know I am no more Oriental than you are.

Am I my brother’s guardian?” Cain asked after he had killed his brother, Abel. We are now living in such an interconnected world that we are all implicated in one another’s history and one another’s tragedies. As we—quite rightly—condemn those terrorists who kill innocent people, we also have to find a way to acknowledge our relationship with and responsibility for Mamana Bibi, her family, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died or been mutilated in our modern wars simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The first murder, first jealousy, and first conflict of interest began when Cain, the elder son of Adam and Eva, killed his younger brother Abel. Not Cain, but the character of Cain, in various shapes, still exists.

Where is your brother, he asked, and cain responded with another question. Am I my brother's keeper, You killed him, Yes, I did, but you are the one who is really to blame, I would have given my life for him if you had not destroyed mine, It was a question of putting you to the test, But why put to the test the very thing you yourself created, Because I am the sovereign lord of all things, And of all beings you will say, but not of me and my freedom, What, the freedom to kill, Just as you had the freedom to stop me killing abel, which was perfectly within your capabilities, all you had to do, just for a moment, was to abandon that pride in your infallibility that you share with all the other gods, and, again just for a moment, to be truly merciful and accept my offering with humility, because you shouldn't have refused it, you gods, you and all the others, have a duty to those you claim to have created, This is seditious talk, Yes, possibly, but I can guarantee you that if I were god, I would repeat every day Blessed are those who choose sedition because theirs is the kingdom of the earth, That's sacrilege, Maybe, but no more sacrilegious than you allowing abel to die…

Politically speaking, the murder of John Brown would be an uncorrectable sin. It would create in the Union a latent fissure that would in the long run dislocate it. Brown's agony might perhaps consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it would certainly shake the whole American democracy. You save your shame, but you kill your glory. Morally speaking, it seems a part of the human light would put itself out, that the very notion of justice and injustice would hide itself in darkness, on that day where one would see the assassination of Emancipation by Liberty itself. Let America know and ponder on this: there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, and that is Washington killing Spartacus. (Open letter in defense of the abolitionist John Brown)

And I read something else," Jacob goes on. "There was this discussion of the story of Cain and Abel, from the Bible. After Cain kills his brother, God says, 'The bloods of your brother call out to me.' Not blood. Bloods. Weird, right? So the Talmud tries to explain it." "I can explain it," says William. "The scribe was drunk." "William!" cries Jeanne. "The Bible is written by God!" "And copied by scribes," the big boy replies. "Who get drunk. A lot. Trust me." Jacob is laughing. "The rabbis have a different explanation. The Talmud says it's 'bloods' because Cain didn't only spill Abel's blood. He spilled the blood of Abel and all the descendants he never had." "Huh!" "And then it says something like, 'Whoever destroys a single life destroys the whole world. And whoever saves a single life saves the whole world." There are sheep in the meadow beside the road. Gwenforte walks up to the low stone wall, and one sheep--a ram--doesn't run away. They sniff each other's noses. Her white fur beside the ram's wool--two textures, two colors, both called white in our inadequate language. Jeanne is thinking about something. At last, she shares it. "William, you said that it takes a lifetime to make a book." "That's right." "One book? A whole lifetime?" William nods. "A scribe might copy out a single book for years. An illuminator would then take it and work on it for longer still. Not to mention the tanner who made the parchment, and the bookbinder who stitched the book together, and the librarian who worked to get the book for the library and keep it safe from mold and thieves and clumsy monks with ink pots and dirty hands. And some books have authors, too, like Saint Augustine or Rabbi Yehuda. When you think about it, each book is a lot of lives. Dozens and dozens of them." Dozens and dozens of lives," Jeanne says. "And each life a whole world." "We saved five books," says Jacob. "How many worlds is that?" William smiles. "I don't know. A lot. A whole lot.

Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective.

