I'm not sure anyone is arguing that religion is the cause of all social ills, I'm certainly not.

Nor am I saying that a buddhist society would be utopian (although stripped of its -religious- dogma I think it can be a relatively good guide to behaviour, just like most of the commandments could be) - I just know that buddhist doctrine encourages one to do as little harm as possible. It seems odd then that an official professing such tenets would allow those things to happen unprotested, is what I meant.

In Turkey, you have the secularists and the religionists declaring war on eachother. To the point that they are willing to use force. Both Secularists and Religionists are willing to use force to get their way.

In America, you have very little violence dictating internal national policy.

In the Middle east in general, you had very good relations between Jews and Muslims until 1920/30s when emissaries from Germany convinced/paid Muslims in Palestine to create civil unrest against the British by killing Jewish villages. Since then, there has been a continuing institution which gains power by pitting groups against each other. Be they Arabs vs Persians, shiates vs Suunis, Muslims vs Jews.

I believe from the years 800s - 1920s conflicts between Jews and Muslims in the Muslim world was virtually non-existent.

Point being, there are more reasons for the ills of society than any particular ideology. You can blame anything you want, but personally, I'd blame it on a very complex interplay of politics, economics, history, culture and personal responsibility.

Very few people consider the death penalty to be violence.

Where are these "very few people" coming from?

Also, he wasn't referring to "violence" per se, AND even if the death penalty isn't violent (I suspect the view that it is is prevalent in countries that don't have it - the practice seems pretty brutal to me) sniping people that cross over a river pretty much inarguably is.

EDIT: Just asked a few other Brits, including my parents, aunt and brother's girlfriend who's staying over: "Do you consider the death penalty to be violence?" "Yes." Not convinced of your "very few" at all.

Ok, by few people, I mean historically, systems of thought rarely ever consider punishment for a crime to be "violence".

Even Hindus who don't eat animals have the death penalty.

Please show me one documented case of a Jewish court killing a non Jew, or even stoning anybody.




This situation has been in the making for months. Its been on the news on a regular basis. It was in Yesterday's headlines also.

We don't consider most punishments for a crime to be violence. We consider killing someone (for a crime or otherwise) to be violence. If getting beaten up by thugs in a street was a legal sentence then we would also consider that violence.

What?

Every historical system of rules that says "Do not harm others" or "don't do violence" also has in it, the idea of the death penalty.

None of these systems see this as a contradiction either.

I'm not sure why this is such a shock to anybody.

I orignally said very few, just in case there is some isolated system that I don't know about that is an exception to this.


Edit: A very strange unrelated wiki article on the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_capital_punishment

Wow. Whoa. Dude. Seriously, there, woooooah Nelly. Can you put a broader brush to work here? Got any more unsupported generalisations? Is the only ethic system you're familiar with Hammurabi's code? I seriously tried to find an image macro that does justice to the... something-ness of that assertion (I can't find an adjective that does justice, either) and failed.

Buddhism has no in-built concept of death penalty, although Buddhists have argued both for and against it based on their religion. When isolated from Judaic prescriptions (That is, Torah law) Christianity itself can be argued as anti-death penalty.

"Moreover, throughout almost all history, countries where Buddhism has been the official religion (which includes most of the Far East and Indochina) have practiced the death penalty. One exception is the abolition of the death penalty by the Emperor Saga of Japan in 818. This lasted until 1165, although in private manors executions continued to be conducted as a form of retaliation."
This is known in Buddhist tradition as issatsu tasho, "killing one (aggressor) in order that many (innocents) may live" and is a manifestation of "skillful means". In mystical Zen Buddhism (as reflected in Japanese Bushido), there is a traditional expression: "the sword that (justly) kills is the identical with the sword that gives life". Therefore, few (if any) Buddhist groups issue blanket decrees against Buddhists being soldiers, police officers, or farmers (which in Buddhism is classified as a profession involved in destruction of life), and some argue that the death penalty is permissible if it is used for preventative purposes. In general, Buddhist groups in secular countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan tend to take an anti-death penalty stance, while in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan, where Buddhism has strong political influence, the opposite is true. Almost all Buddhist groups, however, oppose the use of the death penalty as a means of retribution.

