bil

Christianity has had some 5 or 6 hundred years to mature and become a bit more secular. It still contains nutjobs who value human life less than their beliefs.

Islam is chronologically/devevelopmentally at the age where in christian terms the state and church would burn you alive for translating the bible into English, or daring to possess such a translation. That from an organisation claiming to be about promoting christianity and god's love.

Habeus corpus is relevant. Get shot of that if only for terrorists, and the risk of embarrasment by encarcerated terrorist suspects turning up dead, with their fingernails ripped out and balls the size of pumpkins is avoided. You just bury them somewhere and forget about them.

jimenato

Yup - it's OK if I do it for my reasons but it's not OK if others do it for their reasons.

bil

No, the point was that if pushed, even a civilised person could contemplate doing things that they never would do normally.

I've always been a great believer in the thought that if you deliberately and maliciously provoke someone beyond their limits, and the punch you in the mouth, or worse, then you have only yourself to blame.

For us to approve of torture in even the most hyperbolic case carries with it the assumption that we could trust the powers that be with the power to torture.

Could you? I know damn well I couldn't.

jonwel

I confess that I haven't read all the previous posts, but I'll say the following: after the Twin Towers attack, the US government invaded Afghanistan and arrested a lot of people at random and took them to Guantanamo Bay, keeping them in monstrously inhuman conditions for years, without trial and with no contact with the outside world, all this being done to show that the world's strongest power was still strong. The very conditions of the imprisonment amount to torture and water-boarding and whatever else simply complete the treatment. Under torture both guilty and innocent will confess (no one imagines that all the people who confessed under Stalin to crimes against the Soviet Union were really guilty). A confession is worth nothing if it is not corroborated by other evidence.
The only purpose of torture at Guantanamo has been to obtain confessions of guilt to justify the whole operation in the first place. It has been shrouded in secrecy precisely to hide its arbitrary nature.

If my daughter were kidnapped and I got hold of one of the kidnappers, would I torture him if it were the only way to get her back? Yes, of course I would, but this example is pure fantasy and has nothing to do with any of the real situations discussed here.

jimenato

I don't see it as much different from the police officer being told to shoot a person who is on the rampage with a gun in a school and is killing pupils. I don't like the thought of police killing anyone but sometimes these unpalatable actions have to be taken.

Do you trust the powers that be to authorise the policeman to do that?

cricketman

Well the stoning and the like was a bit 16th/17th Century Christian behaviour, such as the buring of the witches and the heritics - the Spanish Inquisition and the like. But the Christian role in wars and mass murders is still very relevant

Both Bush and Blair prayed to their God before deciding on whether to invade Iraq
Franco asked the Pope's permission to kill "every Red and non-Christian in Spain", and received it
Thanks to the Pope's refusal to sanction the use of contraceptives in third world countries, millions of Africans (and many Latin Americans) have contracted HIV
Fundamentalist Christians in the States threaten and letter bomb people who do not presribe to their view, such as abortion clinics or gay people

At the end of the day, the religion is someone irrelevant, it is but a tool to be used by the societies that have invented them and/or chosen to use it as a scapegoat.

michael123

@ Cricket man
"Fundamentalist Christians in the States threaten and letter bomb people who do not presribe to their view, such as abortion clinics or gay people"

This is a bit of a strawman arguement IMO there is a whole world of difference between stupid individual acts like that you mentioned which target what the perpetuator considers guilty people and the mass slaughting of totally innocent civilians as has happened in Madrid and other places.

"At the end of the day, the religion is someone irrelevant, it is but a tool to be used by the societies that have invented them and/or chosen to use it as a scapegoat."

This I can agree with to a certain extent except that the religion that is currently targeting me (I am speaking broadly of course) is Islam and as such its not 100% irrelevant.

cricketman

Except it really isnt targetting you very much, really. Al Qaida have killed 4000 civilians so far in the West.

Britian and the USA "in the name of God" killed up to 1 million civilians when invading Iraq and Afganistan. Never mind the countless number of wars and violence that the West has inflicted on Middle Eastern and Muslim countries in the past 200 years.

If there is an evil in the world it is American and European. Look how they have raped, pillaged and enslaved the world over the past 500 years. And now suddently we have "seen the light" and everyone else should be "civilised". It's very easy to say that once you have taken everything that could have been taken

bil

Actually, I don't entirely. There have been cases where the police have been overfast to shoot (cf the Brazilian) a guy carrying a table leg in a plastic bag, and someone else.

I also remember Hungerford where the police allowed the guy to shoot people until he was too tired to go on. Why the hell they did that, I will never know.

bil

Yeah, good point. We are hardly in the position to claim the moral high ground, are we?

Back in the days of the crusades, when the christians took Jerusalem, the streets ran with blood and there was wholesale butchery.

When Salladin took it, instead of allowing his troops to go on a killing spree like the christians did, he ordered the killing to cease, and announced that all the people in Jerusalem were free to go and worship at the religious edifice of their choice.

The evil goes back a long way.

bil

Always been that way. It's sad that so many people lack the critical reasoning needed to see this.

jimenato

I think that the point about the invasion of Afghanistan is a good one as it is more or less current.

Let's not go too far back in time though, surely there comes a time when past evils should be left in the past - not forgotten perhaps - we should learn from them but not dwelt upon too negatively for to do so opens up just about every can of worms that ever existed. All this does is deflect the attention away from the current reality.

michael123

... violence that the West has inflicted on Middle Eastern and Muslim countries in the past 200 years.

...the world over the past 500 years.

200 or 500 why stick at that lets go back 1000 years ago and examine just how Islam spread and just what the cost was in human lives.

BTW I don't recall either Bush or Blair saying in was in the name of their god
that they invaded Irak and Afghanistan, would you care to cite a reputable source for that statement please and I'll say now that the famouse "crusade" is not sufficient

cricketman

The length of timescale is important actually. It is only from pillaging the rest of the world that London, New York or Madrid became such important and "cultured" cities. Look at when all the amazing buildings were built, usually at the height of empire. Its very easy to frown upon the actions of the repressed when you have a full belly and nowadays people dont even need to work for it

It is well documented that both Bush and Blair prayed and asked for guidance from their God when deciding whether to invade Iraq.

Btw I'm not sticking up for Islam, it is a stupid, just like Christianity

michael123

@ Cricketman

First of all you said this...
"Britian and the USA "in the name of God" killed up to 1 million civilians when invading Iraq and Afganistan"

then as justification you said this

"It is well documented that both Bush and Blair prayed and asked for guidance from their God when deciding whether to invade Iraq."

The first statment is just pure hyperbole IMO whereas the second statment is factual

and finally you said
"Btw I'm not sticking up for Islam, it is a stupid, just like Christianity"

At last something we can both agree with.

Could we leave it at that as I've already had a post censored for saying something slightly non U

FWIW I'm not trying to be a 'last word" poster its just I'm unused in the Forums I frequent to having my posts edited.