Capital
Punishment Pt.1
For
the past fifty years or so the tide of public opinion in Western
countries has been running against capital punishment.
Not
surprisingly churches have on the whole run with the spirit of the
age and condemned capital punishment with high sounding moral
arguments which I think their counterparts even a few decades earlier
would have rejected as complete rubbish.
However
on the other hand if we go further back into history we find churches
equally vociferously supporting their own momentary majorities in
ways we find morally repugnant. Calvin happily supported the
execution of 'heretics', Luther urged slaughter of rebelling
peasants, Catholics slaughtered Protestants and vice versa. The
Inquisition for Catholics and the witch trials for Protestants are
now cited as textbook examples of human evil.
Sadly,
I suspect that from St Paul applauding the murder of Stephen onwards
there is probably no Christian church which has not condoned
executions and lynchings that we would judge to be grave miscarriages
of justice and in some cases judicial murder.
Besides
this churches raised, so far as I know, little protest about capital
punishment inflicted even for relatively trivial crimes. One of my
forebears was sentenced to death by a court in England in the 1830's
for just stealing a sheep, even though he was only a young teenager.
In his case the sentence was, on the morning of the execution,
commuted to transportation for life to Australia – otherwise I
would not be here to write this!.
So
again we are confronted again with the problem that those who claim
to be custodians of the Holy Scriptures seem to make it say whatever
fits the views popular at the time. This is deeply disturbing. I want
to consider this recurrent problem a little further here before we
launch into the topic at hand.
It
is easy to throw up our hands in despair and say: “Well if the
Bible can be made to endorse any position on a moral issue how can we
use it at all?” Indeed that has been used as an argument against
“religious” ethical systems. But as I carefully worked through in
my early posts, that way out of the frying pan just lands one into
the fire!
As
I said at the beginning: “If there is no God morals is just a
matter of might becomes right. If money is king, then the golden rule
is indeed as in the old joke “the man with the gold makes the
rules”. If vie et armis is on top then to quote another old
joke “a Smith & Wesson (hand-gun) beats four aces”. If, as
people often think Western nations at present, rule is by democracy,
then whatever the momentary majority says is right is right. (PS the
“as people think” is because we are generally constitutional
democracies – that is there are some restraints on what the
momentary majority can do! This may be inconvenient say for the
anti-gun lobby in the United States: their constitution accords
citizens a right to weaponry. But a constitution or similar
moderating force has this enormous benefit: it saves us from the
truly terrible dictatorship of mob rule.)
In
the other hand, if there is a God, there is some external standard of
right and wrong. Humans may not fully grasp it, they may at times try
to twist it to their own ends, they may argue over what it entails.
But for all this, the situation is still infinitely better than
having no absolute standard at all.
Moreover
our human nature echoes that fact that there is indeed a standard by
which all human actions can be measured. We do understand things such
as injustice. For instance I read this denouciation of a particular
military dictatorship:”They could arrest you on Tuesday because you
did something which was legal when you did it on Monday, try you for
it as a capital crime on Wednesday, execute you for it on Thursday,
and make it legal again on Friday.
But
we do feel this is an abuse. Right and wrong are
somehow above the arbitrary whim of dictators and by extension I say
above the whim of momentary majorities.
So
Once again I come back to my basic contention that our primary source
of moral understanding must be the Bible. If people argue over what
it means: that is to be expected; they argue over everything else! If
people twist it so serve their own evil ends: that too is to be
expected; the world is full of evil people who will twist the best
and most noble things to serve their evil ends.
These
are not arguments against using the Bible as our source
of moral knowledge; they are arguments for using it
wisely and diligently and then fighting to preserve “good” and
destroy “evil”.
Before
I go further, let me share with you some facts relating to Australia
that I gleaned from Wikipedia.
a)
the last execution in Australia was in 1967. (that was for the
shooting murder of a prison guard during an escape)
c)
A
reputable opinion polling company got the following answers to the
question:
"In your opinion,
should the penalty for murder be death or imprisonment?"
Year “death” “imprisonment”
not sure
1953
68% 24% 8%
1995
53% 36% 11%
2009
23% 64% 13%
d)
No political party in Australia currently advocates reintroduction of
the death penalty
So
it is against this background of the state of current popular
opinion, the obvious changeability of the opinion of the momentary
majority and the dangers of reading into the Bible what we want to
find that I launch into this exploration.
In
my engineering studies I was taught that the way to tackle complex
problems was to break the problem into bite-sized components. I think
that will be of help here. There are many interlocking aspects of
“Capital Punishment : the moral issue”. I will take them one bite
at a time.
Next
week: Is capital punishment ever morally right for even for the worst
imaginable crime?
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