Justice for Jessica........

[JCOSTER]

I'll tell you what...

The day you stop your self righteous judgements, insults, and start practicing what you preach I will gladly do so...

Just show me that day.

Do you know him in person to say that?

As far as your link goes. I won't quote the bible anymore here. My opinion is still the same for the death penalty, you take a life out of mere destruction then your life should be taken as well.

 

[phillyfan26]

I don't understand how you think you can measure the level of certainty over someone's guilt.

 

[BVS]

Do you know him in person to say that?

I haven't made a judegment on him personally, just his posts.

As far as your link goes. I won't quote the bible anymore here. My opinion is still the same for the death penalty, you take a life out of mere destruction then your life should be taken as well.

Well my point is you can't stand by a verse alone unless you know the context...

 

[JCOSTER]

Okay you and a few others asked for a biblical back up and I gave it to you from the bible.

Everyone has their own opinions on the matter, some will change and some won't as time goes on.

nighty night.

 

[diamond]

True, because there would be no murder (thou shall not kill) and no death penalty (you guessed it, thou shall not kill). There is no qualifier to that commandment. It doesn't say "thou shall not kill, unless the person did something truly awful," so at least through the lens of the 10 Commandments, the death penalty is wrong.

But all that is besides the point, because that's not the world we live in. The 10 commandments are not law.

This is how I understand the 6th Commandment:

The commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is really not as general as the King James version would indicate. The commandment actually refers to premeditated, unjustified killing - murder. Although God ordered the extermination of entire cities, He did so in righteous judgment on a people whose corruption had led to extreme wickedness, including child sacrifice. Did God destroy the righteous along with the wicked? In an exchange with Abraham, God indicated that He would spare the wicked to save the righteous. He demonstrated this principle by saving righteous people from Sodom and Jericho prior to their destruction. The charge that God indiscriminately murdered people does not hold to to critical evaluation of the biblical texts.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[A_Wanderer]

Are infidels justified targets of righteous judgement?

 

[dazzlingamy]

You know what the feeling I seem to get around here is - if you're not christian and you don't believe in God then you're some unmoralistic person that doesn't give two flying fucks about your fellow man, whethe r they're dead alive, a murderer, rapist etc.

I don't give a shit about what it says in the bible - surely we've seen over the last how ever number or years people justifying the worst crap in the world by the laws written in some religious book.

It also strikes me that suddenly im barbaric because I don't believe that anyone has the right to take another life. That I don't trust our legal system to be fair and honest and impartial in all senses. That i believe that maybe, in the future at some moment some people who've commited such horrible crimes may realise and mourn for what they've done. Not everyone is some hardcore sociopath. And because of these beliefs, and also because i don't believe in God - I"M the demon in the picture and the people saying god awful things like 'i'd like to kill him myself' and getting all 'its a lucky co-incidence' and coming in here with thei righteous bullshit, getting all arrogant from their religious pedestal so high - are some fucking saints because they read a book and believe every single word in there (but also twist it all to match anything they say)

wow - so forgiving and open - such "'moralistic" people.

 

[Vincent Vega]

So then lets not have and just do what the other countries do instead because thats so much more humane.

Either death penalty or horror in jail?
So, either Europe doesn't exist, or do you mean we are doing that shit?

 

[redhotswami]

Some countries don't have the death penalty but have much more of a brutal way of dealing with those who break the law such as, horrific jails where you wish you would be dead, torture, amputation, mutilation, stoning, drowning...etc. If I had to go through any of those I would rather be dead.

The DP is humane compared to the jail sentences and punishments from other countries.

But see that's what I'm getting at, other countries that do such things DO support the death penalty. I'm referring to the list I posted early on in the thread. The U.S. is listed with Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, China, North Korea, and so forth. And, for the record, apparently the U.S. has it's own jails where they torture prisoners. The way we treat our criminals is really not much different than corrupt nations.

