Friday, April 22, 2022

The Evangelical Fantasy That Murder Alone Deserves Capital Punishment

Even though Genesis 9:6 and Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:12 and other places) both say to execute people for murder, evangelicals treat Genesis 9:6 as if it has more authority than the punitive laws of the Torah that Deuteronomy 4:5-8 teaches are meant for all nations to follow.  Then there are the repeated statements about how God's nature does not change, so it is only out of a selective emotionalistic or cultural admiration for some commands of the Bible over others that evangelicals treat murder as especially deserving of the death penalty--and even actively reject the idea that other Biblical capital offenses really deserve death at all.  That Genesis 9:6 attaches the death penalty to murder does not mean that the divine commands that come next would have lesser validity or no validity at all.

Evangelicals might just keep referring to Genesis 9:6 anyway, as if the moral obligations described in Genesis 9:6 and Exodus 21:12-14 are not supposed to both be derived from the same source, that source being God's nature.  There is neither a strictly logical reason nor a Biblical reason to think that capital punishment is only universally appropriate or obligatory as a response to murder.  When it comes to extra-Biblical facts, murder is nowhere near the worst thing a person could do to another human, so it would be logically impossible for it to deserve death without at least some things worse than it also deserving death.  When it comes to the Bible, it is clear that God is said to call for the execution of far more than just those who murder.

This is a conflict that arises when the evangelical desire to dismiss the Torah's capital and corporal punishment commands as somehow "irrelevant," despite them being tied to the moral nature of a deity that does not change (Malachi 3:6), meets the irrational belief that murder is somehow the epitome of cruelty or malice.  Most evangelicals believe both ideas, so they pretend like the Bible agrees with each one.  In truth, it explicitly contradicts both of them.  All that evangelicals tend to do is start with an emotion-based idea (that God would not want the other capital offenses of Mosaic Law to always be punished with death across all times and places) and then appeal to some pastor or author that concurs.  They are insects before rationalistic truths and they are generally ignorant of how the Bible even compares another capital sin to murder.

How ironic it is that Deuteronomy 22:25-27 specifically says that rape is like murder as it prescribes the execution of all rapists--even if murder had some special permanence as a capital crime according to the the Biblical texts and something like kidnapping or sorcery did not, Deuteronomy 22 would still bring capital punishment for rape alongside capital punishment for murder.  It is simply idiotic to believe that the Bible does not universally call for capital punishment for anything besides murder without actually reading the Bible and not making any assumptions, and it is idiotic to read the Bible thoroughly and still think it says to only execute murderers.  There is no refuge for these evangelical ideas except fallacies and errors.

There is nothing special about murder that leads to the Bible labeling it alone a permanent capital offense across geographical location and different eras of time.  According to Biblical morality, it does always deserve death, but this is because God's moral nature does not change, which would mean all other Biblical capital offenses also forever deserve death.  Murder is not even the worst Biblical crime assigned execution!  This is the same false premise from which evangelical launch their asinine ideological emphasis on eradicating abortion above all other sins, as they ignore far greater cruelties that people have to live with.  Killing the innocent is no small sin.  It is just not the greatest sin and so it is not the only one that deserves execution.

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