Abel was also the first of the human family to experience physical death- and it was through murder! He suffered death because of another's sin, the transgression of his elder brother Cain, who, in a fit of rage, killed him in cold blood. At the same time, thanks to faith in the sin-offering, he overcame death. The first man to descend into the Valley of the Shadow of Death was the first one to triumphantly march straight through it into the Paradise of Glory. He stepped from the excruciating pain of mortal manslaughter's hate into the exquisite land of eternal delights prepared by the Father's love! He led the way, like a pioneer, for all subsequent generations of men and women of faith throughout human history.

So when Jesus comes along and says to us, “Love your enemy,” we instinctively feel how radical it is. He’s not just giving individuals a personal ethic; he is striking at the very foundation of the world! The world was founded on hating enemies, and now Jesus says, “Don’t do it!” When Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek,” he wasn’t just trying to produce kinder, gentler people; he was trying to refound the world! Instead of retaliatory violence; the world is to be refounded on cosuffering love. Jesus understood that the world had built its societal structures upon shared hatred, scapegoating, and what René Girard calls “sacred violence.” In challenging “sacred violence” (which Israel cherished in their war stories), Jesus was challenging the world at its most basic level. We cherish, honor, and salute sacred violence. We have to! We have a dark instinct that we must honor Cain’s war against Abel—and our own wars upon our hated enemies—or our whole system will fall apart. But Jesus testified against it—that those deeds were evil. This is where the tension begins to build. What Jesus called evil are the very things our cultures and societies have honored in countless myths, memorials, and anthems. It was this deep insight into the dark foundations of the world that Jesus possessed and his brothers did not. James and the rest of Jesus’s brothers and disciples could testify against symptomatic evil of greed and immorality, but they could not testify against the systemic evil of hating national enemies. This is why the world hates Jesus in a way it could not hate his brothers. Ultimately, Jesus’s brothers belonged to the same system as Caesar, Herod, and Caiaphas—the system of hating and seeking to kill one’s national or ethnic enemy. Jesus’s call to love our enemies presents us with a problem—a problem that goes well beyond the challenge we find in trying to live out an ethic of enemy love on a personal level. How can a nation exist without hating its enemies? If nations can’t hate and scapegoat their enemies, how can they cohere? If societies can’t project blame onto a hated “other,” how can they keep from turning on themselves? Jesus’s answer is as simple as it is revolutionary: instead of an arrangement around hate and violence, the world is now to be arranged around love and forgiveness. The fear of our enemy and the pain of being wronged is not to be transferred through blame but dispelled through forgiveness.

A dizzying array of resources across multiple fields of human inquiry has been deployed to defend this belief. By far, the strongest were theological arguments that presented white supremacy as divine mandate. Particular readings of the Bible provided the scaffolding for these arguments. Black Americans, for example, were cast as descendants of Cain, whom the book of Genesis describes as physically marked by God after killing his brother, Abel, and then lying to God about the crime. In the white Christian version of this narrative, the original ancestor was a Black criminal, and modern-day dark-skinned people continue to bear the physical mark of this ancient transgression. This story implied that Blacks likely inherited both their purported ancestor’s physical distinctiveness and his inferior moral character. These teachings persisted in many white Christian circles well into the 20th century.

In trying to find out what Bruno thought of his priesthood, we now have a serious problem which we did not have before. In Venice, he told his fellow-prisoners that he was an enemy of the mass, and thought transubstantiation a ridiculous idea and the Catholic ritual bestial and blasphemous. He compared the elevation of the host to hanging somebody on a gallows, or perhaps to lifting him up on a pitchfork. He told somebody who had dreamt of going to mass that that was a terrible omen; and he performed a mock mass with Ovid's Art of Love instead of a missal. He joked about hungry priests going off from mass to a good breakfast. He spoke particularly ill of the mass as a sacrifice, and said that Abel, the archetype of the sacrificing priest, was a criminal butcher who was rightly killed by the vegetarian Cain. A phrase he used elsewhere, apparently about Christ's passion and not directly about the mass itself, seems nevertheless to express rather exactly his attitude to is: he called it 'some kind of a cabbalistic tragedy'.

