Gabe the Angel

Why is the killing of children by terrorists any worse than the killing of adults? Please take time to reflect on this. This is a key issue in the understanding of the way accept or not accept religion. Whilst we may differ in our opinion concerning the interpretation of the Bible or Koran, do we not all feel humanity for these children regardless of race or colour or religious background. Is it any easier to deal with this with or without religion, and why is it so.

Valdemar

The murder of children by terrorists is just as bad as the murder of adults by terrorists. It's still killing.

We place more value on the innocence of the child and their potential to experience life to the fullest which was cut short. This is an evolutionary trait and subject to discussion in another forum.

What any of this has to do with religion is beyond me.

Emp-JohnIV

The things with killing children is that they were alive just long enough to realize that they are alive and that they want to do things with there life. Then there life is ended. I think it is mostly an evolved trait to protect children, but I don't care, I still get pissed off when they are targets.

WCH

It's partly an issue of life-expectancy, too. When you're 5, you can expect to live another 70 years, and if you're 70 you can expect to live another 10 or 15 or so. Based on that alone, killing a 5 year old is worse than killing a 70 year old, 'cos you're taking away more years of his life.

Dean Anderson

I think that this is more of a moral issue than a religious one, so I'm passing it over to MF&P.

Guido

Children are more defensless then adults. So in general it's considered bad to kill children. The same goes for adults who can't defend themselves like Down syndrome, elderly or people in a wheel chair. I don't know the moral foundation of it, just that on all play-grounds around the world it's bad to pick on someone smaller then you. Maybe it's a kind of evolutionary thing to protect children at all costs.

Killing adults is wrong too. Random acts of terrorism, like blowing up a train with women, children etc is wrong. But targetting children is what causes the most anger to us.

Children are more innocent too. If I where a target of a terrorist attack, you could always say I had it coming, for example for voting for a government that has a bad foreign policy, not writing letters to free Palistinian prisoners etc. As an adult I could in some way or another be part of the problem that caused terrorist attacks. This doesn't apply to children.

Ms. Siv

This is more an innate evolutionary preference than anything else.

Our preference for the young often extends beyond humans, to cute young kittens, puppies, koala bears etc.

Evolutionary psychologists have pointed out that the physical features of “cuteness�? in young children are shared with many other young in the mammalian world - large, roundeded heads relative to body length, large eyes, and small noses. This is why puppies all have pug snouts.
These are probably characteristics of some types of physical cues that we are biologically predisposed to responding with a feeling of love and caring.

For more than 90% of our evolutionary history, we were nomadic hunter gatherers moving around in groups of mostly genetically related individuals.
Obviously, in such a case, a preference for the welfare and well-being of the children would be a good gene-propogation strategy because children have their entire reproductive life in front of them whereas any adult is more likely to have completed at least a part of it (more likely to have fathered/mothered at least a few children).

It is this same instinct which remains when we respond to children by being, in general, more protective towards them than towards adults. even though these children may not be genetically related to us anymore or maximised gene propogation our objective.

BillyTheKat

The killing of children is held to be worse than the killing of adults because of the more sentimental aspects of the construction of childhood, particularly the notions of "innocence", "defencelessness" and "potential" (see also anti-abortion arguments for further examples of this). It's interesting to note how the Western media responds to, and amplifies, this construct; for instance, consider the near-iconic image of the Vietnamese girl emerging from a napalm attack, and the soon-to-be iconic image of the young boy emerging from the Beslan school siege. Compare and contrast this with images of Palestinian children dressed up as tiny suicide bombers, and the discursive problems this imposes, as well as the media treatment of children who kill (or more generally, the media treatment of children who do not conform to our expectations of how children behave).

I believe the whole phenomena is fairly recent and local (if only in historical terms); it didn't seem to be an issue with regard to child workers in 19th century Britain, for instance, and IIRC at this time child criminals were treated in the same manner as adults.

Ms. Siv

Well ... the blank slate and noble savage myths (aka innocence and purity of children) might be recent ... but the phenomena of considering children's lives to be more valuable than those of adults is certainly not a new one ... nor is it a Western idea. Nor is it unique to humans.

BillyTheKat

I'm not too sure how to respond to your comments because I find it unclear as to whether they're meant to challenge or support mine. I wouldn't (and haven't) claimed that valuing children's lives over adults is a particularly new or unique phenomena, but I would note that the manner in which children are valued (and conceptualised; for instance, small adults? savages? "living dolls"? something else?) does vary across history and geography, and even within societies.

However, with regard to the uniqueness of these ideas to humans, human-style communal offspring-rearing seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and the significance of offspring seems to amount to little more than maternal familiarity or, as far as other species are concerned, an easy meal.