Worse Than Murder

Murder is often cited as one of the first examples of a major misdeed--and perhaps even as the most severe.  According to some, there is no greater offense than murder.  They right to life is said to be the most important human right by such people, as if painlessly murdering someone is as disrespectful to the victim's humanity as torturing them for months or years.  As a number of hypothetical and actual examples affirm, there are forms of abuse that show far more disrespect for their victims than even casual murder does.  Even on a subjective level, while different people might find death preferable to different things, there is likely something that every person would find more atrocious than mere killing.

Some tortures are more depraved than it is even possible for simple murder to be.  This is why it is always more heinous to inflict certain kinds of tortures on evil people than it ever is to inflict simple murder upon innocent people.  The act itself, not the recipient of the action, is the largest factor in determining the morality of an action; only after the nature of the act is accounted for does the identity of the victim become an important factor.  An evil act is not always more or less evil when an evil person is its victim.  In some cases, such as when some call for unbiblical tortures in the name of "justice," there is no more depraved motive or deed than those associated with torture.

In light of these truths, it is asinine when a society tends to use something like a murderous shooting as an example of the absolute greatest evils a human can commit.  Such a person either lacks a thorough understanding of the true extent of human cruelty or willfully ignores it.  Malice, sadism, and selfishness can lead to acts that would make many victims plead for death.  Reason and experience can reveal to everyone that there are things far more brutal, degrading, and cruel than murder in its basic forms (such as murder by gunshot).

If even a single kind of possible treatment of a human is any worse than simple murder, it follows that the "right to life" spoken of by so many conservatives is not the most important right humans have.  It is important, but it is not of the utmost importance.  Indeed, it is far from the most important right affirmed by the Bible, as there are many examples of greater sins that the Bible directly condemns, such as making someone a lifelong slave against their will (Exodus 21:16), torturing someone with certain methods for days or longer (Deuteronomy 25:1-3), or violently raping someone over and over (Deuteronomy 22:25-27).

The point is not that murder is a trivial offense.  On the contrary, Biblical ethics takes murder so seriously that it, like several other equal or greater crimes like kidnapping and rape, is assigned the death penalty.  Nonetheless, it is true that murder, unless it is coupled with things worse than murder, is nowhere near the most degrading thing one person could inflict on another.  Two things can be heinous to the point of meriting capital punishment without having an equal severity.  On this, reason and the Bible agree.  Sins are not equal, for they do not all violate obligations that possess the same importance, and it takes more cruelty to torment people in psychologically and physically devastating ways than it does to simply murder them.