Thinking based on evil is not pessimistic; it is the thinking based on misfortune that is pessimistic because it wants desperately to escape evil or, alternatively, to revel in it. Thought, for its part, does not cure human misfortune, the terrible obviousness of which it absorbs for purposes of some unknown transformation. Pessimism excludes any depth that eludes its negative judgement, whereas thought wishes to penetrate magically beyond the fracture of the visible. The rays of the black sun of pessimism do not reach down to the floor of the abyss. Absolute depth knows neither good nor evil. Thus the intelligence of evil goes far beyond pessimism. In reality, the only genuinely pessimistic, nihilistic vision is that of good since, at bottom, from the humanist point of view, the whole of history is nothing but crime. Cain killing Abel is already a crime against humanity (there were only two of them!) and isn't original sin already a crime against humanity too? This is all absurd, and, from the standpoint of good, the effort to rehabilitate the world's violence is a hopeless exercise. All the more so as, without all these crimes, there simply wouldn't be any history. 'If the evil in man were eliminated,' says Montaigne, 'you would destroy the fundamental conditions of life.

Were these real people?” He raised an eyebrow. “Would my answer change your understanding of them?” “I’m not sure. It’s just that they seem too simple to be real. As soon as a desire arose, they acted on it. And not small things, like ‘I need a new hat’ or ‘I want to buy a loaf of bread.’ Large things like Adam and Eve and the apple. Or Cain killing Abel.” She frowned. “I know I haven’t lived very long, but this seems unusual.

The good news is that family dysfunction is not new. If you want to feel better about your own upbringing, spend some time in the Old Testament. Adam’s son Cain killed his brother, Abel. Noah got drunk and disgraced his family. Abraham slept with his wife’s servant in order to have a child, defying God’s promise that his wife would bear his son. Isaac played favorites with his twin boys, turning them against each other. Jacob’s sons were so dysfunctional that they sold one brother into slavery and then led their dad to believe he’d been murdered.

Genesis suggests that four relationships were broken by Adam’s toxic shame: the relationship with God, the relationship with self, the relationship with brother and neighbor (Cain kills Abel), and the relationship with the world (nature). The Twelve Steps restore those relationships.

It is, indeed, a metaphorical zone for the myth of all conflictual transformation, great and small, political and social, natural and familial, for the revolution, for the death or murder of God, for the splitting of the atom, for the emergence of language, for the original murder where Cain kills Abel, for the chopping of a tree, for a paparazzo catching a celebrity in an awkward position and publishing the details the next day, for the assassination of Michael Collins and, most insistently—embracing them all — for the Oedipal killing of the father.

Everything which is not connected to you is not connected to God,it means it is artificial. If the artificial is not connected to God,then it connected to the devil .because when God rejects your sacrifice remember,satan will receive it,and will put it anointing upon you. Remember when God rejected the sacrifice of Cain ,the devil took it and and put is anointing on him,the result was that he kills his brother. Genesis 4:3-8 KJV And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord . [4] And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: [5] But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. [6] And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? [7] If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. [8] And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

In meekness, yet fearlessly and firmly, Abel defended the justice and goodness of God. He pointed out Cain’s error, and tried to convince him that the wrong was in himself. He pointed to the compassion of God in sparing the life of their parents when he might have punished them with instant death, and urged that God loved them, or he would not have given his Son, innocent and holy, to suffer the penalty which they had incurred. All this caused Cain’s anger to burn the hotter. Reason and conscience told him that Abel was in the right; but he was enraged that one who had been wont to heed his counsel should now presume to disagree with him, and that he could gain no sympathy in his rebellion. In the fury of his passion he slew his brother. Cain hated and killed his brother, not for any wrong that Abel had done, but “because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.” 1 John 3:12. So in all ages the wicked have hated those who were better than themselves. Abel’s life of obedience and unswerving faith was to Cain a perpetual reproof. “Everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.” John 3:20. The brighter the heavenly light that is reflected from the character of God’s faithful servants, the more clearly the sins of the ungodly are revealed, and the more determined will be their efforts to destroy those who disturb their peace. [75] [76] [77]