 

[redhotswami]

about a million pages ago, someone, i think diamond, mentioned lethal injection being humane. for the record, it is anything but. it is designed to shut dwn the muscle movement, so we think they are asleep, or dying peacefully. but they aren't, they just can't move to tell us. it is nothing but a mask of the torture that is going on inside them. it is the same as torturing someone and gagging them so we can't hear their reaction and strapping them so they can't move.

 

[redhotswami]

also, to those who support the dp, we've talked about if your children were victims. but let's turn the tables. i ask you:

if your child was the murderer, would you support the dp? if you so believe that someone who kills deserves to be killed, would you be the one to pull the switch?

 

[phillyfan26]

about a million pages ago, someone, i think diamond, mentioned lethal injection being humane. for the record, it is anything but. it is designed to shut dwn the muscle movement, so we think they are asleep, or dying peacefully. but they aren't, they just can't move to tell us. it is nothing but a mask of the torture that is going on inside them. it is the same as torturing someone and gagging them so we can't hear their reaction and strapping them so they can't move.

Not only that, but he assumed in that same post that every single person who's been convicted of murder is guilty:

I think we are quite humane on how we execute guilty murderers in our country.

dbs

 

[Vincent Vega]

Now Loki wants attention -- and when the Norse god of mischief wants attention, I know I best snap to it!

Quite frightening figures. But I can understand the judges and jury. If they let go someone who is guilty, and something happens, they are in an awful situation because all those who've known better all along will give them a hard time.
And the media likes to be one of them.

 

[Vincent Vega]

You know what the feeling I seem to get around here is - if you're not christian and you don't believe in God then you're some unmoralistic person that doesn't give two flying fucks about your fellow man, whethe r they're dead alive, a murderer, rapist etc.

I don't give a shit about what it says in the bible - surely we've seen over the last how ever number or years people justifying the worst crap in the world by the laws written in some religious book.

It also strikes me that suddenly im barbaric because I don't believe that anyone has the right to take another life. That I don't trust our legal system to be fair and honest and impartial in all senses. That i believe that maybe, in the future at some moment some people who've commited such horrible crimes may realise and mourn for what they've done. Not everyone is some hardcore sociopath. And because of these beliefs, and also because i don't believe in God - I"M the demon in the picture and the people saying god awful things like 'i'd like to kill him myself' and getting all 'its a lucky co-incidence' and coming in here with thei righteous bullshit, getting all arrogant from their religious pedestal so high - are some fucking saints because they read a book and believe every single word in there (but also twist it all to match anything they say)

wow - so forgiving and open - such "'moralistic" people.

That's the problem. First, it was implied that all criminals are atheists, and if they are Christians, then only on paper, making them atheists again. It's not the first time I get that, that we, as people who don't believe in something flying over us, are bringing all the bad, the ills and the destruction to the earth.

Then, there is this totally off comparison, that when a state doesn't have the death penalty, their jails are horror. Nothing in between.
In Europe we abolished the death penalty, as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand along with some other countries, but our prisons didn't turn into chambers of torture and horror.

How the Bible here is used to justify capital punishment undermines the secularism of the United States. You can't speak of the separation of church and state, but then use your religion to justify something that is perfectly up to the state.
If you want to justify the death penalty, and also support the separation of church and state, then you have to find another arguments, or admit that you don't intend to live in a secular country.

The insults towards non-religious people, or the implication that we don't feel for the victims is quite repulsive. Yes, the picture post was great, really.

 

[2861U2]

This is how I understand the 6th Commandment:

The commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is really not as general as the King James version would indicate. The commandment actually refers to premeditated, unjustified killing - murder. Although God ordered the extermination of entire cities, He did so in righteous judgment on a people whose corruption had led to extreme wickedness, including child sacrifice. Did God destroy the righteous along with the wicked? In an exchange with Abraham, God indicated that He would spare the wicked to save the righteous. He demonstrated this principle by saving righteous people from Sodom and Jericho prior to their destruction. The charge that God indiscriminately murdered people does not hold to to critical evaluation of the biblical texts.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Good post

Yes, God does indeed kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the Bible, though most are from the Old Testament. As diamond pointed out, most of those deaths were to remove those who refused to obey.

