What about torture?
The following are a couple things that I posted in an online forum that Matt and I have been following since way back when we were into Unreal Tournament gaming (1999!)... anyhow, the board eventually morphed into a bunch of people who knew each other from gaming together, into a group of people from America and Europe who talk, bicker, laugh, etc., about current events since UT is no longer played very much.
Anyhow, there was recently a topic started (here - warning, pg13 language, etc) that soon became a discussion about torture, and how Bush may sign into law a Bill to allow non-adherence to the Geneva Convention in some cases, presumably to allow for "torture." Anyway, here are a couple of my responses which sum up my feelings on the issue. I've tried to kind of edit out some things so you can just read them as stand alone statements of mine without having to read the discussion.
Warning: this is just my opinion. You might think its naive, or trite, or stupid, or religious... it is probably at least a little all of these things, so deal with it and stop your bitching. Or no, actually, I'd welcome some discussion in the comments section.
(Right before this, one poster had said the whole "turning the other cheek" teaching of Christ didn't really apply to dealing with suspected terrorist interogation, because "there are plenty of examples of God dealing harshly with the unjust.")
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Regarding "turning the other cheek": self-defense when one's life is in obvious danger is never to be questioned by me, nor Christian (nor any other major world religion's) morality.
What is at question here is causing intense suffering and unendurable agony to a fellow human being - not one who has a gun to your head, but one that you have in a basement somewhere, restrained. If the man were running at you with a gun, or a bomb, and you shot him in the jaw and it ripped his jaw and neck off, and he were writhing in the ground... causing that kind of agony is justifiable. You were protecting yourself after definately identifying the man as a direct threat against you. This is never the case in torture.
If you are a man of faith, have faith that God will manage to bring about more good than harm from the sins that your prisoner may try to commit, or knows about that will be committed. This is the whole basis for God allowing sin and evil to exist: that somehow more good (love) can come about through it than evil (hate) - otherwise there can be no way God (who loves us, who is love itself) would ever allow it. (Read Augustine's Confessions or even (gulp) the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for a simple explanation of why this is... you could even check the online version of the Catechism if you wanted).
Think about a powerful nation which allows itself to slide into policies of detaining and torturing whomever it likes in the name of procuring information for national security.... no matter if it's ostensibly about protecting the public, or even the world, from terrorists. It's an attack on the same underlying reason for the inclusion of gun-ownership rights to be included in the Bill of Rights: that the government should never be accountable only to itself - in the fullest extent and at the breaking point of government being for the people, the people will at least not whimper and assume the yolk of an oppressor who twists the democratic process as outlined in the Constitution.
We may be far removed from such a distopian nightmare here in the United States this year, this decade, but our footsteps in these times will dictate which roads our country goes down. Ask whether or not the economically depressed people of Berlin in the 1930s thought that a little exclusion of a little group of people would wind up in fifteen years' time produce a mountain of ash containing the remains of 5 million people.
I know, kind of emotional and dramatic... but what's being discussed here is foundational stuff: at the very basis of every human being, be they holy or evil, do you see them as being made in the image of your God, possessing the human rights you enjoy in the great state of Texas? Do you see them as dirty sub-humans that can be electrocuted and urinated on, teeth kicked in and palms sliced without consequence?
We both know that God would yearn for them to not harm other people for their blind Jihad. One would imagine the compassion and yearning Christ would have for sinners like them who would destroy life for a bastardized ideology, the compassion He still no doubt has for them today - this very hour, even...
And then imagine this man, who is under the eye of God, whom God loves and will always love, taken into a basement and beaten and lacerated until he breaks, and the men who do this to the one He loves are put in power by you by the workings of democratic government, with your approval of what they will do...?
*******************************
Related but slightly different topic:
I am familiar with the idea of the dogs and the lambs. It goes something like this: we are a nation of sheep, we enjoy our freedom, and we are protected by the carniverous dogs, who have a cynical, yet more reality-based idea of the threats (wolves) facing the herds of sheep and how to deal with them.
Human history extends from conflict, and just as evolution sharpens the survivers of conflict into the present plethora of living species, we seem to be beings of conflict. I am surely not in denial of this, nor do I reject that a big part of us is still rooted in our conflict-rich, material-scarce existence.
