Regarding the peripheral point I made on Deuteronomy 25:1-3, should we punish the offender after the whole city and its inhabitants are destroyed, or should we threaten/force the information out of him to prevent the bombing? There's a higher reason to execute one above the other.
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Well, then any punishment, including imprisonment, is "torture," because social isolation can also be a form of "torture" under the UN standards. The emotional pain of imprisonment is also excruciating.
With the punishment of flogging, the ethical issue isn't "torture," it's whether the punishment is excessively cruel. The distinction potentially makes an important difference, because "punishment" is a just reward for a crime after appropriate judicial proof, while "torture" is presumptively unjust because the victim receives no due process.
As to whether flogging is excessively cruel, I think we'd agree that in the contemporary context flogging is never an appropriate punishment even if a criminal offense has been proven. The Deuteronomic and Levitical criminal laws concerning corporeal punishment, IMHO, are in this case descriptive and accommodated to the ANE context rather than proscriptive.
On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 9:13 AM, huiyiing@juno.com <huiyiing@juno.com> wrote:
That's punishment in the form of torture. Alright, we may differ in the use of terminology, but in both cases, excruciating pain is inflicted on the individual. Regarding the offense which the criminal is punished for in the context of the Old Testament, I wonder how that compares with allowing an entire city and its inhabitants to be bombed to ruins.
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Received on Thu Aug 7 22:33:59 2008
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