[alwaysconservative]

Thank you so much for your very thoughtful reply!

First of all, you are correct. I was referring to the 10 Commandments, and I usually DO interpret them to mean "murder" rather than simply "kill" because of the nuances between the two different terms. The difference for me, on the issue of the death penalty, is that the choice to kill is issued as a punishment by humans, rather than an instinctive response to a threatening situation or for the immediate protection of others (for example, self-defense, defense of others, war). In the death penalty situation, the person has already been convicted of the crime and the the imposition of death or imprisonment is the pre-meditated response. It is an act of knowingly ending the life of another because they have violated our codes. And that is the crux of my discomfort, since I believe it is for God to judge, and not us.

I understand and actually agree with your analysis about government being placed in a position to fulfill God's will, but where I was going with this (and apparently didn't communicate very well!) is that people often abdicate their personal responsibility to the (supposedly faceless) government, and let the big, bad ol' government do what they themselves are too squeamish to do for themselves.

Actually, I'm probably not even the best person to even be commenting on this issue, since I change my mind on it so often. Although I supported the death penalty for McVeigh, I sometimes also wish he had not been executed so that we could have pumped him for information and links of OKC to Al Qaida, and to make him ponder throughout his life the suffering he caused. A few years back, when I faced a serious personal loss of a loved one, a friend told me something that has always stuck in my mind: "There are worse things in life than dying." So, sometimes the death penalty is NOT the worst thing we can do to the wrongdoer. Sometimes a lifetime of imprisonment is worse.

Maybe it DOES boil down to what you think the worst punishment is, and who should be administering it.

[WFTR]

Your thoughts are interesting, and I appreciate your posting them.

In many ways, I understand your concern about people separating themselves too much from what must be done to establish justice. A people who just want to let the government kill other people without thinking about what is being done are a people who are not worthy of the liberty that our Founding Fathers tried to give us. Executing a criminal is a very serious issue, and people should take it seriously. In a government that is supposedly of the people, by the people, and for the people, that responsibility is particularly strong.

I understand that keeping a prisoner alive may often be a "worse" punishment, but to me the issue is not "worst" but "just." There are those whose crimes are such that a part of me would want to keep them alive and torture them. My passion says to give them a long and miserable life. However, my sense of justice says that the appropriate punishment for some crimes is execution. We could both think of worse things to do to McVeigh, but the question is whether execution was the most just thing we could do.

WFTR
Bill