Monday, December 22, 2014

Who would Jesus torture?


This seems pretty clear cut to me. What America did after 9/11 with a whole bunch of prisoners, including some we knew were innocent, was TORTURE. Dick Cheney can continue to spin in his grave (wait, he's not actually a ghoul?) that it wasn't torture and that he'd do it again, but that says more about his lack of morality and character than it does about the torture we inflicted. But to America's deep shame, even acknowledging that it was torture doesn't dissuade some from endorsing it.

Today I saw this graph which sets out responses to the "Was torture justified" question by religion (or lack of).



Not surprisingly to anyone who pays attention, religious folk tend to okay torture while a majority of non-religious folk (aka agnostics and atheists) don't believe torture of other human beings is justified. So much for "Do unto others" and "Love your neighbor", not to mention "Love the sinner, not the sin." Of course, this probably has more to do with American religious folk being deliberately and systematically co-opted by the Republicans so that conservatism is more important to them than their religion.

I should also point out (again) that actual experts who study this have demonstrated time and again that torture is ineffective in getting good information and torture played no role in our getting information that lead to the killing of Bin Laden. So not only is torture immoral, it is ineffective. It's also dehumanizing and unamerican.

If you profess to love Jesus, and you still endorse torture, you may want to crack open that book of yours again and try to connect with the values that Jesus is supposed to represent. I'm pretty sure torture isn't one of them.

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