Torture, Murder, And Hell

The evangelical myth that murder is the worst interpersonal sin is one of the more asinine and destructive myths about behavior and morality that they have ever expressed.  I once had a conversation with someone, an evangelical, of course, who conveyed belief in the motion that murder is universally worse than all torture could ever be.  Thinking Christian theology is actually aligned with this, she attempted to show that the Bible supports it.  Her conclusion rested on the assumption that when the unsaved die, they will suffer in hell eternally, and thus torturing them while alive is better than murdering them and "sending" them to hell, no matter how severe the torture is.

Even if it goes unspoken or if some evangelicals have not put all of their beliefs and misconceptions about the Bible and general philosophy together to directly come to this, it is precisely the stance that either many evangelicals believe (and verbally affirm when questioned about the issue) or the one they would believe if they actually contemplated the different sides of the subject all at once.  There are numerous logical errors and even simply misunderstandings of actual Biblical teachings here, but the conclusion this woman put into words is far from uncommon in a theological community that often trivializes or ignores even the worst tortures that Mosaic Law so clearly condemns or excludes.

The irony of this is not only thinking that death itself could be worse than intense pain, when the truest death of nonexistence could not possibly be an objectively or subjectively worse fate than prolonged and vicious tortures, but that eternal torture in hell, which is not even what the Bible teaches most unsaved beings will receive in the first place, is what makes murder worse than all torture!  In other words, she said that torture in the afterlife makes torture less severe than death.  This is an utter, blatant contradiction that actually is indirectly based on the idea that torture really is worse than murder/death after all.

Beyond this inherent contradiction in this version of the idea that murder is worse than all torture (some torture is less severe, of course), there are multiple outright falsities in this.  Something like murder isn't more or less unjust to do to a Christian or non-Christian if it is truly wrong to begin with, but on what this person expressed, her own erroneous "justification" for why murder is worse than torture would not even apply to Christians anyway.  And what about the fact that the Bible repeatedly teaches not that the general unsaved from humanity will receive eternal conscious torment, but that they will eventually cease to exist, the punishment being cosmic death rather than endless torture?

That the Bible also specifically prescribes the killing of people who commit certain sins while universally prohibiting certain forms of torture already disproves the idea that murder is worse than torture: if killing people was the most heinous, unjust thing that could be done to them, it would always sinful by Biblical standards, but that is not at all what one finds in Mosaic Law.  Instead, murder is just one of multiple capital offenses and the forms of torture or physical punishment prescribed for certain crimes is so minimal or scarce that the American prison system of today is objectively harsher than anything demanded in the Bible.  The relationship between torture, murder, and hell is in no way what this other person said to me on the level of Biblical theology or even just the separate fact that murder cannot begin to rival the cruelty of most kinds of torture without torture itself preceding the murder