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From: mmh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: On Capital Punishment
Message-ID: <May.19.05.16.15.1993.1068@geneva.rutgers.edu>
Date: 19 May 93 09:16:16 GMT
Sender: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London, UK.
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Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu

In article <May.12.04.29.37.1993.10035@athos.rutgers.edu> gt7122b@prism.gatech.edu (Randal Lee Nicholas Mandock) writes:
...
>       safety.  To the degree that means other than the death
>       penalty and military operations are sufficient to keep the
>       peace, then these non-violent provisions are to be preferred
>       because they are more in proportion and in keeping with the
>       final goal of protection of peace and human dignity.

Thanks for posting the exact wording which I had not seen
previously. The part I quote above seems to me to indicate
disapproval of capital punishment - it is to be used only when
other means are not sufficient; I would say this is a stronger
restriction than saying that capital punishment is useable when
justifiable. I would certainly say there are cases where a
crime justifies death (perhaps this is the Old Testament
interpretation), but my reverence for life would say that I
would oppose the actual infliction of the death penalty (a New
Testament interpretation?). It is a matter for debate whether
the death penalty works to keep the peace in a way that
non-violent provisions do not. I don't believe it does, and I
would certainly observe that in the USA, where you have the
death penalty, there is a far higher murder rate than here in
the UK, where we do not.

Matthew Huntbach
