Should Christians Support Capital Punishment?

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All right, Tim, the question for today's episode is, should Christians support capital punishment?

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Well, God supports capital punishment, so should we. Okay, well, why exactly does

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God support capital punishment? I mean, he's given us plenty of commands that tell us not to kill people, and that there are certain repercussions that should come with killing people, so it seems like he would be against telling people to kill other people, right?

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Well, all we have to do right here is just make a simple distinction between killing and murder. So, murder has been traditionally understood as the killing of another person without justification or excuse.

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So, especially the crime of killing a person with malice, forethought, or with recklessness manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.

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So, the idea of murder is killing another person without justification, but then that begs the question, is there ever justification to kill another person, essentially?

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Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So, you have killing, and the Bible doesn't give a wholesale condemnation of killing in any instance.

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I mean, obviously, God sends his Israelites in the Promised Land to be acts of judgment upon the pagan nations at that time, and God, obviously, is perfectly within his authority to take human life whenever he wants, right?

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So then, the issue is, does God ever give human beings the authority to take another life?

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So, is there a distinction to be made between murder and killing?

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Meaning, murder is the killing of another person without justification. Is there justification in God's eyes for killing another person?

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And the answer is, overwhelmingly, yes. So, as you think about the Noahic covenant that happens at the very beginning of the

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Old Testament, you see that whoever sheds the blood of a man, by man shall his blood be shed. And that's grounded in man being created in the image of God, essentially.

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So, because man is made in the image of God, whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.

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And you can just trace this out through the whole legal system, throughout the whole covenant, and it's based on the principle of retribution, so, lex talionis.

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And that's essentially, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life. So, if you take a person's life without justification, then justice would demand that your life be taken to pay for that life.

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So, that's just the way retributive justice works in the Bible, essentially. Okay. So, why are so many opposed to it now, then?

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Because they're more sentimental than they should be, okay? Okay. So, I mean, people are sentimental, and they don't understand justice like they should.

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And what's interesting about that is that we are living in a time right now where people, at the one hand, they're clamoring for justice, right?

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So, everyone's clamoring for justice, but then we don't have any idea what justice actually is anymore. Right. And so, it feels mean.

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Right now, we're in an overly -mothered stage in the evolution of our country in the sense of we prioritize sensitivity, the virtues of sensitivity and compassion, and we don't seem to have a category for hard justice in that way.

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And so, what we get is a caricature of justice at that point. And so, what we demand is we demand sensitivity, and we think that if we just love people, love will overcome all.

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And we've kind of developed a sentimental view of the way love is and a sentimental view of justice in general.

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But the issue is all it would take would be for one of these individuals who doesn't support capital punishment, for one of their children to be kidnapped and brutally murdered and raped and everything else.

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And you would find that, at that point, they would intuitively know, and I'm not wishing that upon anyone,

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I'm just saying that if that horrible thing happened to them, they would know that what happened was profoundly wrong and unjust and needed to be fixed in a certain sense.

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And just having the rapist, murderer person just look at you and say, I'm sorry, isn't good enough.

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Right? Right. Yeah, they can't undo what they've done. Whatever they've done, it's not going to bring back your son or daughter or whatever else.

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It's just that's not the way things work. And so there are some things you can do that demand, like justice demands punishment.

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And the more that we have kind of a, you know, we don't view man as, like in terms of categories of sin and guilt and condemnation, the less that we understand these basic categories of justice along these lines.

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So why – so I know earlier you said that, you know, obviously human life is precious, and it is.

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So then why is that the specific punishment? I mean, you know, couldn't you just –

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Have a cup of coffee and talk it over? Well, no, not have a cup of coffee and talk it over.

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Sort it out, you know, just tell the murderer, hey, it's not nice to kill people. Hey, you know, look, the first one's free, but after that we're going to really get – no, not that.

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I'm talking about, you know, why not just do what we do now and just throw them in prison for life or something?

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Yeah, well, throwing them in prison is profoundly unjust and immoral. So basically, who pays for prisons?

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We pay for prisons. So, you know, if you kill someone, then that means – justice doesn't demand that I allow you to live at my expense, right, at taxpayer expense, in safety, in perpetuity, forever, while you basically contribute nothing to society whatsoever.

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So this is a profoundly immoral way of handling that situation. And, like, the point of capital punishment is – most people don't realize this, but,

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I mean, the point of capital punishment is to ensure justice, but then it's to be, you know, a curb to immorality in that way.