Straw men are bad, old man.

Just as different religions have different social implications, different government types have different social implications as well. If we account for both of those, then we might easily expect insular, democratic, secular Western European nations, like Holland, to be the most utopic political experiments in existence. However, since this clearly is not the case, w--oh wait.
It really hasn't changed so much as the bombardment of straw men has forced me to narrow my verbiage substantially.

Religion, via its social influence, causes significant social ills. We typically lump violent totalitarian dictators into the "evil" category. Those who act out the social ills that are influenced by religion are usually called "evil." It doesn't seem to be a big stretch to apply it to religion. Yes, religion has its good points, but so did Hussein and Stalin. Granted, Hussein and Stalin are much more responsible for what happened in their countries than any cleric is for someone else's crime, but that doesn't change the fact that you can trace certain influences that lead to an increase in certain types of abuses back to a religion. I never said that religion causes all social ills. That's actually directly incompatible with my statement that it's the details of the religions themselves, not religion as a concept, that causes problems. (This is not to be confused with my arguments on other threads that all religions are false--very different, and I have fewer issues handling that wholesale.) I also never said that every religious person commits crime. That's ridiculous. I did say, however, and cover in great detail that you left completely unrefuted, that the social implications of actually believing a particular religion can create a society where people are more disposed to commit certain crimes, even if the religion itself says not to, because every religion comes prepackaged with a philosophy and a worldview. I even said, very explicitly, that people do not always accept their religion's philosophy and worldview when there are anti-religious or moderating societal pressures, most notably in Western and Oriental societies. This does not, in any way, shape, or form, ameliorate the blame due to that religion--if you don't actually believe in the social conventions of your faith, you won't actually practice the social conventions of your faith except under duress (ranging from peer pressure to execution), and you're not actually getting any information at all on the implications of your faith.



Except you can. You do with everything else. Wal-Mart doesn't worry that goods ordered from Japan are going to fall off the edge of the world before their ship lands in California because they really and truly believe that the world is round. Many Arab Muslim men are not taught to control their sexual urges because their teachers really and truly believe that its impossible and the solution is to present women as asexual and keep them at home as much as possible. The headdress is not a fashion statement for most Middle Eastern women, Xinemus. You know this. State laws that suppress biology and cosmology lessons to high school students are not conveniences to lighten teachers' workloads. Again, this is not news to you.

It isn't limited to governments, either. The Australian and British clerics mentioned back on page one are under no governmental duress. The rioting Muslims in Denmark weren't bused out by the Prime Minister. The recent honor killing in London wasn't a state-sanctioned execution against intersectarian courtship. Governments just provide for convenient composites, but you notice it even among insular religious immigrant groups from some of the more fundamentalist regions in the world.

". When isolated from Judaic prescriptions (That is, Torah law) Christianity itself can be argued as anti-death penalty."

Dude, what part of , Judaism doesn't practice the death penalty, don't you understand?

The official teachings of Judaism approve the death penalty in principle but the standard of proof required for application of death penalty is extremely stringent, and in practice, it has been abolished by various Talmudic decisions, making the situations in which a death sentence could be passed effectively impossible and hypothetical. "Forty years before the destruction" of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, i.e. in 30 CE, the Sanhedrin effectively abolished capital punishment, making it a hypothetical upper limit on the severity of punishment, fitting in finality for God alone to use, not fallible people.

While allowing for the death penalty in some hypothetical circumstances, scholars of Judaism are broadly opposed to the death penalty as practiced in the modern world. The Jewish understanding of Biblical law is not based on a literal reading of the Bible, bur rather through the lens of Judaism's oral law. These oral laws were first recorded around 200 CE in the Mishnah and later around 600 CE in the Babylonian Talmud. The laws make it clear that the death penalty was used only rarely. The Mishnah states:

A Sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: a Sanhedrin that puts a man to death even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: Had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death (Mishnah, Makkot 1:10).

