But do you think the perps of these heinous crimes are going to stop?
Yes, because they'll be in prison. I'm not saying that the alternative to killing them is setting them free.
Or the gods are simply expecting humans to do it themselves. The gods won't do for humans what humans can do for themselves.
See?
Yes, I "see," all right. I just don't agree.
Religious arguments don't really help in this type of discussion. Some people are Christian, some are not, some are agnostic and some are atheists to whom the idea of what a big invisible friend in the sky might think is absurd. We all have different ideas about what the gods - if they exist - might or might not do.
Right. My point was not to speculate about religious influence because, as I said, I'm agnostic. So we're off on the wrong track.
My point is that, IMO, killing people as punishment is wrong. It's not about being practical or impractical, fair or unfair, feeling sorry for the killers or loving the killers or hating the killers. It's not about whether I want to feed and house them or not.
I believe it's just wrong, in some larger, overarching sense of morality. So it's not really about gods. My point in invoking the concept of "god" was to suggest that it's about the moral laws to the universe. I know that even that concept, in itself, is often disputed. I happen to think that there are some moral absolutes, and one of them is that you don't kill people except in self-defense.
the only arguments one could bring against it were emotional arguments and not really suited for the logical structure of a debate.
But that's not true. First of all, you can argue that it's wrong because inevitably innocent people wind up getting executed. And you can point out that death sentences are influenced by juror misperceptions, inadequate representation, gender, racism (from deathpenaltyinfo.org:
Modern studies of the death penalty continue to find a correlation between sentencing and race. The studies consistently show that those who kill white victims are much more likely to receive the death penalty than those who kill black victims) and other inequalities.
And in practical terms, you can argue that capital punishment is not effective at deterring crime -- on the contrary, I believe it encourages crime. The United States, the only Western country that allows capital punishment, also has the highest crime rate among Western industrialized countries. And states where capital punishment is legal tend to have higher murder rates. Here's a chart ranking states by murder rates.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=169#MRord The states with the highest murder rates are at the top. The states highlighted in yellow are those that DON'T allow capital punishment. You'll notice that the yellow states are concentrated at the low end of the list.
Now, the cause-and-effect could potentially go the other way -- perhaps the states with higher murder rates allow capital punishment because they feel they "need" it more. But clearly the existence of a death penalty does not stop murders from occurring.
Do you see rapists going free by the dozens? Some do, most don't. And why? Because people are being educated about women and rapists. That women aren't always the Virgin or Good Little Housewife and if they're not, doesn't mean they deserve whatever violence is done them.
Fine, but that's a direct contradiction of what you said in the first place, that juries make mistakes in rape trials. So you could argue that, through education, they're improving. But your point originally was that they do make mistakes. I agree, and that's one problem with capital punishment.
And adultery, but I'm not about to compare them to the West and we are talking about the West, right?
No, we're talking about capital punishment. I don't think we specified a specific global region. Gary's point was that in very recent memory homosexuality was considered a deviant crime here. I added that, in some countries, it is still a capital crime. The overall point is that humans are fallible in their perception of criminality. The criminalization of homosexuality relates to the capital punishment debate because it shows that humans are capable of killing people -- and feeling totally justified in doing so -- for "crimes" that others regard as perfectly acceptable behavior. I don't trust that sense of justice.