Oh, I just might have known you'd diss "holisticpolitics.com", Clinton, you heartless swine! :-) You'll get your comeuppance when we come to Windsor and picket your musical performances.

Now, I'm not gonna get myself all worked up over the fate of Paul Hill...one way or the other. I've got better things to do today. But...I will make a few brief observations.

1. All the people who enthusiastically favour capital punishment should get to experience it firsthand themselves (at least once), after spending a few miserable months or years on death row. I figure this would give them a new slant on the subject, and it would also eliminate the more paranoid and vicious segment of the population handily. The sentences could be carried out by other people who also are in favour of capital punishment, on a lottery system. The last one left would then be given a chance to off him/herself, providing he/she was still in favour of the general idea. A refusal to do so would indicate that the subject's opinion of the matter had changed.

2. Those who freely give a government the power to execute people may one day live to bitterly regret it.

3. If you think it's too expensive to imprison people, then I guess you value money more than life. Nice set of values there, Bubba. The mafia is looking for guys just like you, so you'll never be out of work!

4. The concept of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" is not a Christian concept. It was a Jewish concept (as expressed in the Old Testament), and may still be, but then Jesus gave his teachings which cast out those very ideas (among many others). For his doing so, the pro-capital-punishment crowd of his time (scribes and pharisees) had him executed. Jesus never physically harmed anyone. That many so-called Christians have ignored Christ's teachings of mercy and forgiveness is obvious, and says much about them but nothing about Jesus.

4. It is always possible to come up with particular stories that appear to support either the pro or anti-capital punishment position. That is because we are highly emotional creatures...and it's also because to every apparently rock-solid rule there are a few particular exceptions!!! And this is what people tend to overlook when they try to establish rock solid rules about life.

What's my solution? Try to come up with a generally workable rule, and apply it generally, but stay flexible at the same time and think creatively in each situation.

So, although I am nominally against capital punishment, and am not inclined to give a political system that authority, I am open to the fact that a situation might arise where I would feel it was necessary or advisable to kill someone. Such situations are rare, but they can and do happen. I try to judge each situation on its own merits rather than relying on some Absolute rule. This makes me (I hope) a thinking creature rather than a robot who lets others do his thinking for him.

Society would much rather have robots who simply follow rules. Thinking people are considered too unpredictable and dangerous...

The reason I am reluctant to give governments the official power of capital punishment is that they are unpredictable and dangerous, and are usually run by the immature and unscrupulous to boot. I trust myself. I don't trust governments, churces, or other such organizations.

- LH