I can appreciate that.
Personally, though, I love executions. Wish they'd bring back the chair in most states; a little more bang for the taxpayers' buck, please.
-Dan
I have struggled with the idea of capital punishment for years. I believe in the sanctity of life. I know that, personally, I could never partake in this process. But the morality is different when it comes to capital punishment. I understand both sides. Every individual must decide for him or herself. Even so, I will remind everyone that it is still something for serious contemplation and not a situation for jokes, for politicizing, or for simple ignorant relishing of death to the guilty.
Personally, though, I love executions. Wish they'd bring back the chair in most states; a little more bang for the taxpayers' buck, please.
-Dan
I have struggled with the idea of capital punishment for years. I believe in the sanctity of life. I know that, personally, I could never partake in this process. But the morality is different when it comes to capital punishment. I understand both sides. Every individual must decide for him or herself. Even so, I will remind everyone that it is still something for serious contemplation and not a situation for jokes, for politicizing, or for simple ignorant relishing of death to the guilty.
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I understand how you feel. I hate abortion and am not keen on Capital Punishment because of my feeligns on the sanctity of life. The way I feel is that I would stand in the way of someone trying to kill a baby but I would not be so inclined to do the same for a serial child rapist/murder.
I am in 100% support of capital punishment. I agree wholeheartedly that it's not a joking matter. I don't see any reason for rejoicing he's dead. He did horrible awful things, that if I were the parents, I don't know that I would have let the law take it's turn. With that said, he still had a soul, and I have no idea where his heart was at the end of his life--but I know that Jesus died on the cross for this guy as much as for me.
No offense; very few pro-death penalty advocates do either. It's a collective historical ignorance on both sides.
The Death Penalty, as practiced up to the mid-Twentieth century in Western Nations with heavy Judeo-Christian influences, was never thought of as a "deterrent" of any sort: that was always considered to be beside the point, and actually irrelevant.
The truth of the matter is that for every sin against man there is a possible recompense in Judeo-Christian law on this earth: from theft to bearing false witness to any manner of other crimes ranging from the trivial to the significant a worldly restitution, in some form or another, is available as a penance from the perpetrator to the victim. All save one: murder.
The thinking went that when one takes a person's life in cold blood, they have taken from them something that can, by definition, never be recompensed to them on this mortal plane. This was a crime, therefore, that was considered impossible for men to judge, beyond the bare facts of the guilt of the responsible party. Only God, the thinking went, could truly adjudicate such a matter. Therefore, those guilty of what we would call first-degree murder where condemned to death not for their actual crime, per se, but because it was understood that the only Power that could truly judge it was God, and the only way to facilitate that ultimate judgment was to dispatch the guilty to His presence, forthwith.
Hence the nineteenth-century concluding pronouncements of "Hanging Judges" as they passed their sentences upon the condemned: May God have mercy upon your soul.
It was actually seen as a merciful way of allowing the guilty to plead their case before the One Entity that could truly adjudicate their claims, if any, to "justification" as to the crime they'd committed.
Myself, I simply opt for the practical side of it, and support the Death Penalty on that basis; it deters at least one murderer when the needle is inserted, if not others. One less monster that might potentially harm either me or, more importantly, a member of my family some day.
But the origins of the Death Penalty in Western Culture had nothing to do with any of that: it was focused on the afterlife, and the necessity to get the person who'd taken another's life before the Judgment Seat of God, because Human Law couldn't, truly, do "justice" to the matter in this temporal sphere.
That is the true origin of the Death Penalty in Western Civilization, plain, simple, period. It works either way, in my estimation.
-AJC
It's called Capital PUNISHMENT and it's well named.
After much contemplation, I've decided I'm against it. I just can't get past the idea of giving the state power of life and death over it's citizens.
I too have struggled with the idea of capital punishment. You are absolutely right that this is not a situation for jokes or politicizing or for simple ignorant relishing of death to the guilty.
Thanks for being so eloquent.
Ross murdered my freshman college roommate, Dzung Tu. I was up at the prison the night Ross was executed with Dzung's brother. I know that it was a relief to Dzung's family that Ross was put to death, and I am glad that they are feeling a small measure of relief. Still I refuse to see Ross in simplistic terms, of being a monster. I grieve not just for Dzung's life, but for his wasted life too.
Also, I saw that the day after the execution that Dzung's brother looked sadder than I had ever seen him. The grief will always be there for him, even though the killer is gone.