Yet... a big, big part of me wants to go further, and declare that we're not just animals in conflict, as was the case hundreds of millions of years ago. Somewhere, somehow, we picked up [insert Creation stories here] reason, logic, love, emotion... all of which makes us human. Other animals may have the rudiments, but we have the genuine combo to produce custum, civilization, relationships, altruism.
Furthermore, 1.) though we have the capability and the natural propensity to do these things, behave in these ways, and 2.) because we are products of our unending chain of ancesters extending back into time who have always been involved in this universal struggle, it is my firm belief that all these things (civilization, decorem, custom, emotional relationships, altruism to our causes), are subject to the full pressures of conflict.
Maybe that got a little too abstract: I'm trying to say that all human endeavors can be oriented in one of two ways:
1.) A way which is aligned with our naturalistic roots, which concedes supremacy to the human animal and condition of conflict. As regards this discussion and torture specifically, someone who believed in this way about human existence would identify our country as a great thing, a thing that should be upheld because it works great; it should be upheld even at the price of torturing men - that's the price of the conflict. Torture of another human is weighed against a gain of some kind (material, psychological, spiritual).
or a second way:
2.) A way which, in the final analysis, is a rejection of our naturalistic origins as dictators of our values; an affirmation of our inherent worth as human individuals and a way that seeks justice and compassion for all, ALL, fellow human beings, even if their way is different from ours - even if the person they are considering is a believer in what I just listed as number 1. It becomes irrelevant who the person is, or what they were planning to do, or what they knew. The fact remains that they are coexistant with you and in possession of the same human rights as you. An organized country made up of people who believed in this second Way would seek policies which sought to deal with and limit the progression of the number 1s, but never, ever would they place an individual adherent of way number 1 on the rack to torture them: nothing would be worth the sacrifice.
The real deep and buried issue that this whole thread is discussing is this: what is the human being - is it something which can be weighed against something else in any way, or it is fundamentally important enough on its own, by its own merits, to be the prime objective?
I firmly believe our civilization and our custums are the medium in which we exist. They are not things to be given value in and of themselves. To weigh the value of any human (no matter how evil they behaved) against the possible gain (for example, security) any country, religion, or social organization could gain by sacrificing that person is an absurdity outright: by saving a bombing, you would have us regress unto barbarism?
Anyhow, there was recently a topic started (here - warning, pg13 language, etc) that soon became a discussion about torture, and how Bush may sign into law a Bill to allow non-adherence to the Geneva Convention in some cases, presumably to allow for "torture." Anyway, here are a couple of my responses which sum up my feelings on the issue. I've tried to kind of edit out some things so you can just read them as stand alone statements of mine without having to read the discussion.
Warning: this is just my opinion. You might think its naive, or trite, or stupid, or religious... it is probably at least a little all of these things, so deal with it and stop your bitching. Or no, actually, I'd welcome some discussion in the comments section.
(Right before this, one poster had said the whole "turning the other cheek" teaching of Christ didn't really apply to dealing with suspected terrorist interogation, because "there are plenty of examples of God dealing harshly with the unjust.")
*************************
Regarding "turning the other cheek": self-defense when one's life is in obvious danger is never to be questioned by me, nor Christian (nor any other major world religion's) morality.
What is at question here is causing intense suffering and unendurable agony to a fellow human being - not one who has a gun to your head, but one that you have in a basement somewhere, restrained. If the man were running at you with a gun, or a bomb, and you shot him in the jaw and it ripped his jaw and neck off, and he were writhing in the ground... causing that kind of agony is justifiable. You were protecting yourself after definately identifying the man as a direct threat against you. This is never the case in torture.
If you are a man of faith, have faith that God will manage to bring about more good than harm from the sins that your prisoner may try to commit, or knows about that will be committed. This is the whole basis for God allowing sin and evil to exist: that somehow more good (love) can come about through it than evil (hate) - otherwise there can be no way God (who loves us, who is love itself) would ever allow it. (Read Augustine's Confessions or even (gulp) the Catechism of the Catholic Church, for a simple explanation of why this is... you could even check the online version of the Catechism if you wanted).
