PACIFISM UBER ALLES
By David Vance On July 31st, 2011Just back from BBC debate on Capital Punishment for Oslo killer. Usual liberal nonsense put up against me but the bit that intrigued me was the admission by the Ekklesia delegate that he was a pacifist. I suspected this from the way he wilfully interchanged murder and killing, a tell tale sign of uberliberalism. Killing and Murder are NOT the same thing as any dimwit knows. He used the trope about the State “murdering” when it executes those convicted of murder. It doesn’t murder them – it lawfully kills them. Big difference. He believes all killing is wrong. So, had we listened to his ilk in 1939 we would now all be speaking German. If your daughter is being raped, should she turn the other cheek? Of course not. The Bible is crystal clear – those who purposefully set out to take life should forfeit their lives. We have a perfect right to defend ourselves.
What a plonker you were on the programme, you even interpeted the bible wrong, and you keep trying to interpet it, when clearly its beyond you:)
He used the trope about the State “murdering” when it executes those convicted of murder. It doesn’t murder them – it lawfully kills them.
Like Bloody Sunday?
So you are a pacifists
No he is active in rejecting violence…
LOL you keep going on there and they keep showing you up
Bloody Sunday mopery.
He rejects Christ’s word. Not my issue.
The State executes after due process. It’s called a Jury Trial. Don’t you even get the basic elements of how capital punishment works? Plus, since most people in the UK support it’s reintroduction, I speak for the majority. Except, of course, on Biased BBC.
KateyO.
It is a historical fact that England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have cultures and laws shaped by Christianity. For over a thousand years.
Our laws are mainly based on Bible chapters and verses.
The confusion comes in when the laws and practices of the Old Testament are confused with the Gospel of Grace and Redemption, in the New Testament.
Apart from Genesis the Old Testament is mainly the story of God and His Chosen People, the Jews. God revealed himself to the Jews. He gave the 10 Commandments and the laws of how to live.. to the Jews. He sent the prophets,, to the Jews etc etc.
The New Testament does not do away with the Law, it simply says that those who are reconciled to God through Christ do not live according to the Law, they live by Grace: and they try to live a life pleasing to God because they WANT to, not because they have to.
We know that we live in an imperfect world, and we know that innocent people get killed in military actions and wars. I think you are using one bad situation like Bloody Sunday to bolster your claim that there is no difference between what the State does in the name of the people (justice) and what the individual does by their own hand (vengeance).
Most murders are carried out by people who feel that they are ‘punishing’ someone who has wronged them – they feel entitled to take a life in cold blood. Civil society rightly opposes the use of violence and ending of human life as a route to justice. It is what makes society civilised. An absolute refusal to enact the power to kill. Murderers kill, the rest of us including authorities don’t and shouldn’t.
Colm,
Obiously, by your thinking, we can be too civilised, – I would add, – ‘for our own good!’
The problem I have with people citing biblical authority is the lack of consistency. There tends to be a bit of picking-and-choosing over which particular laws are picked up. So for example coveting your neighbour’s property isn’t illegal, nor is adultery.
So biblical authority isn’t absolute. We are quite capable of picking and choosing which particular lesson we want to draw from the bible.
That of course is if we even think that a 2000 year old book of stories is a good foundation upon which to derive our laws. But that is a separate argument.
Ernest
Civilised does not have to mean lenient.
Colm -
Civil society rightly opposes the use of violence and ending of human life as a route to justice.
Of course it doesn’t.
A majority of all us individuals who make up civil society favour capital punishment. The power elite which controls the state (and which is wholly seperate and apart from civil society) opposes capital punishment.
Of course, the power elite is not at all opposed to killing, whether or not as a route to justice. Otherwise, pacifism would be official policy and HM Ambassador in Washington would have protested the killing of bin Laden.
“The problem I have with people citing biblical authority is the lack of consistency.”
Geoff,
I thought I’d addressed that issue above?
People tend to mix up the Old Testament with the New, and then say it’s inconsistent.
Mind you, the Cof E does that as well so…
I know it’s frowned upon to bring religion into discussions, but it does seem to me that if one accepts the Bible – or the Koran- as the bedrock on which you bas e your values, it shows more consistency than those who adopt moral relativism and “situation ethics”.
