Defending the Truth

It always bugs me that the advocates of the Death Penalty try to use "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" to defend the Death Penalty. Didn't Jesus Himself say that it was once said that, but that we are called to love our enemies, bless those who persecute us, and generally return good for evil?

Didn't Jesus say we should be merciful as God has been merciful to us, and that if we don't show mercy our Father in Heaven won't show it to us? Yeah, the Old Testament Law did give lots of laws where the penalty for breaking them was death.

So the Pharisees were quite alright in trying to put the adulteress to death, right? Wrong. Jesus said unless we're without sin ourselves we can't execute those laws. Paul in Romans 3 says therefore anyone is guilty who condemns others according to the Law for they are guilty of the same things!

Paul makes his case all through Romans 3, pointing out that the WHOLE WORLD is guilty before God. None are justified by works, not one. Jesus is the only exception because He IS God, and therefore can't be guilty before Himself. It's like saying everybody is guilty before the Judge, but the possible exception is the Judge, therefore, only a human who was God, aka Jesus, could be sinless.

Therefore, the Law is indeed a just condemnation of what's wrong, but by it we're all guilty. We can't judge others according to it without being guiltless ourselves!

Human beings are fallible, and can't exact vengeance perfectly. That's why God says "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." I think we should leave the whole vengeance stuff up to him. Prison should be meant to protect society, not to punish wrongdoers.

The flaws from fallible people trying to execute perfect justice when God alone can do that are evident by all the people getting pardoned from Death Row thanks to DNA evidence. The bottom line is, if we can't ensure only guilty people will be on Death Row, then NO ONE should be on Death Row.

I'll take your youth and inexperience into consideration before I decide if you should be on death row for posting something so stupid.

Just as I will take into account your eloquent and well thought-out arguments, which so clearly showed me the error of my ways, before issuing my rebuttal.

Well, I guess he told you PN.

Jzyehoshua makes some interesting points.

It always dumbfounds me that so many so called Christian anti-choice people are ardently pro-death penalty. According to the New Testament, Jesus intervened in the stoning death of the adultress (which was perfectly acceptable in it's day) challenging those without sin to cast the first (next) stone. More importantly, Jesus was (as the story is told) a victim of the death penalty himself, and unjustly so. So I think that if the Christ were to return today, and he's anything like the being protrayed in the Bible, he'd be an ardent opponent of the death penalty himself.

Stone away boys...

Hmmm, it's an interesting theory. So does Jesus' anti-death penalty stance supersede the many death penalty sentences God lays out in the Old Testament? If Jesus is God then it seems as if God changes his mind a lot for a perfect all-knowing being; either that or he suffers from cognitive dissonance. Either way he flip-flops more than John Kerry in a waffle house; someone who we didn't want running our country... let alone the universe.

Well, my point in that original post was that yeah, God does present death as the penalty in the Old Testament, a lot. However, the catch is that it declares EVERYONE as guilty. The New Testament writers point out that the reason we can't judge is because we're all deserving of death.

The thing with Jesus, He never said our sins were any less deserving of death than they were in the Old Testament. With the adulteress, He never said she wasn't worthy of death. The very fact that He forgave her and acknowledged she'd sinned by saying "go and sin no more" shows otherwise.

Rather, He came to show that we all need to repent or else perish because we're all equally guilty of death. He reminded us that the Law can't justify any of us; we're all sinners, from Mary and the apostles to the parson giving the Sunday message.

We need to fall on God's mercy because our good works can never earn us acceptance with God, and God is just - why should He continue to show us mercy if we will not show mercy to others?

It's not that God is any less just than in the Old Testament, or that the sentence of death has changed at all since God gave the Law. It's that through Jesus we can find God's mercy, and in the Old Testament there are many examples of God's mercy as well. It's that asking for and receiving God's mercy makes us accountable to show that same mercy and forgiveness to everyone else we meet.

Well said Jz

I've since apologized for being uncivil to you. However, I think there are plenty of people who deserve to be put to death. It never made sense to me to "forgive" someone who has just committed murder, when he's quite likely to do it again.