Rabbinic law developed a detailed system of checks and balances to prevent the execution of an innocent person, and these were so restrictive as to effectively legislate the penalty out of existence. The law requires that:

* There must have been two witnesses to the crime, and these must conform to a prescribed list of criteria. For example, females and close relatives of the criminal are precluded from being witnesses according to Biblical law, while full-time gamblers are precluded as a matter of Rabbinical law.
* The witnesses must have verbally warned the person that they were liable for the death penalty
* The person must then have acknowledged that he or she was warned, and yet then have gone ahead and committed the sin regardless.
* No individual was allowed to testify against him or herself.

In law schools everywhere, students read the famous quotation from the 12th Century legal scholar, Maimonides,

"It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death."

Maimonides argued that executing a defendant on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice." (Caprice of all kinds are more visible now with computers, statistics, DNA evidence, and new discovery laws directed at prosecutors' files.) Maimonides was concerned about the need for the law to guard itself in public perceptions, to preserve its majesty and retain the people's respect.

Today, the State of Israel only uses the death penalty for extraordinary crimes. The only execution ever to take place in Israel was in 1962, against convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. However, Israeli employment of the death penalty has little to do with Jewish law.

In Orthodox Judaism, it is held that in theory the death penalty is a correct and just punishment for some crimes. However in practice the application of such a punishment can only be carried out by humans whose system of justice is nearly perfect, a situation which has not existed for some time.

Orthodox Rabbi Yosef Edelstein

So, at least theoretically, the Torah can be said to be pro-capital punishment. It is not morally wrong, in absolute terms, to put a murderer to death ...However, things look rather different when we turn our attention to the practical realization of this seemingly harsh legislation. You may be aware that it was exceedingly difficult, in practice, to carry out the death penalty in Jewish society ...I think it's clear that with regard to Jewish jurisprudence, the capital punishment outlined by the Written and Oral Torah, and as carried out by the greatest Sages from among our people (who were paragons of humility and humanity and not just scholarship, needless to say), did not remotely resemble the death penalty in modern America (or Texas). In theory, capital punishment is kosher; it's morally right, in the Torah's eyes. But we have seen that there was great concern—expressed both in the legislation of the Torah, and in the sentiments of some of our great Sages—regarding its practical implementation. It was carried out in ancient Israel, but only with great difficulty. Once in seven years; not 135 in five and a half. (Rabbi Yosef Edelstein, Director of the Savannah Kollel)

Orthodox Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan writes:

In practice, however, these punishments were almost never invoked, and existed mainly as a deterrent and to indicate the seriousness of the sins for which they were prescribed. The rules of evidence and other safeguards that the Torah provides to protect the accused made it all but impossible to actually invoke these penalties…the system of judicial punishments could become brutal and barbaric unless administered in an atmosphere of the highest morality and piety. When these standards declined among the Jewish people, the Sanhedrin...voluntarily abolished this system of penalties (Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan in Handbook of Jewish Thought, Volume II, pp. 170-71).

In Conservative Judaism the death penalty was the subject of a responsum by its Committee on Jewish Law and Standards:

The Talmud ruled out the admissibility of circumstantial evidence in cases which involved a capital crime. Two witnesses were required to testify that they saw the action with their own eyes. A man could not be found guilty of a capital crime through his own confession or through the testimony of immediate members of his family. The rabbis demanded a condition of cool premeditation in the act of crime before their would sanction the death penalty; the specific test on which they insisted was that the criminal be warned prior to the crime, and that the criminal indicate by responding to the warning, that he is fully aware of his deed, but that he is determined to go through with it. In effect this did away with the application of the death penalty. The rabbis were aware of this, and they declared openly that they found capital punishment repugnant to them… There is another reason which argues for the abolition of capital punishment. It is the fact of human fallibility. Too often we learn of people who were convicted of crimes and only later are new facts uncovered by which their innocence is established. The doors of the jail can be opened, in such cases we can partially undo the injustice. But the dead cannot be brought back to life again. We regard all forms of capital punishment as barbaric and obsolete...
Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser, Statement on capital punishment, 1960. Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards 1927-1970, Volume III, p.1537-1538


Death is Different
What does Judaism say about the death penalty?

