So far from disrespecting [not a verb! urg!] human life, capital punishment asserts the sacred character of innocent, as distinct from guilty, life..
The objections of whey-faced liberals are infantile, in the context of grim reality. Capital punishment is not “un-Christian”: Saint Paul awarded the “jus gladii” to Christian princes. It is not “barbaric”: perfectly civilised people endorse it, as has always been the case, as well as many distinguished philosophers – the true barbarism is sanctioning the collapse of society. When no judge has at his disposal the supreme penalty which every thug carries in his pocket, then power has departed from legitimate authority and resides with the forces of anarchy.
It does not “make us the same” as the murderers: we shall only become the same if we mutilate and eat children
I have noted elsewhere that our societies are intrinsically disordered. We have inverted the natural order of the state by allowing private citizens to murder the totally innocent without even public scrutiny, let alone intervention; and we have removed the right of the state to take the life of its guilty citizens. It is absurd to think that such a society could re-adopt any kind of systemic respect for human life until it corrects this basic inversion.
It is absurd to think, in fact, that such a society can even survive.
Saint Paul awarded the "jus gladii" to the pagan Roman state, in a letter he was writing to the Roman Christians living just a short walk from Nero's palace, the emperor who would eventually order the death of Paul himself.
ReplyDeleteLet's have no revisionism here.
It is absurd to think, in fact, that such a society can even survive.
ReplyDeleteIt won't. Which is cold comfort.