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Understanding Evil
I saw a tweet for a Chinese delicacy: Yin-Yang Fish.Here is what it looks like:
A fish whose body is deep fried while its head is protected. “Speed is the key — when you prepare the fish, you can’t hurt its internal organs, so when you serve it, it can stay alive for at least half an hour,”
(only click on this link if you want to see the living fish gasping for air).
This is not mere cruelty. It is not sadism. The Chinese have a matter-of-factness about it all.
It occurred to me that this is actually a really good explanation for cultures that do not have the Torah as a foundational text. Because there is no rational reason why humans, as apex predators, should not eat anything else, in any manner they choose. Indeed, consuming animals becomes a way to bring their spirits into one’s own body. Cruelty? Irrelevant.
This is the nature of a society that thinks nothing of harvesting organs from living criminals in order to give them to more powerful people.
This is the kind of place that believes power is its own justification. It is the “Might Makes Right” ethos that dominates every evil society and culture and nation in the world. I can, and so it is fine that I do.
The worldview that produces Yin-Yang fish and harvests human organs and seeks supremacy over all others is pure evil. It is the antithesis of everything that seeks to be good and holy.
Published in General
This is one reason, and probably the main one, that I object to capital punishment. It’s not what happens to the convict. It’s what happens to the executioner(s).
One of the reasons firing squads work: everyone can deny to themselves and others that it was their shot that hit/killed the prisoner.
Yes, except that cattle eat the grass which is today and tomorrow is thrown onto the fire, but also we are not only allowed to eat venison and such, we are commanded to eat little baby lambs, if I understand correctly.
I think that if God specifically ordains something it’s got to be okay with God who created all things to fulfill His purposes.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t God prohibit killing food animals by strangulation? This seems arcane to me, but if God says it, I’m sure He has a reason for it.
Gallup push poll.
Does it though? Is there evidence that the executioners are changed?
And are they any more changed than soldiers who kill?
And doesn’t God command the death penalty for certain things, such as murder? How does that happen if nobody will do it because it might make them sad or something?
Soldiers are changed by killing. So are cops. I don’t mean these men (mostly men) are turned into different people. But there is a change, an alteration in self-definition and not a welcome one. It is a burden one has to figure out how to carry.
But more to the point, an executioner, by definition, is not killing someone who is actively trying to kill him. Instead, he is killing a defenseless person. Whatever that man (mostly men) have been convicted of doing, on the day of execution he is helpless and the executioner is safe. So the experience of killing him is very different from that of a soldier during wartime.
By the way, I also think that a society in which it is considered acceptable to tear flesh from a still-living creature is altered and diminished, even if this is a relatively uncommon practice reserved for gourmets.
Mike Huckabee published a piece in the Washington Post a long while back—I still counted myself a progressive in those days, so I was surprised to find myself impressed by his argument, which was basically that the death penalty should only be carried out with the humble understanding that execution represents our (collective) failure to figure out how to deal effectively with crime, justice and human violence.
An execution should not, in other words, be counted a victory for justice, but sometimes (not often) accepted as the best we can manage under the circumstances, including the circumstance of our own imperfection.
For instance (and I think this was his example?) one might have to resort to the death penalty when a murderer, having been sentenced to life without parole, continues to commit violent offenses while in prison, endangering fellow inmates and prison staff, and is not dissuaded by threats of further punitive refinements to an already penultimate sentence.
An animal must be killed as quickly as possible with a minimum of suffering. Nowadays, there are people trained to do it.
There’s always solitary confinement for one example, but the Left is against that too.
Right. And that’s a real problem, by the way. Not just the left’s attitude, but the question of what one can do with a dangerous inmate who continues to offend? There was apparently a guy locked up at Leavenworth during the moratorium on capital punishment who attacked and raped? murdered? more people, including (I think—I’m going to have to look this up) a prison secretary while serving life without the possibility of parole. What do you do with that guy? He ended up in a cage built under the prison rotunda, with bars on all four sides, at least one guard with eyes-on and lights 24/7, and if he was a good boy they’d give him his art supplies.
Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of what this guy “deserved,” does anyone deserve to have to be the prison guard who spends hours in the company of a psychopath who is being, in effect, tortured. Forever?
And just so you know I’m not a sentimental squish: At the moment, I’d throw the switch on this guy myself.
Not proud of it, just admitting it.
Hmm, not sure why he’d have to have someone watching him 24/7 as long as he’s that securely locked up. To keep him from killing himself? So what if he does?
One would think a society that worships abortion wouldn’t cavil at eating live fish. But it might. “If once a man indulges himself in murder . . .”
I can’t find the story I was thinking of…I wonder if I dreamed it? Anyway, the closest thing I could find is this one, from Great Britain, about a man who killed four people, including three fellow prisoners and was accused of at least attempting to eat them.
Hah! Quite right.
One of the Pro-Choicer’s favorite default “arguments” once rational arguments have been countered is a vague ad hominem: “How can they [meaning Pro-Lifers] be against abortion when they’re in favor of the death penalty?” They appear to think this is a slam-dunk argument, which of course it is not.
Answer #1: Many, including many Catholics, are against both.
Answer #2: Capital punishment refers to the deliberate killing of a demonstrably guilty and very wicked person. Abortion refers to the deliberate killing of a completely innocent person.
Answer #3: “How can you be against the death penalty and in favor of abortion?”
By the way, one of the odder features of capital punishment is that, if an inmate on death row does attempt suicide, the prison staff will attempt to resuscitate him.
The difference is between eating an animal after it is dead and eating it while it’s alive. Do you eat animals while they’re alive, Jerry?
If you don’t, it’s likely because you live in a western culture influenced by the Torah.
It horrifies me to see things like this. The people sitting around a table eating a live fish may qualify as human in a physiological sense, but are not much more than animals otherwise. They look human, but really aren’t. Only animals eat other animals while they’re alive.
It’s insights like this in the Torah that actually lead me to believe it is divinely inspired. The Hebrews seemed to be horrified at the inhuman, disgusting practices of their neighbors. Sexual, dietary etc. Where could that insight have come from other than God?
(In Acts 15, gentile converts were not expected to keep the full Jewish law, except to to refrain from idolatry, sexual immorality, and from “blood and from what is strangled.” )
When I make a four corner with abortion (y/n) on one side and death penalty (y/n) on the other, this is the combination that doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t agree with some of the others, but can see how arguments could be made.
BW, looks like a first year Law School criminal law test. Abortion (at least the most recent state laws saying you can kill the infants if they come out of the uterus alive) obvious vi0lation of both religious and criminal law. Maybe the Dems disagree. Execution criminals who killed others for no legitimate reason (e.g. self defense) seems much easier with not much moral consideration. Save the little ones who survive child birth. Execute the killers. Not that complicated to me.
Yes, it’s tellingly inverted that conservatives are generally against killing the innocent and in favor of death for those guilty of capital crimes, and the progressives are in favor of killing the innocent and against death for those clearly guilty of capital crimes.
Inverted?
Oooh, ooh, I know this one!
Cranio-Rectal Inversion?
Keep in mind those “criminals” might just be religious minorities.
Agreed. But still a topic I’m happy to use as a joke.
Once when we were new members at a church, we invited the pastor and his wife for dinner. I made sure to inform him we were having strangled young goat, boiled in goat milk.
I guess you had to be there.
I think because it does not facilitate draining the blood. God commanded the lifeblood to be removed prior to eating.
Chinese cook book:
”How to Wok your Dog”
I read the first quotation and stopped there. I can’t even.
With cheese?
It might also have something to do with the (reported) historical practice of frightening and torturing animals to cause them to build up (iirc) lactic acid which pretenderized (the root of which is not pretend) the meat.
I believe that there is less universality in our psyches than generally assumed.
There are people – I doubt I am one of them btw – who can put down evil without losing any sleep.