Q. The Torah seems to advocate use of the death penalty. Does this mean we should support its implementation today?

A. At the very dawn of civilization, immediately after the flood, God commands Noah: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man will his blood be shed, for in the image of God did He create man"(Genesis 9:6). It is precisely because of man's elevated, Divine nature that we were commanded to deal strictly with anyone who diminishes the expression of His image by committing murder.

After the giving of the Torah, we find that many different transgressions are liable to capital punishment, including murder, adultery, and desecrating the Sabbath.

So it would seem that for mankind as a whole, and also among the Jewish people, capital punishment is a legitimate and even vital part of the system of justice.

In 1981, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the most outstanding rabbinical authority in the United States at that time, was asked by the Governor of New York (Hugh Carey) to present the Orthodox Jewish approach to capital punishment, which was then (as ever) a controversial topic in the state. In his answer (volume II of Choshen Mishpat number 68), Rav Moshe constantly emphasizes not the underlying liability to capital punishment but rather the many different practical obstacles that the Torah justice system, as explained in the Talmud, places in the way of actual execution of this punishment.

First of all, Rav Moshe explains, "the death penalty is mentioned in the Torah only for the gravest transgressions," which would be committed by people who are completely amoral. He goes on to state that even these punishments "are not out of hate for the wrongdoers or out of concern for the stability of society . . . but rather so that people should be aware of the seriousness of these prohibitions and therefore would not transgress them." Indeed, even these punishments are tempered by "sensitivity to the importance of each soul," to the extent that the technical requirements for carrying out the death penalty were next to impossible to fulfill: That no circumstantial evidence is accepted, that warning of the penalty is given and acknowledged before the crime is committed, and so on.

For this reason, Rav Moshe explains, the death penalty was never customary in Jewish communities even when the secular government authorized them to employ it. "And even so, in all the generations there were virtually no murderers among the Jews, because of the gravity of the prohibition and because they were educated by the Torah and by the punishments of the Torah to understand the gravity of the prohibition, and not because they were simply afraid of the punishment."

We can summarize by saying that on the one hand, the Torah prescribes capital punishment for a variety of transgressions. Yet simultaneously, our tradition tells us that these punishments were next to impossible to carry out. It seems that the prescription of capital punishment is mainly an educational device to impress upon us the severity of a small core of basic regulations which are essential for an ethical society. It is not meant to encourage the legal system to actually sentence offenders to death.

However, Rav Moshe adds that in the case of a particularly cruel murderer, or in a situation where bloodshed becomes widespread and out of control, there is justification for the authorities to carry out the death penalty in order to restore respect for the law.

We can learn from this profound reply that in any system of justice, the educational dimension is at least as important as the deterrent factor. Severe punishments are meant to impress upon citizens the severity of the crime even more than they are meant to raise the cost of crime.

In fact, sometimes the educational and deterrent elements contradict. "Cruel and unusual punishment" forbidden by the US Constitution should be a particularly effective deterrent. Yet its educational message is negative, as it tends to erode rather than affirm man's Divine image. It seems that the United States founding fathers were aware of the inner message of the Biblical justice system, as expounded by Rabbi Feinstein, as they forbade this kind of judgment and thus gave precedence to educating the citizens in what is right and wrong rather than threatening them to toe the line.

Incentives and deterrents have importance, but alone they can never create an enlightened society. The fundamental bedrock of society is education towards uplifting values, and the criminal justice system, like other aspects of law and society, must take this into account.


The Death Penalty in Jewish Tradition
Though the Torah prescribed capital punishment for certain crimes, the rabbis moderated its use.
By Louis Jacobs

Reprinted with permission from The Jewish Religion: A Companion, published by Oxford University Press.

