I guess from my perspective, the “abominable tortures shared around by FReepers for mutual enjoyment” is a reasonable attempt to make the punishment fit the crime, to devise harms that seem to satisfy the apparent demands on justice. I don't know why one would expect that the initial reaction to crimes such as these would be much other than a desire for savage justice, an attempt to match cruelty for cruelty, pain for pain, horror for horror, abomination for abomination.
But as I pointed out, it's a starting place, not an appropriate ending place.
And the journey from one place to another, for us humans, takes place in time. We're not like angels, with infused knowledge, with instantaneous working out in our minds and souls of all the implications of life. We go through process.
This is ultimately about forgiveness. To truly forgive, one must, MUST start where he is, which is usually not-forgiveness. The forgiveness easily given, readily thrown to the other, like a life preserver off an ocean liner to the one drowning at sea, is a sign either of no real great offense in the first place, or of insincerity. Or perhaps of an unwillingness to get down to the messy business of it all, unwilling to grapple directly with the offense and the offender. Just throw out the life preserver and get back to the party.
Where the offense is great and keenly felt, the journey to real forgiveness is arduous, and can be quite long. It usually starts in the quest for perfect justice, no matter how horrible that might be, in the desire to match pain for pain. Think about the law of “an eye for an eye.” What is described therein would be by most definitions today, torture. You blind me, I get to gouge out one of your eyes. You knock out my teeth, I get to yank teeth our of your head. I don't know - sounds sorta like torture to me.
Is this initial response saintly and pure? Of course not. Can we say that it is rooted in Original Sin? Certainly, why not? Thus, is it imperfect, yes, even “corrupt”? In so far as it goes.
But it is, nonetheless, where normal, not demonic, ordinary, not bestial, folks usually begin. And it can be a long journey out.
It's right to encourage folks along the way. It's the right thing to do to try to turn folks away from their savage fury to a more considered approach, and to help folks step toward forgiveness.
But not to lecture folks that they're bestial and demonic because they have a just reaction to a hateful crime.
I think that you engage in the very same hyperbole that you're implicitly criticizing herein (and, yes, the punishments described herein are just that - hyperbole), and you indulge your own inflamed anger that people write thusly! "They're not behaving like saints! Or at least, not the way I think saints should behave! Shocking! Shocking!"
Cut me a break.
I hope we all go to Heaven, and in that hope, I must by necessity intend that all will forgive all, and regret their (our) angry words (and, sometimes, acts) of vengeance, but I cannot offer such harsh words toward folks having a normal, if less than entirely-saintly, reaction to unspeakable horror.
sitetest
However think your experience must really differ from mine. You say that this practice sharing of lurid fantasies of revenge-torture against evildoers "is, nonetheless, where normal, not demonic, ordinary, not bestial, folks usually begin."
I'm 62 and have known many hundreds of people (not all just like me as you slice the sociological salami),in a number of places under many difference circumstances, and sometimes under situations of stress, betrayal, crime and harm, and I have never known anyone to indulge in shared torture-fantasy-revenge language, outside of Free Republic.
Really.
They may have thought it --- I have no way of knowing --- they were not all preternaturally empathetic, "nice," or even "conventionally socialized". But I never ran into people who openly talked or wrote like that, until right here at this illustrious website.
That's why it strikes me as, at best, immature emotional self-indulgence, and at worst, an opening of the soul to vicious bodiless entities.