As Dr. Johnson said, "There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea" -- both are awful. My point was simply to demonstrate how screwy *all* people tend to get when they start presuming to do God's work.
There is no question that the U.S. has an evil criminal justice system and that there is no more evil part of it than capital punishment. And, of course, good ol' God figures prominently in our eagerness to send criminals into eternity. For instance, consider this excerpt from Russell Baker's review of William S. McFeely's book on capital punishment, _Proximity to Death_, in the current NY Review of Books:
“… [A]ggressive use of the death penalty … [shows] a degree of brutality in the public spirit that seems inconsistent with the present increase in America’s Christian churchgoing population. Puzzling about this contradiction, McFeely wanders into the theological bogs, borrowing from a theory about lynchings which was formulated by Donald D. Matthews, a historian of American religion. Why, Matthews wondered, had religion and lynching ‘waxed’ simultaneously in the South of the 1890s? Perhaps it was because the Christianity then popular in the South devalued a compassionate New Testament God in favor of the ‘stern and inscrutable God of Israel.’ Christ had to suffer death on the cross to provide atonement for the original sin of which all humanity was guilty. And so, ‘at the heart of salvation,’ Matthews writes, ‘were the metaphors of retributive justice: at the center was a symbol of torture and death.’
“Then, McFeely: ‘So imbued with this belief system were some adherents of lynching—and now executions—that for them, only with a killing can we atone for the sins of the society or one of its worst miscreants.’ This may be a theory that only a theologian can love, but at least it offers a pious rationale for what many now consider an unholy policy.”
Carl
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