AS we live in a (Post) Christian society, we have to accept that much of what we assume as right and value as freedoms, sprang from that source.
Pete
How strange that you – who rails against the power of the state and the ‘violence of law’ over anything from issuing TV licences to emptying bins actually wants the State to have the greatest power of all – to decide when to snuff out a person’s life as part of it’s right to punish wrongdoers.
Geoff Watts,
Surely the ten commandments are more in the nature of rules to be followed if you wish to lead a peaceful and rewarding life, remember they were written to guide a largel illiterate people into more civilised ways, and to be more communally inclined. Hardly surprising that we have the intellect to differentiate the difference between the imperative and those less so.
That many have been adopted as ‘laws’ is a different context, after all our legal system is based on Christian beliefs not christian diktat, and that the seriousness of some laws over others is an adaptation to modern life, hence adultery may well commit you to eternal fire and brimstone, it wont get you jailed, similarly for most of the others.
‘Thou shalt no kill/murder’, is probably the only one that is totally irreversible, and probably is more pertinent to life today.
The difference between ‘kill’ and ‘murder’,- apparently the Catholic church uses the word ‘kill’ rather than murder, – which could be a source of the confusion suffered by those of the Southern persausion.
Picking and choosing isn’t just a matter of choice, its liberally progressive…so they say!
Good stuff Ernest.
Are you going to try for David’s London get together?
Colm,
Surely sparing the life of one who has gratuitously killed another, is being ‘lenient’. By being lenient the burden of guilt is transferred from the perpetrator to the community. It is they who will bear the burden of a lifetimes incarceration, – if only for the cost involved and quite apart from liability that they may do the same again.
Agit8ed,
I will certainly try…
Colm -
The state doesn’t decide when to snuff out somone’s life. Only a jury of our peers can do that.
I am fully prepared to reconsider my position on capital punishment if I think the state has eroded protections for defendants, and if it ever came to pass that the state would decide on someone’s guilt then there would be no greater opponent of capital punishment then me.
Agit
With respect you are setting up a false dichotomy. It isn’t a belief in the bible or relativism. You can have a morally absolute code of ethics without recourse to supernatural beliefs.
Ernest
I agree with your point about separating the legal and the religious consequences of infringement of religious laws.
There are arguments for and against the death penalty without recourse to the supernatural. Given the lack if universal appeal then it probably better to base an argument on something else. 100 years ago recourse to the supernatural might well have been enough.
Ernesto,
I’ll push your wheelchair if you can make it. Or if you don’t need a chair, you can carry my oxygen tank..
Geoff,
I wasn’t saying its either, or.
Just that “people of religion” can logically explain their value system and cultural practices. I agree people do have good codes of non religious ethics, but so far in human history no society has started and developed from a non religious premise.
It is from the fact of our Christian heritage that I am arguing that the death penalty is the way in which society shows the value of an innocent life, wilfully taken by a murderer. The value of that innocent life and how we should live, has been based on Christian beliefs, not Christian diktat (as Ernest said).
Sorry, horribly convoluted sentence!
Agit
Thank you for your reply. Yes religious people do have an”off the shelf” code, but as we have seen with some religions that tends to cause its own problems.
The best example of a state not built on religious grounds is The United States. I forget the date, but the newly formed state signed a treaty with Portugal in which is specifically said it was not a religious state.
Now if you mean society, and not state, then there are lots of societies that were not founded on religion.
As we see today, secularisation is on the increase in western developed worlds, while religious fundamentalism is on the increase in other parts of the world.
Hello everyone
It strikes me that many liberals (such as those speaking about the capital punishment) have an extremely hard-to-pin-down definition of murder. When the state does it after a judicial process then it’s definitely murder. However, when it comes to abortion or euthenesia then it’s…..well, it’s certainly not murder! No, it’s ‘choice’ or ‘mercy’ or something warm, fluffy, liberal and civilised.
find a tall tree a short rope and hang the Nazi bastard.
This man was no Cristian he didn’t kill these children in the name of Christ, he killed these children because there parents were allowing and encouraging the pollution of his race with multiculturalism. Those are his words, he is a NAZI and needs extermination PERIOD