Capital punishment (was Book offer)

• Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]

> MICHAEL

> 

> 	<lengthy statistics snipped>

> >

> >And I think that's enough.

> >

> >    Of the industrialized western nations, we are the only one with a

> >death

> >penalty, and we have violent and property crime rates we ought to be

> >ashamed of.

> >

> >    We also have by far the most religious population of any western

> >nation.

> >

> >    There you have it Pedro, your religiosity is positively correlated

> >with crime.

> >Barry had it quite right in another thread, where I pretended to be a

> >fundamentalist for a couple of paragraphs:

> >

> >     "Another element is the murderous attitude that such a mindset

> >reveals, an

> >     attitude which may result in harm well beyond the verbal.  "

> >

> >Indeed.

> >

> >    Ciao.

> 

> RALPH

> Thanks, Michael. Unfortunately, Americans are so brainwashed with the

very

> idea of capital punishment that most of them accept it as perfectly

normal.

> Most churches accept it, many even push it. In the U.K. the most avid

> proponents of it were Church of England clergy. Thank goodness, the

> Catholic Church now opposes it. That won't change the minds of Catholics

> like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William F. Buckley, though.

> 

> I was once talking with my mailman about it. He is a very decent guy, but

> he bristled when I suggested that capital punishment should be abolished.

> He was sold on the idea that it is a deterrent, probably because he had

> never heard otherwise. I asked him to consider which states have the

> highest number of murders per capita. I suggested Texas, Georgia and

> Florida. He agreed. I then asked which states have the greatest number of

> executions. Texas, Georgia and Florida! And which states have the highest

> percentage of Xian fundamentalists? Texas, Georgia and Florida, probably.

> He walked away thinking.

> 

> I'll have more to say about capital punishment and the Bible later.

> 

IAN
I'd like to hear more. I am for the death penalty but not in the manner it
is used today. Further, I don't see it as a deterent but as a way to get
rid of some really rotten people and save money besides. Oh, I know, the
way the system is run now, it costs more to execute someone than it does to
keep them in jail for life, but that is one of the problems.

• Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]