Tuesday, August 14, 2007

The religion of love

Religion and culture behind Texas execution tally:
Texas will almost certainly hit the grim total of 400 executions this month, far ahead of any other state, testament to the influence of the state's conservative evangelical Christians and its cultural mix of Old South and Wild West.


Christianity! The religion of love! The seamless garment of life!

11 comments:

  1. But I imagine very few of those executed are atheists. ;)

    You never know, they might kill themselves off if we just leave them to it...

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  2. It's a nice idea, but in this sort of conflict, innocent bystanders are the first to be slaughtered.

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  3. As Sam Harris pointed out, slaughtering people for moral instruction is very much a part of the Bible. It is the "God is love" folks who have Christianity all wrong.

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  4. I believe that one of the condmandments say thou shall not kill. do they not believe in what they believe in?

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  5. Since the same chapters which includes the commandment popularly translated as "thou shalt not kill" also demands the death penalty for a variety of infractions, as well as God's specific instruction to commit the absolute annihilation of several groups, one suspects that the "kill" should be interpreted more narrowly. IIRC (and I'm no linguist or biblical scholar), the commandment enjoins from from committing unsanctioned killing, i.e. murder.

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  6. Larry is, AFAICT, correct: the commandment against killing is an intra-tribe prohibition to increase cohesion. Killing those Philistines? Rock on with your bad selves.

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  7. Generalizations about individuals who belong to groups is always risky, be they christians, atheists, muslims, etc. A couple of christian voices about texas and evangelicals:

    http://levellers.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/evangelicals-a-major-force-behind-high-rate-of-executions-in-texas/

    and

    http://theivybush.blogspot.com/2007/08/in-article-linked-below-one-of-factors.html

    Surely it would be a hasty generalization for me to point to Hitler and declare "Atheism! An ideology of nihilism and hatred!"

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  8. The point is the hypocrisy, not the causality.

    The only consequence that atheism has on morality is to reject theistic slave morality.

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  9. The links are good, BTW. I've reformatted them for my readers' convenience:

    Levellers
    The Ivy Bush

    I'm unequivocally pleased that evangelical Christians are criticizing their Texas brethren.

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  10. And I am unequivocally pleased to hear atheists rejecting the death penalty and pointing out Christian hypocrisy.

    -Jonathan of The Ivy Bush

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  11. How is it hypocritical when the Bible teaches the propriety of the death penalty for capital crimes?

    And on what basis do you say, as an atheist, that the death penalty is morally objectionable?

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