Technically, God has killed every person who has ever died.

Now let's wait for BVS to tell God to practice what he preaches.

 

[phillyfan26]

Good post

Yes, God does indeed kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the Bible, though most are from the Old Testament. As diamond pointed out, most of those deaths were to remove those who refused to obey.

Technically, God has killed every person who has ever died.

Now let's wait for BVS to tell God to practice what he preaches.

It's amazing that you and diamond think that there's no possible way any other interpretation can be correct. Yet, the only counter-argument to their analysis on passages is, "Nope. Wrong." Diamond did so a few pages ago.

What does the Bible have to do with the issue?

 

[Irvine511]

This constant referral to the Bible must be a uniquely American thing because I've read a lot of DP literature from Canada and the UK and I can't say I've ever, EVER seen it as a line of reasoning. Here, you can't get away from it on this thread for a second.

It's honestly tiresome. We can discuss this in terms of the rule of law and a legal system, but how do you make an argument when somebody invokes Scriptures? You've already lost. They have their beliefs and their interpretation and that's that. Totally useless form of discussion, to be frank.

catching up on this thread, and i couldn't agree more.

frankly, some Christians are little more than national embarssments and NO DIFFERENT in their outlook than the "islamic terrorists" they want Rudy to go kill.

 

[Irvine511]

Just to remind everyone here this is the little girl in the article mentioned above.

this is cheap emotional blackmail. you can do better than this and i'm insulted that you somehow think that opposition to the death penalty means that i care ANY LESS about this little girl than you do. you are not holier than i am, you are not more compassionate than i am, you are not more concerned with this tragedy than i am.

 

[Irvine511]

I don't give a shit about what it says in the bible - surely we've seen over the last how ever number or years people justifying the worst crap in the world by the laws written in some religious book.

and you know what just occured to me?

America has more "believers" than any other western country. American has more "Christians" who go to church regularly than any other western country. American Christians scream and yell about how we're founded on "Judeo-Christian values" and how the Founding Fathers were Jesus Freaks themselves.

and yet, we've got, by far, the highest murder rate in the western world.

you do the math.

so, let's drop our Bibles, dump Jesus, close the churches, and maybe we'll see our murder rates drop to levels seen in heathen Western Europe and Australia.

please, dump Jesus for Jessica. if you cared about Jessica, you'd do your best to secularize America so that our murder rate will go down.

if you've just come back from church, you don't care about Jessica and you want little girls to get murdered.

please, do it for Jessica.

 

[MadelynIris]

This constant referral to the Bible must be a uniquely American thing because I've read a lot of DP literature from Canada and the UK and I can't say I've ever, EVER seen it as a line of reasoning. Here, you can't get away from it on this thread for a second.

It's honestly tiresome. We can discuss this in terms of the rule of law and a legal system, but how do you make an argument when somebody invokes Scriptures? You've already lost. They have their beliefs and their interpretation and that's that. Totally useless form of discussion, to be frank.

Yeah interesting. But it might be argued that much of western law has it's origins in judeo-christian law. Likewise stated in other cultures.

 

[Irvine511]

Yeah interesting. But it might be argued that much of western law has it's origins in judeo-christian law. Likewise stated in other cultures.

no one cut and pastes the Bible into American law.

not that they wouldn't if we didn't stop them, but American law does not call upon a higher power as the ultimate arbiter of justice and that we'd better hurry up and kill some motherfuckers so they can get to God quickly and then he can judge them in his pearly celestial court, as has been suggested in here.

i'm fine with judeo-christian cultural influences, but it's crap to think that the Bible has any sort of authority over any American citizen.

 

[toscano]

Difference between the US and other countries i sthat here people use th ebible to justify the death penalty, in other countries they used it to get it abolished.

To the Diamonds and JCOSTERs of the world, do you think you have a better understanding of the bible than the likes of the Catholic, Episcopal and Methodist churches who use it to OPPOSE the death penalthy ?

