Why is Human life considered precious?

This question has been nagging at me for quite some time now.

Are we really that self-important as to consider ourselves necessary in the grand scheme of things?

I think it really started to bother me when I started reading the Coldfire Trilogy recently, and I made a sudden connection some time around when the Hunter was mentioned: Every time a predator appears that is higher up on the foodchain then man, man denounces it as evil and amoral, and attempts to destroy it.

Be it mythological, such as Dragons and Demons, scientific, such as robots, biological, such as zerg or aliens, mystical, like Vampire or Werewolves or any number of terms from the witch trials, man has instantly seen anything superior as evil, and tried to destroy it.

I mean, I understand the whole idea of "Well, being prey is bad, kthx", and I agree, to an extent, that any species should have the right to fight back, but to denounce our favorite legends, Vampires and Werewolves, as evil, simply because they feed on humans every so often really irks me.

I mean, we eat animals. and vegetables. and they don't band together because they consider us evil.

And the first person to bring up sentience will be shot. I'm still debating whether thats a good thing or a bad thing.

Because humans can come up with things that may or may not help the entire world, your cat will not. There are a variety of reasons, including human narcissism.

Don't worry if there's a demon eats you, I will refrain from calling it evil...*sigh*

Hmm... I actually mulled over it a little, and typically speaking in our fiction the thing that is "higher on the food chain than us" typically is trying to kill our entire species not just create or maintain a balance. Not all dragons, robots, or aliens, are considered evil, they are generally shown as evil in movies and books in which they were meant to be, a good example is Stargate SG-1 in that series there are more neutral and good alien races than bad ones in that series, but most of them can't help us since the humans are the protagonists in the series, and we have to prove we are better than everyone else so that they will stop looking down on us as primitives.

Kais you made a good point (glad I'm not the only Stargate fan here). Also Arizth, in the grand scheme we are all important because if humanity dies off and the universe is the better for it, from our perspective it would be better if the universe sucked but we were still in it. It's part of our survival instincts to consider our survival the most important thing even if that clearly is contradicted by facts.

People claim Human life is precious because of the basic instinct of survival. Try to tell someone that scientifically we are in the same group as primates when we are classified and they'll deny it. On top of that we have built so much and have proven the ultimate adaptation. So a mixture of our own arrogance, performance at our basic duties as a species. Are the reason we hold human life to be more precious than anything else.

Basically, we're arrogant and look down on others.

because u only get to live once and there is no "up there" or "down there"

so enjoy ur relatively short period when u're still alive is most important.

I like to think it's because we're pretentious bastards. Also, I don't find human life very important, really. I find material possessions more important. Does this make me shallow? Maybe.

However, say there's a house burning down with my Zelda collection in it. On the other side of the street a little girl is about to get hit by a fire truck. Which do I try to save? The Zelda collection, fuck the girl. That, and someone else will probably grab her anyway.

Hmm... I may be the only pretentious bastard here.

we humans also have it's own predator. that is human himself.

war caused many death. like the incident in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when US soldier bombing the place using Atom Bomb. that was the highest death ratio in history. the holy war can be consider as the same.

every life form has it's own predator. kill and gets killed. that's the cycle of this world.

if war never happens,then "Death" will be human's predator.

Disease has killed way more humans than humans have, even if you include the human introduced diseases (the plagues being an example, because humans killed cats which let rats propagate and spread their fleas far beyond where an unkilled cat would spread them.) on the human side they still haven't killed as much as natural disease has.

hmm.. desease might killed more humans than the human itself. but the humans can cure the dissease,so it's no problem at all.

war can cause more victims rather than disease. more ever,if both sides didnt want to get the solution,the war will never end and may caused humans to be extinct.

because of war,the humans will always race to be the strongest which will cause more death.

agreed, war will not never cease to exist, because humans are more greedy and ignorant than any other living creatures(thus result in our desires and such), and as long as we strive to overcome others, fighting will never end.

life is precious simply because it's too fragile to be taken away

I'll have to argue the "ignorant" part of this statement, ignorance is simply not knowing something, an animal is far more ignorant than any human because they don't know anything but what their instincts and memory (which isn't very spectacular normally) tells them. No humans are often times ignorant but mostly they are stupid, they don't use the information available to them to make a good decision, they simply make one based on whatever might be driving them at any given time.
While humans can treat disease, disease can grow to be worse and more powerful, it's an arms race to see who will hit a dead end first.

I like to view fighting and war as necessary evils otherwise the human population will grow too fast and we all starve to death, eating the entire planet out from underneath us in the process.

It's already far too late for that. We're already far too large for a mamillion species. Unless there is a major war or disease that runs rampant soon we will reach the point of no return for population. Within the last 200 years the population of our earth has grown from around 1 billion to 6.7 billion. Imagine what it will grow to in the next 100-200 years (30+ billion people on earth? talk about armageddon)

Because we are smarter, which makes us supirior. That is the only thing.

i meant "ignorant" as a willingful neglect or refusal to acquire knowledge of necessity. perhaps not the best word i was lookin for, sorry, Kais

Human life isn't precious. Regardless of what we may be taught about yourself or what you manage to think about yourself, in the end, you are the only one thinking it. Human life is expendable. We are born, we live, we die, and we become nourishment for whatever can bear consuming our bodies for sustenance. I depress the shit out of people when I start talking about how no one is special and after you die, no matter what you've accomplished in your life, everything moves forward without you. Our existence is fleeting and at some point we are all forgotten. Even the most respectable people who are remembered in history are celebrated for furthering the idea that we are something more than what we truly are. The truth about our insignificance sucks. It makes people sad, uncomfortable, depressed, and many times drives them to kill themselves or others. When people look back at those people, they condemn them and attempt to "better" themselves and society by trying to eradicate that kind of behavior.

Man's greatest predator isn't man. We are so narcissistic that we even give ourselves undue credit for the natural occurrences that plague our existence. You want to know what man's greatest predator is? Its nature, by way of our own warped perception of things. Nature isn't out to get us. We're not important enough for anything to be out to get us, that's another warped human perception. Nature is man's greatest predator because we made an enemy out of it. Our species dies at the hands of nature just as much as any other species does. However, we've become so intent on survival that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we can control it. We die because we're supposed to die, "unnatural" deaths are perfectly natural, but since man has constructed so many different ways to destroy itself, we think that we deserve some kind of credit.

the term you are looking for is denial or stupid.

as for the actual topic its considered important cause we is the humans that are considering it. $20 says if i went out and asked a elephant(assumeing we could converse intelligently and understand each other) he would say that we mean nothing and the elephants were the most important to the earth. bet the gator would say the same thing.

We consider human life to be precious because... well, because we're humans lol, what more reason does there need to be, we value what we are. Anyways, all life is precious, if for no other reason than that we awesome humans have yet to find a way to replicate it.

Let me ask a question, then.

Lets say, for arguments sake, tonight one of us became a vampire. A predator.

What would you do to it, barring capture and scientific dissection?