I didn't say the Law of Talion ("eye for an eye") was bestial or demonic. I said abominable tortures shared around by FReepers for mutual enjoyment, is demonic.
Certainly, any person properly and justly angry at a child-rapist, may feel a further tempting impulse from his irascible nature to devise hideous tortures. Dante's multiplex imagination supplied a lot of this for his Inferno.
However, indulging the irascible appetite in this manner --- enjoying the idea of certain kinds of tortures --- is corrupt, just as corrupt as indulging one's erotic appetite by fantasizing sexual gratification with children, broadcasting one's proclivity to lust after children, or even enjoying the idea of gratifying oneself with children.
Giving in to an irascible passion is corrupting to oneself, and to anyone else who has a part in the fantasy of torture: either by applauding it, seconding it, further elaborating it, or even tolerating it without rebuke.
You spoke well when you said Better to label these attempts as “ultimately futile,” and “in need of further reflection,” and “in the final analysis, unjust.”
But the fantasy of torture also needs rebuke. Otherwise people pursue their unclean thoughts in public, without shame, to the corruption of our online community and the peril of their souls.
We all need nothing so much as to be "transformed in the renewal of our minds."
Romans 12:2
Do not conform to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve
what God’s will is—
his good, pleasing and perfect will.
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.
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