indra
ONE love, blood, life
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2004
- Messages
- 12,689
JCOSTER said:So be it, but if it where my child....words cannot explain the punishment I would want them to have.
I can certainly understand wanting the person who hurts or kills your child to suffer the most horrible death possible. But would you be willing to do what you want done yourself? If you could, what does that make you? How could you do what you say you'd like done to this guy and live with yourself? Even if he's the scum of the earth, could you really inflict this type of torture on him and be able to live with yourself? Would you be able to explain it away to yourself by saying it was justified because he was bad?
Or would you require someone else to do it for you? If this is the option, how do you justify making someone else become a barbarian? And what do you do with that person if he/she (or you, if you do it yourself) if he/she starts to get a rush out of it? Doesn't that possibility make that person unfit to be in the general population?
Opposition to the death penalty or to eye-for-an-eye type punishment is not as much because of any sympathy for the condemned as it is the realisation that it causes a detrimental coarsening of society. That's not good for anyone.
* edit -- well damn. I just read Irvine's post and he said it much better than I did.
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