I don’t know what has kept us humans so deeply asleep. Even with all the evidence before us, we still refuse — out of sheer habit — to admit our mistakes. Awareness is hard, but not harder than what we call “living” today. Becoming aware is not painful; for years we have confused the “pain of the wrong path” with the “pain of truth.” We are so sunken in our own simplicity that we refuse to change the most private thing we own — our beliefs.
Awareness is personal — and so is responsibility.
But let us be clear: “just following orders” offers no legal immunity, and “others told me so” does nothing to reduce your responsibility or mine. Let us understand that God does not punish anyone on our behalf. The story of “divine punishment” was taught to us for one reason only: so that oppressors could escape accountability, and the oppressed would sit on their hands and wait. If cosmic retribution were truly the order of things, every lion in the jungle would have been struck down by God for tearing apart buffalo — but nature has its own law.