I'm catching up with the thread, still 5 pages behind. (Zunism is neat though!)
Fakedit: Crap, didn't mean to type so much O_o Sorry.
Those are easy commandments to confuse. "Coveting thy neighbor's wife" sounds a lot like adultery. Also that part does specify gender.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
What if you covet thy neighbour's husband? Or the neighbour himself/herself?
Since I shitposted in the past, I would like to point out this is an honest question. (though perhaps I should note that it is my religious duty to occasionally shitpost)
Covered in the KJV: It's okay as long as you don't covet his butt.
(This is not an honest answer)
The real answer is that that commandment is telling you not to covet your neighbor's property. Women were property, men weren't, so a woman coveting a man makes no sense. IE it's "covet" in the "seek to own" sense.
That's why adultery is a separate commandment, which (while vague and long-debated) is probably gender neutral.
It takes a lot of assumptions to decide that god could have made the universe a lot better and that it deserves to die for the choices it's made. Maybe this is the best possible universe, and god is the only thing stopping it from being completely hellish. I sure don't know, so I wouldn't use the state of the universe as justification to kill anything.
If godlike entities revealed themselves, I would want to learn from them. I would try to ask them questions if they're a sentient entity and follow them if necessary. If the universe is run by an impersonal force like karma, I'd try to study it in a more scientific way.
"Best" is pretty relative... But certain diseases and parasitic creatures make it hard to argue that this is the best universe for humanity. Maybe if the universe was only created initially, and then passively observed as everything evolved... In that case things are pretty decent.
But yeah, it'd probably be a lot smarter to be diplomatic with a superior entity. Assuming the entity is "outside the universe", which basically makes the universe a simulation: Even if there's a theoretical way to escape, like a program escaping a virtual machine (which is nearly impossible with proper safeties), we probably aren't nearly advanced enough to do so yet. And we're just as guilty of running unpleasant simulations, so we can't really judge the entity without hypocrisy.
The main concern would be that we may be "ruining the experiment" by becoming aware of our situation. Or, we could be completing the experiment (with similar results for us, but at least we won?) Or possibly our universe was meant to develop a new race of unique sophonts, and we will be allowed to interact with the real world.
So either we try to hide what we know until we can escape, or we try to communicate with the Furthest Ring and hope they're benevolent.
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