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I said United States was built from the fundamentals of Christianity, and then you asked me to explain it and I did. I never said it still is like that.
That is incorrect though. Our constitution and country were based off of enlightenment principles, never religious ones. Want some evidence? Well, I'll tell you some anyways.
1. The Constitution does not mention the word God at all.
2. The "In God We Trust" went on our money after the Civil War.
3. The "Under God" went into our pledge after the McCarthy hearings.
4. When Hamilton was asked why he omitted God from the constitution, he replied that we didn't need "foreign aid." That doesn't sound very religious to me.
5. John Adams said that if we did not have a wall between church and state Puritans would, "whip and crop, and pillory and roast." That doesn't sound like it's in support of religion.
6. Benjamin Franklin was a deist.
7. Thomas Jefferson was a deist.
8. Thomas Paine was a deist.
9. George Washington wasn't really religious.
10. James Madison wasn't really religious.
11. Madison believed that "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen centuries" during which Christianity had been on trial: "What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."
12. George Washington spoke no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism.
13. Tom Paine, a writer rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly honest about his religious beliefs, which were quite obviously deist: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.... I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." This is how he opened The Age of Reason, his blantant attack on Christianity. In it he rallied against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the Old Testament, "a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." The New Testament is less brutalizing but more absurd, the story of Christ's divine genesis a "fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of the Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it." Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology with the pure clarity of deism.
14. Jefferson said, "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." The Revelation of St. John he dismissed as "the ravings of a maniac."
15. The three accomplishments Jefferson was proudest of--those that he requested be put on his tombstone--were the founding of the University of Virginia, the authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly radical document that would eventually influence the separation of church and state in the US Constitution; when it was passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, Jefferson rejoiced that there was finally "freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination"--note his respect, still unusual today, for the sensibilities of the "infidel." The University of Virginia was notable among early-American seats of higher education in that it had no religious affiliation whatever. Jefferson even banned the teaching of theology at the school.
16. The founding fathers had to appear a bit religious to keep the good will of the masses, so they appeared religious for their political gain.
Those people do not sound like the people who would write a Christian constitution.
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While this is not always strictly the case, yes, that's the general idea. Once you've done enough harm to the rest of society, you no longer deserve to live.
Prove that statement. I honestly don't see the logic in it.
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No, it would not be productive, but it's their money and so long as they got it honestly they can do what they want with it.
So they should have to pay so someone THEY love should be put to death. That's absurd.
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You mean aside from the family and friends of the victims, and any future victims if the criminal is released and then reofffends?
The family and the friends of the victims have no right to be upset if the person is in jail. It is merely fueling their vendetta against them to put them to death, it would do them no legitimate mental gain. That need for revenge is an illogical one that is not at all fair to the criminal. If a person was going to get the death penalty, and we disallowed it, they would get life in prison without the possibility of parole, so they would not be able to commit a crime again.
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Except that it isn't. This kind of logic would indicate that what Robin Hood did is still theft, even though it was actually reducing the total amount of injustice caused. It is not morally wrong to take the life of someone who does not deserve to have it.
Again, prove to me that once you kill someone you forfeit your own. Also, prove it is not morally wrong to take the life of a criminal.
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This is an argument I've heard several times before. The logical result of it is that, if you were born as a slave in the ancient inca civilization, and the priests decided to sacrifice you, you would not have the right to live. To go one step farther than this, we can now make the general statement that 'wrong' is now exactly the same thing as 'illegal'. As far as I can tell, anyone who sincerely believes that needs to have their head examined.
Humans are animals. Animals have no human rights. It is absurd that humans place themselves above animals and presume that they have natural rights. It is not as if I am endorsing the actions of the Inca, I am merely saying that, as defined by the society of the Incas, the slaves do not have the fundamental "human rights." They did not have the right to free speech, to property, or to any other "human rights." My take on this is merely a philosophical one, so I don't see how you can say I need "to have [my] head examined." If you want to, prove to me that humans have intrinsic rights that they are born to.
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No, the only reason they didn't have the right to kill the other person was because the other person hadn't done anything to deserve being killed. The person doing the killing had. Like I said before, if we're going to say everyone has the same rights regardless of what they've done, then how can we justify even locking criminals up while leaving other people free?
We can justify locking up criminals because we should be rehabilitating them and sometimes it is necessary to remove them from the general population. Putting them in jail benefits mankind, killing them doesn't any more than jail does.
I honestly do not see the benefit to the death penalty. It merely provides revenge for those who should not ask for it.