The Bible prescribes the death penalty for a large number of offences including religious offences such as idol worship and the profaning of the Sabbath. But the question of capital punishment in actual practice in ancient Jewish society is extremely complicated.

Talmudic Restrictions

According to the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 1:4) the death penalty could only be inflicted, after trial, by a Sanhedrin composed of twenty-three judges and there were four types of death penalty (Sanhedrin 7:1): stoning, burning, slaying (by the sword), and strangling. A bare reading of these and the other accounts in the tractate would seem to suggest a vast proliferation of the death penalty. Yet, throughout the Talmudic literature, this whole subject is viewed with unease, so much so that according to the rules stated in that literature the death penalty could hardly ever have been imposed.



For instance, it is ruled that two witnesses are required to testify not only that they witnessed the act for which the criminal has been charged but that they had warned him beforehand that if he carried out the act he would be executed, and he had to accept the warning, stating his willingness to commit the act despite his awareness of its consequences. The criminal's own confession is not accepted as evidence. Moreover, circumstantial evidence is not admitted.
From Practice to Theory

It has to be appreciated, however, that practically all this material comes from a time when the right to impose the death penalty had been taken away from the Jewish courts by the Roman authorities. According to one report in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 41a) the power of the Jewish courts to the death penalty ceased around the year 30 BCE; according to another report (Sanhedrin 52b) it could only have been imposed while the Temple stood and must have come to an end not later than 70 CE when the Temple was destroyed.



This means that, although earlier traditions may be present in the Mishnaic formulations, the whole topic, including the restrictions, is treated in the Mishnah and the Talmud in a purely theoretical way. It is hard to believe that when the courts did impose the death penalty they could only do so when the conditions above obtained. Who would commit a murder in the presence of two witnesses when these had solemnly warned him that if he persisted they would testify against him to have him executed for his crime?



That the Mishnaic material is purely on the theoretical level can be seen from the oft-quoted statement (Mishnah Makkot 1:10): "A Sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death. Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel says: they would have multiplied shedders of blood in Israel."



This Mishnah is a kind of reflection on the whole law of capital punishment. Faced with the clear biblical injunctions, the Rabbis mentioned could not simply have said that capital punishment was wrong. After all, the Bible states that it is right and has to be imposed on the guilty. But the statement seems to imply that the Rabbis welcomed the development by which the Sanhedrin no longer functioned with the power to impose the death penalty and Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon speculate that even when the Sanhedrin did possess this power, various legal means could have been adopted to negate the imposition of the penalty.



It is not so much as Jewish apologists maintain, that the Rabbis consciously attempted to reform the law, but rather that when the power to inflict the death penalty fell into abeyance in any event this development was interpreted as being fully in accord with the Torah's regard for all human life, including the life of the criminal; so in a sense it was felt to the good that the death penalty could no longer actually be imposed but was simply left in the books for theoretical discussion. Once the matter was discussed on a purely theoretical basis the gruesome details could be described in all their starkness while, at the same time, restrictions could be piled on in order to make the death penalty virtually impossible. In practice it became illegal for a Jewish court to impose the death penalty.
Extra-Legal Punishment

Against all this is the Talmudic statement (Sanhedrin 46a) that as an emergency measure, "when the generation requires it," a court has the power to "act against the Torah" and to order an execution or other "illegal" physical penalties. In other words, although it is illegal to impose the death penalty, the court can, on rare occasions, act illegally if the aim is to protect the Torah. Naturally, it all depends on the circumstances that would warrant executions without the due process of the law. The statement was never interpreted as meaning that what the Law took away with one hand it gave back with the other.



The German and French communities in the Middle Ages ignored the statement altogether and never imposed the death penalty, not even when circumstances seemed to call for it. Not so in Muslim Spain, where the Gentile authorities gave the Jewish courts a good deal of autonomy. In Spain, albeit on rare occasions, the courts did rely on the Talmudic statement and imposed otherwise illegal penalties such as mutilation (found nowhere in the classical sources) of certain offenders; they also executed offenders such as informers who endangered the community. When Asher ben Yehiel (d. 1327) came from Germany to Toledo in Spain he expressed his horror at the Spanish practice, totally unknown in Germany, although later on he himself conformed to the Spanish norm.
Modern Considerations

There the matter rested until the establishment of the State of Israel.



