(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Thu, 4/12/12, Matthew Knight <jacobeiserman at gmail.com> wrote:





Whoa, back up Marc!  Even in your own tradition, many people talk about a "consistent ethic of life."  There are still many theists among the liberal ranks, and most of us arrived at our positions out of our understanding of divine law (while recognizing that it is not our place to legislate morality for those who believe differently). 
 
That is the difference between a theist and an absolutist.  I wrote a very long response but determined that it was too ugly to post for public purview, so I will pass with some brief statements before I abandon the field (this time for real)
 
I never said our death row was cheaper than life imprisonment - our death row IS life imprisonment with the costly appeals.  That expenditure and the expenditure for the humane treatment of people who have for all intents and purposes broken the social contract is entirely wasted.
 
(And remember there is a correlation between violent offenders and genetic abnormalities such as an extra Y chromosome... for those who claim the system is entirely unjust in its unequal demographic distribution. Perhaps the naturalists were right, and there never was any choice at all, ever.  )
 
Life means less than nothing without a divine absolute behind it - simply material dross subject to the same chance made accidents that make one man born beautiful and another ugly, one sound of body and one sickly all the meager days of his life, one being conceived as a groundhog and another as a Roman Emperor.  What good is kindness and humane treatment in such an arbitrary existence? 
 
If you do not agree on first principles, you can never come to mutual understanding.  And thus it will always be, for those who are simply unable to grasp the humane treatment of those who do not treat others humanely and never will see any value in it beyond Divine Law.
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