 

[martha]

Wow.

The heathens argue for the lives of strangers in a death penalty thread. The Christians quote Scripture to make themselves feel better about killing strangers.

And we wonder why our country is in the state it's in.

 

[melon]

Yeah interesting. But it might be argued that much of western law has it's origins in judeo-christian law. Likewise stated in other cultures.

But it's not true. Our direct legal influences have to do with Enlightenment-era philosophy and thought and, to a lesser extent, British common law.

If our legal system really was influenced by Christianity, as many people erroneously state, then we would likely have been like the other "Christian states" of the 18th century: absolute monarchies getting their moral dictates from the Vatican (Catholic states) or absolute monarchies with the monarch as the head of the church, with no religious freedom allowances (Protestant states). It should be no coincidence that both the United States and France's revolutions, which occurred very close together, were created with the intent of democracy. That's because both were greatly molded by...you guessed it...the Enlightenment.

The idea of the U.S. being molded on "Judeo-Christian values" was evangelical Protestant revisionism during the mid-19th century, used for purposes of evangelism. It was as much bounded "in fact" as the myth of George Washington chopping down his father's cherry tree.

 

[MadelynIris]

Melon,

You use the term "legal-system" as opposed to law. I guess I'm thinking more along the lines of "laws" as relating to murder, theft, etc...

 

[BVS]

Now let's wait for BVS to tell God to practice what he preaches.

Are you serious? Kid, you're way out of your league.

 

[melon]

Melon,

You use the term "legal-system" as opposed to law. I guess I'm thinking more along the lines of "laws" as relating to murder, theft, etc...

Then if we are to give credit where credit is due, then we should be thanking the Sumerians, Babylonians, and (for the latter half of the OT) Persians where the Old Testament's laws get their heritage from.

"An eye for an eye," for instance, originated with the Babylonian "Code of Hammurabi" (c. 1760 B.C.), which, itself, has many similarities with the Sumerian "Code of Ur-Nammu" (c. 2100 B.C.). Compare this with the historically disputed, but traditional date of c. 1400 B.C. for Mosaic Law.

Basically, what we're seeing is not all that extraordinary, as all of these cultures were ethnically similar enough that it's no surprise that they all have similar laws. The Old Testament is basically referencing ancient Sumer's laws, much like we often reference Greco-Roman laws and principles from 2,000+ years ago today.

I say this mainly with the hope that we gain the perspective that we should not be burdened by trying to uphold archaic and/or nonsensical laws just because they're "old" or perceived as "Biblical." No, more often than not, they have a larger, non-deified heritage. And, as such, revulsion to things like theft, murder, etc. can exist in a non-Judeo-Christian frame of reference--meaning that society will not plunge into a murderous rampage if we don't base our laws off of religious precepts. There is ample precedent of secular revulsion to these crimes.

 

[Diemen]

This thread is downright terrifying. He we are talking about the death penalty in a secular nation, and everyone who is arguing in favor of it is using a religious text as their evidence.

It simply boggles the mind. How can you justify using a religious text to justify something that affects those who don't even believe that religious text? The Bible is not law.

And honestly, for the benefit of your religion you should pray it never is! If it becomes law, then whose interpretation? What if their interpretation doesn't agree with yours? Would you be ok if the Catholic interpretation of the Bible became law? Or just the Methodist? Or just the Southern Baptist? You might end up on the wrong side of the law even though you are a practicing Christian.

Do we really want to go down this road? Honestly!

 

[MadelynIris]

Diemen,

Completely agree. You do understand, many, many people frame social activity within religion or spirituality. Its the framework of their lives.

I agree, keep it separate, but would object if a law were passed that forced me to do something that is not in the framework of my belief system -- say, "wearing pants".

Joking, btw.

 

[JCOSTER]

Either death penalty or horror in jail?
So, either Europe doesn't exist, or do you mean we are doing that shit?

I think you know what countries have those types of punishments.