Think about a powerful nation which allows itself to slide into policies of detaining and torturing whomever it likes in the name of procuring information for national security.... no matter if it's ostensibly about protecting the public, or even the world, from terrorists. It's an attack on the same underlying reason for the inclusion of gun-ownership rights to be included in the Bill of Rights: that the government should never be accountable only to itself - in the fullest extent and at the breaking point of government being for the people, the people will at least not whimper and assume the yolk of an oppressor who twists the democratic process as outlined in the Constitution.
We may be far removed from such a distopian nightmare here in the United States this year, this decade, but our footsteps in these times will dictate which roads our country goes down. Ask whether or not the economically depressed people of Berlin in the 1930s thought that a little exclusion of a little group of people would wind up in fifteen years' time produce a mountain of ash containing the remains of 5 million people.
I know, kind of emotional and dramatic... but what's being discussed here is foundational stuff: at the very basis of every human being, be they holy or evil, do you see them as being made in the image of your God, possessing the human rights you enjoy in the great state of Texas? Do you see them as dirty sub-humans that can be electrocuted and urinated on, teeth kicked in and palms sliced without consequence?
We both know that God would yearn for them to not harm other people for their blind Jihad. One would imagine the compassion and yearning Christ would have for sinners like them who would destroy life for a bastardized ideology, the compassion He still no doubt has for them today - this very hour, even...
And then imagine this man, who is under the eye of God, whom God loves and will always love, taken into a basement and beaten and lacerated until he breaks, and the men who do this to the one He loves are put in power by you by the workings of democratic government, with your approval of what they will do...?
*******************************
Related but slightly different topic:
I am familiar with the idea of the dogs and the lambs. It goes something like this: we are a nation of sheep, we enjoy our freedom, and we are protected by the carniverous dogs, who have a cynical, yet more reality-based idea of the threats (wolves) facing the herds of sheep and how to deal with them.
Human history extends from conflict, and just as evolution sharpens the survivers of conflict into the present plethora of living species, we seem to be beings of conflict. I am surely not in denial of this, nor do I reject that a big part of us is still rooted in our conflict-rich, material-scarce existence.
Yet... a big, big part of me wants to go further, and declare that we're not just animals in conflict, as was the case hundreds of millions of years ago. Somewhere, somehow, we picked up [insert Creation stories here] reason, logic, love, emotion... all of which makes us human. Other animals may have the rudiments, but we have the genuine combo to produce custum, civilization, relationships, altruism.
Furthermore, 1.) though we have the capability and the natural propensity to do these things, behave in these ways, and 2.) because we are products of our unending chain of ancesters extending back into time who have always been involved in this universal struggle, it is my firm belief that all these things (civilization, decorem, custom, emotional relationships, altruism to our causes), are subject to the full pressures of conflict.
Maybe that got a little too abstract: I'm trying to say that all human endeavors can be oriented in one of two ways:
1.) A way which is aligned with our naturalistic roots, which concedes supremacy to the human animal and condition of conflict. As regards this discussion and torture specifically, someone who believed in this way about human existence would identify our country as a great thing, a thing that should be upheld because it works great; it should be upheld even at the price of torturing men - that's the price of the conflict. Torture of another human is weighed against a gain of some kind (material, psychological, spiritual).
or a second way:
2.) A way which, in the final analysis, is a rejection of our naturalistic origins as dictators of our values; an affirmation of our inherent worth as human individuals and a way that seeks justice and compassion for all, ALL, fellow human beings, even if their way is different from ours - even if the person they are considering is a believer in what I just listed as number 1. It becomes irrelevant who the person is, or what they were planning to do, or what they knew. The fact remains that they are coexistant with you and in possession of the same human rights as you. An organized country made up of people who believed in this second Way would seek policies which sought to deal with and limit the progression of the number 1s, but never, ever would they place an individual adherent of way number 1 on the rack to torture them: nothing would be worth the sacrifice.
The real deep and buried issue that this whole thread is discussing is this: what is the human being - is it something which can be weighed against something else in any way, or it is fundamentally important enough on its own, by its own merits, to be the prime objective?
I firmly believe our civilization and our custums are the medium in which we exist. They are not things to be given value in and of themselves. To weigh the value of any human (no matter how evil they behaved) against the possible gain (for example, security) any country, religion, or social organization could gain by sacrificing that person is an absurdity outright: by saving a bombing, you would have us regress unto barbarism?
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