Thought I'd bump this thread with some thoughtful points. While we had our moment toying with definitions, the fact is, that justifiable or not, murder takes place. This can be seen from a Newtonian point of view, one person accidentally killing another, A friend of the deceased blaming him, killing him and starting a chain reaction of murder and death. I almost want to resort to that phrase from Hellsing...BooHoo, People Kill People.

But I don't look at it that way. It slips into determinism and fatalism all sorts of isms that give me a rash. And really we know better than "Cause and Effect". That's so last century, really. Things arise mutually in nets of gossamer associations. They're not billiard balls that convey momentum upon one another. That's only viewed that way because linear time skews our perspective. But not to digress into physics...

My personal views have not been made totally clear in this thread. Many people may well say... "Murder!!?? That's against the law!!" But Law...law is a stupid sort of word... And indeed, it is Law that gives us a portion of our definition of murder. Law is not law... It's an objective maxim that is enforced only when it discovers a transgression. Which makes it more of a guidline than an actual law. It can't touch transgressors that it can't identify.

These vaguries that we fool ourselves with...don't you notice they all define themselves by their antithesis? What is law? Why, the opposite of lawlessness. It's downright childish. What about these definitions? Hmm? Present simulations of these crimes and watch them crumble. As Jean Baudrillard once put: Ever try to stage a fake bankrobbery? Think you could convince the police that you were faking a robbery, even if you were? So there is no difference between a fake robbery and a real one? So what about a real robbery? It just means there are no fake robberies or real robberies. They're all fake just as they're all real...same difference. What is a bank robbery? Damn definitions...

What is murder? We've already discovered the difficulty in describing that.

And I don't adhere to any law. At all. I'm totally and completely Antinomianist...as Taoists tend to be. They never held a high opinion of the law anyway. "Write down the law," They say. "And people will find away around it."

That's not to say that I feel like forcibly removing someone's life, murderously or not. But should I ever, for some horrible reason, feel that way, I wouldn't let the law stop me.

-Sin