The remarks of Rabbi Isaac Herzog (1888-1959) in an article on Sanhedrin published in 1932 are worth noting. Herzog begins: "I have often heard it remarked that the restoration of the Jewish State in accordance with Jewish law would isolate the Jewish people from the modern civilized world; for the Hebrew penal code includes the death-penalty for purely religious offences such as the willful desecration of the Sabbath, etc." Herzog, quoting the material mentioned above and other Talmudic sources which make the re-establishment of the Sanhedrin dependent on the rebuilding of the Temple in the Messianic age, demonstrates in his reply that until the advent of the Messiah it is illegal to impose the death penalty for any offence, even for murder. There follows this statement:



"The difficulty in question is therefore a matter which could only arise in the Messianic age and need not enter into any practical calculations affecting the reconstitution of the Jewish State in Palestine. But, of course, in view of the actual position the idea of a Jewish State in Palestine (as distinct from a National Home), quite irrespective of the restoration of the Temple, is, in itself, rather a Messianic hope than a question of practical politics."



Little did Rabbi Herzog think when he wrote this that the State of Israel would be established and that he would become its Chief rabbi. When the State of Israel was established the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, did debate whether or not to retain the death penalty as in the law established under the British mandate but the Knesset was not acting as a religious court or Sanhedrin, only as a secular body, albeit one influenced in its decisions by the Jewish religious tradition. The debate between Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon and Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel was referred to it the Knesset debate, and it was eventually decided to abolish capital punishment entirely except for treason committed in time of war.

Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs is the rabbi of the New London Synagogue, Goldsmid Visiting Professor at University College London, and Visiting Professor at Lancaster University. His books include Jewish Prayer, We Have Reason to Believe, Principles of the Jewish Faith, and A Jewish Theology.

I can find stuff supporting my assertions too! Isn't this a fun game?


From here.

Except, since you made a baseless generalisation, all I must do is present proof that it is false - A case in which said generalisation is not valid. Systems of law without the death penalty do exist, historically and currently. Duh!

Contradictory AND wrong!

And yes, I am perfectly aware that Judaism shrugged off the death penalty at an early age.

In fairness, young whippersnapper, it's very difficult to nail down what your actual argument is. The beginning of this thread is quite clear that you are asserting that major religions are evil and using a rape case to prove it. If you feel like I am spending my time refuting arguments that you are not making, I would ascribe this to the fact that you keep abandoning your positions for more moderate ones as the discussion progresses. I'm not upset, of course. I approve of this. But I'm not fabricating the things I'm arguing with, here. You've said them.



I couldn't find any recent statistics, so I'm open to correction here, but in 1997-2001, the International Review of Crime Statistics posted a 10% rise in crime in the Netherlands, as opposed to an 11% drop in Italy (where the Vatican is, you know). Perhaps you will connect that rise to the Dutch Reformed population. I really don't know where this is going, to be honest.

But, yes, the point about different government types having different social implications is exactly my point, and many of the social ills you have laid at the feet of religion can just as easily, or usually, much MORE easily, be explained by other social factors. Your example of the AIDS epidemic in Africa comes to mind.

I don't know if a Muslim ran over your dog when you were a child or what, but once again, I do not think you have come close to substantiating an actual argument, and it seems like it just came out of nowhere. You are welcome to your opinion, of course, just don't expect a raw accusation of religion without the ability to logically or empirically prove your accusation to convince many people who don't already agree with you.

So, is your argument that major religions are evil, or is it not? That's what you led with.

It looks like, now, that your argument is: Religion is one of several factors that contribute to social influences that can cause social ills.

