The death penalty

The US military SEALS unit shot Obama Bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist, self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 World Trade Centre attack.

One interesting point to me in both the basis of this mission, and the aftermath, was this: it seems that our Western leaders do believe in capital punishment, after all. They do believe that their are some crimes that are so heinous that the perpetrator deserves to forfeit his life. They do believe that justice requires death in some cases, after weighing up all other considerations involved. They do believe that the punishment of the evil-doer, and the protection of society, requires that some people be killed by the state, and that there are no considerations of compassion, restoration, rehabilitation, etc., which should let those people off the hook. Indeed, they apparently believe that such acts of justice are even to be celebrated and praised. They believe that a state can have the moral right to execute its citizens (or even in this case, another state's citizens).

In other words, they apparently believe with historic Christianity has believed and taught, based upon the Bible, all this time; even whilst the schools of thought that these leaders follow were continually repudiating the same teachings as barbaric and antiquated.

As I say, all very interesting.

Seems to me that our leaders are once again proving that rejection of the Bible and its truth must always be a selective enterprise. Because this is God's world, and because the matters of justice and our consciences really do exist in the way the Bible says (and not the imaginary way that atheistic and secular humanism wants them to be), that when it comes to it, we have to go back to the old ways. When crunch cases like Bin Laden arise, people have to admit, like it or not, openly or not, that the Bible's ways are needed after all. The problem with modernism/humanism is that it can't be lived out consistently. Real problems come up, and the supposedly nicer, pleasanter, kinder ways of humanism are so obviously unfit for the job that we have to drop them.

Modern states, even for murder, take the view that the basic aim of justice is to reform and rehabilitate the offender, and around 15 years in a prison undergoing corrective programmes is the maximum even the most hardened or outrageous of criminals should face. But faced with a Bin Laden, it seems we must temporarily forget all that and return to acknowledging justice requires the man be removed from the earth, forfeiting his life so that society can keep its life. The reality of sin is that the choice must be made; if we choose to give life to those who hate life, then society will eventually reap the collective harvest of death (as indeed the West is doing). Those who hate life and those who love it cannot remain together in the long term, and to love life sometimes it is necessary to choose the death of those who have shown that they love death. That is justice, and everyone gets what they love. That's what the Bible teaches, and it seems after all that our leaders deep down know it. The main flaw of their god-lessness as a practical program is: it doesn't work.