Reading through this discussion should give you a small feel for the kind and depth of stupid we have to deal with on this side of the pond. Religion still has its evil talons ahold of our hearts.
Unfortunately, that kind of blind religious stupidity infests our politics a well.
Half a century ago, I attended a university (well, state college at the time, but a couple years later we became a state university) class in Rabbinic Literature (ie, primarily Talmud) which was taught by a rabbi. I learned a lot in that class and still cherish what I had learned.
Nearly a decade later, at the insistence of my wife before the birth of our first son, I also took a class in Development Psychology (in Piagetian manner, we studied
stages of development based on observations that children go through stages of development before which certain kinds of reasoning is beyond them (eg, conservation in which the same amount of liquid is poured from a short glass to a tall glass and, before being able to handle this concept, they say the tall glass contains more liquid) ).
The textbook included a chapter on the development of moral reasoning (oddly not covered in class) in which the first stage is
rules-based morality in which some authority sets some arbitrary rules and right-vs-wrong is based solely on whether or not you follow those arbitrary rules. In rules-based morality, if any harm befalls someone because you followed the rules, then that is the responsibility of the rules-giver, not yours. This was examined in the infamous
Milgram experiment (that everybody knows about but doesn't remember the name) in which "teachers" in a "learning experiment" adminstered electric shocks of increasing severity, including ones labeled suggestively as lethal, on a "student" (a confederate of the experiment) who complains of a heart condition, but the "teacher" presses on on the authority of an authority figure, even after the "student" becomes ominously silent (AKA dead). Refer also to the independent film,
The Experimenter, on some independent streaming services (and sometimes on cable).
The next stage of moral development comes on around 6 years of age or so, in which they start to look at the motives of the "violation" (eg, the stealing of a loaf of bread to feed one's starving family, the driving crime of
Les Miserables).
The rub is that most Christians are stuck back in the pre-school stage of "an authority says so, so that's how it must be
and if anything goes wrong as a result, it's not my fault but rather the fault of that authority." Rules-based morality.
My Rabbinic Lit professor taught us about Jewish morality. Basically, Jews are obligated to obey the Law. But when obeying the Law will result in the loss of a life,
then you save that life even if it requires violating the Law.
Contrast that with
Christian "morality". Two or three decades ago I heard the news of a law case in which the parents of a young child were tried for criminal neglect because they had withheld from him vitally needed medical treatment due to their Christian beliefs in faith healing. Their child had died from a form of meningitis that was easily treated with antibiotics, but that violated their religious beliefs so they let him die. And at their sentencing, they stated that if the exact same situation were to arise with their next child, then they would act in the exact same manner, their faith was so strong.
My own son died young, so I know extremely personally how devastating the death of a child can be for a parent (two and a half decades later, when will I recover? Any day now.). And yet their faith is so strong that they would sacrifice the life of their own child for it? How
sick!
That is a very telling difference between Christian and Jewish morality. Christian morality is strictly rules-based. "God" give us these rules (even ones that do not exist anywhere in the Bible, such as forbidding abortion -- the only mention of abortion in the Bible is to mandate it if you think your wife is carrying someone else's baby and, OBTW, here are the instructions for performing that abortion). And in the name of such extra-Biblical "laws" Christians mandate anti-abortion laws which directly place women's lives in mortal danger
for no good reason.
IOW, Christianity has their Christian God
demand human sacrifice. And a blood sacrifice to boot (since the women suffering under such laws are bleeding out into many diapers as they sit in their cars in the hospital's parking lot waiting to be near enough to death to finally be treated).
In Judaism, if the question is between the life of the fetus or of the mother, then you choose for the mother.
Clearly, Judaism is far more morally superior to Christianity.
So what is the status of capital punishment in Israel?
According to Wikipedia:
quote:
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Israel. Capital punishment has only been imposed twice in the history of the state and is only to be handed out for treason, genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people during wartime. Israel is one of seven countries that has abolished capital punishment for "ordinary crimes only."
Israel inherited the Mandatory Palestine code of law, which included capital punishment for several crimes, but in 1954, Israel abolished the penalty for murder. The last execution was carried out in 1962, when Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann was hanged for genocide and crimes against humanity. The last death sentence in Israel was handed down in 1988, when John Demjanjuk was sentenced to death for war crimes and crimes against humanity; his sentence (and conviction) was subsequently overturned in 1993 following an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court. No death sentences have been sought by Israeli prosecutors since the 1990s.
Currently the only crimes that are capital crimes in Israel are for crimes against humanity and treason.
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