The world thinks peace would come if everyone made a lot of money, but people haven’t found peace in possessions. They have thought the world would have peace if all arms were destroyed. Yet Cain killed Abel without a handgun. It is man’s heart that is the problem.

troubles started on the first page. In Genesis 1, it says that God created the plants first, then the animals, and people last. But in Genesis 2, it says that God created Adam first, then the plants, then the animals, and Eve last. Which was it? Not even God can have it both ways. Then comes the talking snake and the angel with the flaming sword. Actually, the idea of a talking snake didn’t stretch my imagination too much. But after Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, God posts an angel with a flaming sword at the garden gate to make sure nobody ever tries moving back in. That means that the Garden—and the angel with the flaming sword—are still there today, somewhere on the banks of the Euphrates. What if someone sent an army to conquer Eden? Sure, an angel with a flaming sword can hold off Arab raiders on camelback—but how about a fleet of tanks? Then there’s Cain’s wife. At the start of Genesis 4, Eve gives birth to two sons, Cain and Abel. After he kills Abel, Cain goes off and finds himself a wife. Cain and his wife have children of their own, then grandchildren, then great-grandchildren, then great-great grandchildren. And then—and only then—Adam and Eve, who are still alive and kicking, give birth to their third child. So if Adam and Eve are the parents of the whole human race, where did Cain’s wife come from? After that, there’s a lot of begetting—which gets

Was his brother’s name Cain?’ asked Tom. Hatty pretended not to have heard him. This was particularly irritating to Tom, as it was what he had to suffer from all the other people in the garden. ‘Because the story of Cain and Abel is in the Bible, and Cain really killed Abel. I don’t believe this Abel who gardens here has anything to do with the Bible Abel—except that he was called after him. I don’t believe this Abel ever had a brother who tried to murder him.

8Cain said to his brother Abel*…and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him. 9The Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” 10Then He said, “What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground! 11Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground,* which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 12If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.” 13Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is too great to bear! 14Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth—anyone who meets me may kill me!” 15The Lord said to him, “I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him.

After Eve conceived and bore children, twin sons, God tested their loyalty. He asked them for a token of their worship. Abel brought a blood offering to God while Cain presented grain. When Abel’s offering proved acceptable in God’s sight, and Cain’s was rejected, he killed Abel and was banished from the family dwelling, the Cave of Treasures. That was when the most amazing thing happened. Cain threw his head back and laughed wildly. “The gods visited my ancestors. I am a god!

The Haunt The haunt walks counting the bodies held in cubicle chambers; each night the rattle of his keys reminds one of the living dead who are keyless. The Turnkey continues his nightly watch to ensure none of the living dead commits suicide. To be truly dead is forbidden, unless the State sanctions the kill. This ritual first began as a means of penitence, and Auburn was the first N.Y.S. penitentiary and silence was the means to repentance, silence and reading the bible. Back then, the penitent memorized the portions of the bible: when Cain killed Abel, Joshua’s war on Jericho, and all about Ruth, Mary, and Esther — with little thought of God. Over 100 years, the haunt walks with the sanctimonious sentiments of a sentinel, with self-righteous indignation which the living dead attempt to repel with false braggadocio — but when the lights go out, the sudden screams, and all- night talk to prohibit nightmares — awaiting the dawn — permit the haunt to smile with arrogant knowing. The torture of the night is the haunt’s pleasure, making the rounds smelling the decay of dreams deferred, the putrid stench of justice, like the full bowels of slave ships. Gun towers stand reminiscent of the hanging trees with its strange fruit that the haunt picks at leisure appraising its ripeness in terms of life sentences. As steel bangs against steel, chains clang with the echoes of gangs dressed in strips of day and night, black and white; the fright prohibits flight as jail cells constrict and severely depict the absence of liberty. The haunt of Auburn, year by year decade by decade, in a century has never escaped the nightly count of tormented souls, himself chained to the ball of the imprisoned — a spirit’s horror of lost freedom.

