A Pound of Butter

If you were to go to a store to buy a pound of butter, you would take the butter off the shelf, and taking it to the cashier, you would pay for the butter. If the price was five dollars per pound, you would pay the five dollars and take it home. There would be an empty space on the shelf, but soon someone would replace that pound, and all would be well with no damage to anyone.

If you were to take someone's life, then there would be a very empty space on many people's shelves, and the very tragic part is that those spaces cannot be easily refilled, if they can be refilled at all. The loss to those of the empty spaces is so great that it is unimaginable, and we all know that the loss will go on forever.

So the value of a pound of butter is five dollars. What is the value of a life?

The simple and obvious answer is a life, which is the full price. Therefore, if you take someone's life, you should be prepared to forfeit your own. There are obviously excuses and exceptions, unavoidable accidents, honest mistakes, etc., but there has to be a price to pay. If you kill someone because you were driving like a fool, drunk or otherwise, this is not an honest mistake. No matter how you try to explain it to the victim's family. If you sell drugs to someone in order to provide yourself with a good lifestyle and the drug addicts destroy their lives, this is not an honest mistake, and so on and so forth.

The bottom line is that if you are not prepared to pay the full price, then please leave the butter on the shelf!