That's a significant shift from your original point, and what's more, I'm not even sure what the value of your current assertion is. Of course religion can be a social factor, but social factors are just that... social factors. It depends on what people are going to do with it. We can also look at poverty levels, education levels, the profitability of crime in a particular region, the ethnicities of a region, the history of conflict in a region, the history of political leadership in that region, the philosophies that have risen and fallen in that region, the level of sanity in leaders and constituents... there are a ton of factors that roll up into why a given society is experiencing its current set of ills, which is what I've been saying all along. Anything you've used so far to "prove" that religion is evil could just as easily be applied to a ton of different things, few of which, I would guess, you would single out as evil.



Right. Or video games. Or whether or not someone hugged Stalin enough. Once again, I'm questioning the value of your current proposition. "Religion influences people, and sometimes people do bad things for any number of reasons," is hardly worth making a thread about. If this is not your point, and your point is actually what you started with - that major religions are evil - then you are still a long shot from summoning any viable scrap to even indicate how this could possibly be the case.

I never said you did. I said that, so far, you haven't proven how religion causes any. At the very least, you certainly haven't demonstrated how it does so in a manner different than any of the other hundreds of environmental and social factors that might influence someone.



I generally consider pointing out a complete failure to support a contention as "refutation." Xavius, you haven't even fulfilled minimal requirements for evidencing this claim. It's something you -said-, certainly, but you seem to be under the impression that repeating an argument is the same thing as substantiating it. Show me some evident, definitive cases of scope where societies are more evil for the express reason that a particular religion is popular there, and you'll at least have made some progress toward establishing your contention.

"Major religions are evil. Look, here's an article where a Muslim raped a girl. I'll bet this is because his religion hasn't taught him how to handle his sexuality appropriately. Ergo, major religions are evil." This is not proof. Coming up with grand hypotheses of how a given social ill -might- be traced to a religion is also not proof. I could just as easily come up with a hypothesis of how your anti-religious sentiments are a product of living in Nebraska, but that wouldn't establish it as correct.

You did say that explicitly, and once again, have never proved that people who don't actually believe their religions are less evil than people who actually do. It's just a hypothesis that you keep stating.



But you've said earlier these are not necessary consonants with the teachings of Islam. They are directives of totalitarian/oligarchical governments that use their religion as a veneer for keeping their population in check while they make money.

Now, of course, that's also an unproven hypothesis that I just made. Why is a group of rich politicians using whatever they have at their disposal to perpetuate their power and wealth a less likely explanation than, "Religion is evil?"



Sure, and I agree. You'll recall, for example, I mentioned the atheist Columbine shooters. Was it their atheism that drove them to murder? Was it the fact that their atheism did not teach them how to control their murderous tendencies? Is atheism evil?

I guess I'm at the point where I'm seeing the "Religion is Evil" argument, which has been aptly demonstrated to be little more than blustering, and the "Religion is one of many social factors that could influence people acting misanthropically," which is hardly a post-worthy statement.

Apparently, you aren't aware of much.

Judaism almost never practiced the death penalty. This is different however, from the fact that the system itself recognizes the limited usefulness of the death penalty, and indeed sees the death penalty as something different from actual commitment of violence to another person.

Of all the verses in the Bible that actually mention implementing the death penalty, you chose the two verses that don't say that! (The hebrew term is a passive form, of "you shall die" as in. If you jump off a high cliff into a vat of boiling laval, you shall die.)

You are very good at twisting a person's words around. Congratulations.

Avaer asked how could it be that a practicing buddist, who believes that one can not harm another person, can allow the Death Penalty.

I answered by stating, that historically, very few people (i.e. agreed upon and practiced systems of thought) ever thought of the death penalty as falling under the category of "harm another person."

You still haven't shown where this isn't the case.

No baseless generalizations have been made, save by Xavius.

Why would you banish someone rather than put them to death (which is simpler and less risky) for any reason other than that it's too bruutal and contradictory to the various anti-violent principles whatever culture it was had at the time?

He does. But it is the Prime Minister and Parliament that runs the nation, not His Royal Thai Majesty.

Good question. Ask all those people banished from Iraq and Iran over the years.


Infact just read about these people to find out why...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile#Notable...e_been_in_exile