(July 8, 2017 at 6:23 am)AtlasS33 Wrote:(July 8, 2017 at 6:04 am)chimp3 Wrote: In the past you had advocated for the chopping off of hands for the crime of theft. How is that different than torture? What if the person is innocent? What does it do to the psychology of the one bearing the sword?
Penalties differ drastically from systematic crimes.
Fines and prison are a type of torture. To judge them not to be "barbaric" enough; or not to be "savage" enough is just playing around with the meaning of torture: eventually we look for the pain.
Political torture and criminal torture,...etc, are always playing around using pain; in places where pain should not be used: i.e stopping a revolt against a dictator.
Cutting the hand, and all the penalties in Islam are facing pain with pain: thieves rob people out of their hard work, adultery increases crime rates because children get born without parents to raise them, killing is....well killing.
But torturing a whole neighborhood (like in Syria) because you want to strike fear, to bury a revolt, is so wrong.
What you appear to be saying is that you approve of torture for acts which your religion tells you are wrong, but not for anything else. I'm not picking on Islam - this is a distressingly common mindset among religionists.
Doesn't this seem to make a case for torture being part and parcel of religion?
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