As a matter of fact, it's the main event; it’s the story of the founding murder. Now, you will immediately observe that it's not a collective murder but, if you look at the text closely, you will see that it can be interpreted as a collective murder. Cain says, “Now that I have killed my brother, everybody will kill me.” In other words, the law against murder, the implicit law against murder, has been broken. Now everybody can kill me. So I will make a law against murder. The first consequence of the murder of the brother is also the law against murder. Therefore, it's a foundation of the human community. It has, in a way, “good” consequences. We can put “good” between quotation marks here, because everything is founded on evil violence. But it makes it less bad if you know that murder is forbidden from now on. To say that murder is forbidden is to say that we have a human society. We are no longer in the wildness of Cain’s murder of Abel. Therefore, we are told that Cain is the founder of the first community. We are never told how he does it, but it's obvious. The only thing he does before this society is founded is to kill his brother. This murder can easily be interpreted as collective if, after he has killed his brother, Cain is threatened with murder all over the place. “Everybody is going to kill me,” he says. In other words, people will kill each other.   Therefore, Cain is the symbol of a tribe at first, but doesn't necessarily have to be regarded as a mere individual.

Now that I've killed my brother, everybody will kill me”? Who is "everybody"? Is it Adam and Eve? Is it two old parents? That makes no sense. Therefore, you have to say that we are in a fluid situation where we are dealing with a community and the founding of the community. It's no longer chaos. It's a community that is run by the rule against murder because there has been a murder. So I say the founding murder, which is a collective murder, is like that. There is something in the first epistle of John that is a reading of Cain and Abel.[15] Satan was a murderer from the beginning. The “from the beginning” is very important because it means what I just said to you: for the Gospel, Cain and Abel are part of original sin. Cain and Abel are part of the first definition of mankind. That's very important. We are dealing with the biblical interpretation of the founding of human communities as a result of original sin, which is the law against murder in the first Cainite community. After that they invent all sorts of things because they have ritual, because they have some form of sacrifice. So it's really very close to what we said previously. What I'm doing now is interpreting the beginning of the Bible in terms of the anthropological theory that we are discussing.[16]   SB:

As many contemporary thinkers have pointed out, when you create an identity by despising other groups, it makes you dependent in many ways on them. Ironically, the “other” becomes part of who you are. You need for them to stay in their place and to fit your stereotypes of them. And if something threatens your one-dimensional, negative view of them, it shakes your very foundations. This is what brought Cain to kill Abel, and why Peter responded violently as well. Their false identity was shaken, and rather than change it and give it another foundation, they lashed out at the people who were endangering it.

...the red skies over Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic Ocean predict a penultimate doom. Is this the red horse, the second of the Four Horsemen from the Book of Revelation? Wars and rumors of war have preceded this cataclysm going back to Cain killing Abel. However, this episode of global bloodshed has just begun.

Finally comes the third temptation, the most compelling of all. Christ sees the kingdoms of the world laid before Him for the taking. That’s the siren call of earthly power: the opportunity to control and order everyone and everything. Christ is offered the pinnacle of the dominance hierarchy, the animalistic desire of every naked ape: the obedience of all, the most wondrous of estates, the power to build and to increase, the possibility of unlimited sensual gratification. That’s expedience, writ large. But that’s not all. Such expansion of status also provides unlimited opportunity for the inner darkness to reveal itself. The lust for blood, rape and destruction is very much part of power’s attraction. It is not only that men desire power so that they will no longer suffer. It is not only that they desire power so that they can overcome subjugation to want, disease and death. Power also means the capacity to take vengeance, ensure submission, and crush enemies. Grant Cain enough power and he will not only kill Abel. He will torture him, first, imaginatively and endlessly. Then and only then will he kill him. Then he will come after everyone else.

This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don’t let it get complicated. Gray it ain’t. It’s black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.” He nodded back over his shoulder. “Thanks to you…” He lifted my hand and stared at the center knuckle. The cut had spread open. “… those boys in there are reconsidering their choice.

