As we all know, the lessons from Genesis are fundamental to each of the "big 3" monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I am not personally religious, however, I view this to be an equally moral question, as much as religious question.
More to the point, I see no value in reading the rest of the "Good Book", if we can't fundamentally agree upon, and live by, the basic tenet that human beings are responsible for one another's well-being.
Two hundred years ago, prior to the Industrial Revolution, all countries around the world were relatively uniform in wealth. Differences in wealth between nations, by today's standards, were relatively minimal, as no nation had yet achieved widespread economies of scale and industrial output. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, that all changed, as the "Western" nations industrialized and left their "undeveloped" brethren in the economic dirt, literally. Many of the undeveloped regions of the world (think Africa) are in some cases worse off than they were 200 years ago; this is due to a population explosion and the addition of just enough Western technology to have the worst of both worlds e.g. low incomes and heavy artillery.
The divide between rich and poor has grown for 200 years, but in the past 30 years it has accelerated. Two hundred years ago, human beings had at least a semblance of argument for their brutality and domination of neighbouring countries. Back then all countries were in a similar economic situation where most people were relatively poor, working conditions were awful, and existence for the majority was miserable and short. It was eat or be eaten.
Today, we have no excuse. The Western nations have historically unparalleled wealth and the undeveloped nations live in abject squalor. Depending on which figures you use, between 30,000 and 40,000 children die every day from "Poverty" i.e. for want of a few dollars worth of food and medicine. If you extrapolate the lower number (30,000) out for the past 50 years, that's over half a billion children who died, while the West was enjoying its orgy of consumption. This is a holocaust of human life, unprecedented in human history. I know, we've put men on the moon, built jet liners, invented the internet/iPhones etc. However, our economic "success" has come at enormous human and environmental cost. We live under a model that commoditizes human beings BELOW their cost of survival, and environmental resources below their cost of replacement.
This isn't an impassioned plea to "Save the World", this is an observation that unless we find a new economic model based on fairness and compassion, then the survival of humanity itself is at extreme risk.
With the rising tide of religious fundamentalism across the world, we are seeing the inevitable associated increase in ignorance and intolerance that can only come from reading the same book over and over again. What makes this era unique however is the combination of proliferating nuclear weapons, rising intolerance, global economic instability, and weakening of the last great superpower, all coming together to form an historically lethal situation.
IF (big if), the human race is going to survive this impending "Dark Ages", then it occurs to me we will only do so by adopting a more equitable distribution of economic resources that spreads education and opportunity worldwide. For that to happen we will have to overcome our historical legacy of strong dominating the weak, and start living Judeo-Christian values, as opposed to just reciting them...