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Yeah, a deterrent. It's to be a deterrent. And so, you know, you don't want to incentivize certain behaviors, okay?

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So the more that you make this the monster scandal that it is, the more that you're discouraging people from going there with it, right?

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Because there's something in the back of their mind to say that if I do this, I'm going to die, my life's going to be over. And that needs to be there to keep people honest, okay?

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Like, in that way. Now, if you just, like, if you wanted to incentivize murder, then you're going to get what you subsidize, if that makes sense, okay?

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Yeah. So, like, if you gave everyone a million dollars to murder someone, they would do it, okay?

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Like, so what you want is, like, justice would demand you have a system of government set up that's designed to punish.

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Like, God's instituted government to bear the sword, right? To punish evildoers and, you know, to praise those who do good.

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And the point there is just to say that God's established government to be his means of judgment, okay?

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And all of this ultimately points to the reality that judgment day is coming and God will be just and, you know, no one's going to get away with anything, right?

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So they may get away with certain things in this life, but they're not going to get rid of it in the life to come. And so, you know, all of this is rooted in the reality that we're sinners and that we deserve condemnation and punishment.

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And you can, you know, perform certain actions that demand certain punishments. Okay, yeah, you know, and it makes a lot of sense what you're saying, especially because I've heard people who at least

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I assume would be against capital punishment say some very strange things, you know, about similar situations that you might use capital punishment or at least that would involve, you know, someone that they thought needed to die actually dying.

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So like, for example, I think I've brought this up before, but it probably is worth repeating again.

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I was watching a video from, I think it was Apologia, where they had a woman on who was at some point in her life, you know, she was raped by another man and she was an atheist.

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So she didn't agree with the guys on Apologia, but they're going on to have a sort of debate conversation type thing.

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And, you know, at one point they're like, hey, so let's assume like we could go back and say like to the guy who like took advantage of you like that, we'll just say, hey, look, he's locked up, like you get to decide what we do with him.

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So what do you want to do to him as his victim? And she was saying like,

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I mean, the scariest sounding, like most detailed things I've ever heard before that just sounded awful, terrible.

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But then at the same time, you know, these are the kind of people who would say like, well, no, we can't kill people because they, you know, because they committed a crime.

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And I've even seen people, you know, like on Reddit, Reddit's a terrible, terrible site.

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I mean, it's just like, it's like the most left -leaning thing I've ever seen. It was like Twitter, but Twitter's gotten a little bit better.

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It's terrible. And there's so many times where I'll see posts that are like, something along the lines of, you know, if you saw

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Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene in a canoe in the river and they're both drowning and you can only save one of them, what would you do?

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And literally every comment is just like laugh, you know, mock, not do nothing.

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You know, all these things are like, that's weird. They didn't even, I mean, they didn't even do anything worthy of capital punishment and you're, and you're totally okay with them dying and laughing at it.

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So why is it all of a sudden different when it, you know, when we're talking about a murderer or a rapist?

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I mean, you know, we live in the, in the whole Me Too movement. It seems like capital punishment for rapists would be like a pretty, you know, well agreed upon point now, but it's not for some reason, you know?

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And so it's, I don't know. It just seems like that sounds more like justice than throwing them in jail for the rest of their life where we have to pay for it.

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Doesn't it? Yeah, it definitely does. And that's when you're living in a confused time, like, like we're living in right now, none of it's supposed to make sense.

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And that's, I mean, that's just a feature of it, not a bug. I mean, you know, a debased mind is going to like a mind that essentially doesn't function anymore.

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Right. So none of it makes you stupid, none of it makes any sense, you know? So like, there's no, there's no logical consistency to be had here.

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And I mean, you could see that in other ways like with the feminism versus transgender kind of discussion. I mean, those two projects are in fundamentally incompatible in every way, imaginable.

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Those two projects do not fit together. So, you know, the internal logic of feminism is like absolutely opposed to the internal logic of transgenderism.

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But then like when you're living in clown world, essentially none of it's going to make sense. And so, so you can have people who like have been trained to respond in horror to the thought of capital punishment, who are at the same time praying in precatory prayer stores,

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Donald Trump, and would be perfectly willing to sign off on his assassination because like really all that matters is power in the system.

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That's all that matters. It's not like consistency. Doesn't matter. What matters is raw power, right?

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And they'll, they will do whatever it takes to get their way. And that's what we're talking about. Right? So they may have a, like a stated position on paper that certain that goes a certain way, but when push comes to shove, they will do whatever it takes to win.

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Okay. Fair enough. This has been another episode of Bible bashed.

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