Nailed

Aliens, please read this first before making first contact with our species. This is important.

As a species, we don't have anything worth being proud of. We pay lip service to ethics. The most important ethics teacher we had came along and told us to behave ethically. He had a good chance of changing the world, and all, which would have led to two thousand years of ethical behaviour and a fair and decent species.

But we didn't like what he was saying, so we went and nailed him to a tree.

Then, to crown the insult we added to his injury, we spent the next two thousand years violently abusing the land, animals, plants, the soil, our own water supply, the very air, each other, CHILDREN ... but this time with the justification that we were acting on behalf of the dead man, whose desiccated corpse still hangs from that tree in every building, and in some form or other around every true believer's neck.

Yes, we nailed that ethics teacher to that tree, then claimed that THE MURDERED ETHICS TEACHER told us to abuse and rape the world and everything.

If that does not convince you of the shakiness of our grasp on ethics, and on sanity itself, then nothing else will.

So aliens, please take this as fair warning. Stay away from us, or be prepared to get ripped off.