This morning, I went past the Mons Palatinus,” said Karl one evening as they sat together over bread, olives, and cheese. “There, some commoners still pray to Romulus and Remus.” He shook his head. “Allegedly, there are remains of a cave where the two brothers were nursed by a she-wolf. What a ridiculous notion!” “Really?” Johann smiled. “Weren’t those brothers abandoned as infants and washed ashore in a willow basket on the banks of the Tiber? And didn’t Romulus kill his brother later on before founding Rome?” “Yes, I think that’s how the story goes.” Karl frowned. “Why?” “Well, Moses was also abandoned in a willow basket on a river, and Cain killed his brother, Abel. So, the one story is a ridiculous notion while the other is true belief? Where is the difference?” “Debating with you is probably more exhausting than debating that Luther.” “I’m not debating, merely posing questions,” replied Johann. “Just like the Greek philosopher Socrates used to do. Questions bring light to the darkness of the world.

I‘m Eve. I raised Cain to kill Abel.

The first man that was slain in the world was a saint, and he for religion.  And as Luther said, Cain will kill Abel unto the end of the world.

Lucian took a swallow of the whiskey and licked his lips. “The one brother doesn’t seem too upset about his dead brother, and I’m starting to think this family might be a little bubble off plumb, but I get the address of the shooter and throw Cain in back of the Nash. On the drive over, he’s telling me that he didn’t have anything to do with killing Abel and that he didn’t even help the shooter dump the body—made him do it himself. Took some kind of strange moral stand on that one, I guess.” The old sheriff rolled his eyes. “Well, Ludlow Coontz, the shooter, is this big, dumb-lookin’ bulldogger, two hundred and seventy pounds if he was an ounce, and this is before I had yon man-mountain over there.

Lately, in the curious and widely diffused teaching called the Science of Sociology, it has been asserted that the relations between the members of human society have been, and are, dependent on economic conditions. But to assert this is merely to substitute for the clear and evident cause of a phenomenon one of its effects. The cause of this or that economic condition always was (and could not but be) the oppression of some men by others. Economic conditions are a result of violence, and cannot therefore be the cause of human relations. Evil men – the Cains – who loved idleness and were covetous, always attacked good men – the Abels – the tillers of the soil, and by killing them or threatening to kill them, profited by their toil. The good, gentle, and industrious people, instead of fighting their oppressors, considered it best to submit, partly because they did not wish to fight, and partly because they could not do so without interrupting their work of feeding themselves and their neighbors. On this oppression of the good by the evil, and not on any economic conditions, all existing human societies have been, and still are, based and built.

My God, my new understanding of God is that he does not promise us protection and intervention. He promises only salvation and enlightenment. This is our world, a gift from God, and we make it what it is. If it is unjust, we have made it so. If there is boundless misery, we have permitted it. If there is suffering, it came from man’s own action or inaction. Abel killed Cain; God did not.

Thee knows. . .dying's only half of it. Any of us hear, I hope. . .is ready to die for what he believes. If it's asked of us and can be turned to good account. I'm not one for dying, willy-nilly, thee understands. . . .It's an awful final thing, and more often and not nobody's much discommoded by it, except thyself, but there are times when it's the only answer a man can give to certain questions. Then I'm for it. But thee's not been asked such a question, now. Thee can go out on the pike. . .and thee'll be . . .as dead and just as forgotten as if thee'd tied a stone round they neck and jumped off Clifty Falls. No, Josh, dying won't turn the trick. What thee'll be asked to do now - is kill.' The word hung in the air. A fly circled the table, loudly and slowly, and still the sound of the word was there. . . .louder than the ugly humming. It hung in the air like an open wound. Kill. In the Quaker household the word was bare and stark. Bare as in Cain and Abel's time with none of the panoply of wars and regiments and campaigns to clothe it. Kill. Kill a man. Kill thy brother. . . .

12 Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his Brother (presents the prototype of evil). And wherefore slew he him? (Cain was not a murderer because he killed his Brother, but killed his Brother because he was a murderer.) Because his own works were evil, and his Brother’s Righteous (points directly to the Cross; the rejection of God’s Way [the Cross], which Cain did, is labeled by the Holy Spirit as “evil”; Abel accepted the Cross [Gen., Chpt. 4]).