Ep 124 | The Christian Case for the Death Penalty

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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John Doyle (0:30)

One of the most interesting parts about being a Christian today is that every time you want to do something that must be done, people who aren't even Christian and, in fact, who base their entire national political project on being as offensive to Christianity and Christians as possible, they'll come out of the woodwork and they'll tell you, hey, doesn't the Bible say that you have to believe in freaking loving thy neighbor even if he's killed 13 US soldiers? Isn't that the freaking Christian thing to do? So it's always taking our faith and wearing it as a kind of skin suit to defang us and convince us that we're not allowed to basically do what must be done. And obviously, there's a lot of debates within the Christian community about the death penalty. The good thing is, however, we have a lot of precedent that we can point to to understand how maybe these other societies that were far more pious, far more reverent, far more Christian than we are, yet they were still killing people all of the time who deserve to die. Maybe they have a better understanding of actually how God wants us to treat these things rather than our very modern society.

Which rather than worshiping God, worships the dignity of human beings and so on as it's been explained to me. So we're going to get into all of that because I think that these people actually not only deserve to die, but must die in order for us to pay proper respect to the infinite value of human life. I know that sounds crazy, but trust me, we are tapping into wisdom that is beyond our comprehension. We will do our best to explain it. Do stay tuned.

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to The John Doyle Show. So as we all pretty much know by now, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has pushed to have Nadal Hassan publicly executed by firing squad and has added on to this that it should be live streamed for the viewing enjoyment of the public. Now, this has gotten a lot of people very upset. Archbishop Timothy Broglia, who oversees the spiritual care of Catholics in the US military, has urged soldiers not to participate in this. You also have pretty much the entire pre-Trump establishment coming out against this saying public executions are what freaking oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan have, maybe because they understand what's necessary to deal with these kinds of people, keep them in check. So we're going to get into all of it. We're going to get into the theological arguments, the historical arguments, and overall just why ultimately, this is a good thing that we definitely should do. But before we get into any of that, let me just present to you my basic argument, my basic arithmetic on why we should be killing criminals far more often, far more expediently and far more legally and coolly, which is to say, without all of these dubious appeals that just cost a lot of time and money, if we agree that human life has infinite value, which I agree with, first of all, then it is the case that the only way to make right the wronging which occurs by having taken innocent human life is by killing the person who took that life in the first place. Because if you come into my house and you kill me or something, if we assume that my life has infinite value and we give you a sentence of 25 years to life or something, maybe even life in prison, we are now saying that whatever value my life has could actually be quantified by your remaining 50 years, 60 years, 70 years or something. So that's not quite an infinite value. That's actually assigning you an actual numerical year value, which is supposed to be justice, supposed to be justice for me and my having lost what is supposedly of infinite value. We're all supposed to agree on that. Moreover, because everything is so libtarded anyway, and all of this conversation is flavored by talk of rehabilitation, your sentence probably won't even be actually life in prison.

It'll probably be something closer to 25 years, maybe life in prison, but with possibility of parole, so you get out with good behavior. Maybe the charges are dismissed because you're found to be insane or something, or because some liberal activist group comes in and tries to tamper with the DNA sample and make it look like you didn't even freaking do it. There are all of these things at play, which ultimately mean that if you go and murder somebody, it is unlikely that your sentence is going to be equal to the number of years of that person's life that you robbed. You understand what I'm getting at here? If we actually believe that human life had infinite value, and so when you murder an innocent person, you have now taken from the world something of infinite value, the only way to approximate writing that wrong would be to take your life from you. It's to say, we can never repair what has been stolen. We can never bring it back. We can never make the balance sheet squared, but we can try. We can get close, and the only way that we can get close is actually taking from you something that is, of course, of infinite value, which is your life. That is the only thing we can do that can approximate justice. Anything less than that, 25 to life, slap on the wrist, anything less than that basically says human life doesn't actually have infinite value. It has very quantifiable value, which is 25 years, a slap on the wrist, maybe nothing at all if your skin is the right color. We can actually quantify the value of human life. That is what our current justice system is saying. And as it would turn out, it's only when we want to, I don't know, actually live in a way that reflects that maybe human life does have value that is beyond our comprehension. And because of that, we should treat it as so, just as societies of days past have. It's only when we want to do that that all of a sudden these people come out and pretend human life has infinite value. What are you doing? You can't kill a criminal. They have a kind of indignation behind their speaking, that they never extend to the murder victims themselves. They concede, dude, yeah, of course, murder is wrong. Of course, terrorism is wrong. I mean, who wouldn't agree with that? But then they go out of their way to use all of their influence and all of their power to basically make it as easy as possible for terrorists and murderers and so on to continue living live their lives as they would, without any kind of consequence. So that's like the basic argument, I guess, that if we actually believe human life has infinite value, we should be treating it as something very, very, very serious, and not just basically be trying to assign some arbitrary value to it, where it's like, you killed somebody 20 years, you killed somebody, but maybe you were really freaking mad, and it made you insane five years, mistrial, and so on. It's just totally dishonest. But getting, I guess, more into the theological weeds, I, of course, have to deal with this quite a bit from Catholics, because what's in the Catechism says that the death penalty is no longer permissible, because the dignity of the person is not lost, even after the commission of very heinous acts that perhaps would warrant the death penalty and also new understanding of, I guess, the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Also, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which do not definitely deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption. So it says then the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person and that the church is therefore working for worldwide abolition of it. Now, none of this is technically dogmatic teaching, and all of it is very new. This was only added to the catechism in 2018 by Pope Francis. But maybe, maybe we could look back a little bit. Maybe we could look at another Catholic authority. Maybe someone you might want to have pints with, wink, wink, Thomas Aquinas, right? Aquinas himself is officially the angelic doctor of the church because of what he wrote in the Summa Theologica, which was still unfinished at the time of his death in 17, or sorry, 1274 But Pope after Pope has regarded this particular text as like the single greatest theological work after scripture itself. And it's pretty much the gold standard for Catholic thought. And he wrote about just about everything you could ever think of ever. It's structured in a really fascinating way too. Everything starts with objections to what he's going to say. Then he lays out rebuttals, goes through everything and so on. You may even recall my own series I used to do, Refuting Every Argument Against Blank. That was sort of a love letter to Aquinas, wasn't it? Kind of a pale imitation of what Aquinas was doing.