No, not recently. I'll try to take the time to read through those threads.
For curiosity, have you been reading my theonomy posts?
Regarding the whole "only the radical libertarians" will enter the gate, a similar thing was brought up at Eric Peters Autos: http://ericpetersautos.com/2014/12/1...comment-544496 "David" is my username. Moleman is coming close to arguing the position that only libertarians are Christians.
Just an FYI: 1. My answer to my own poll question is probably "yes", though its an exceedingly reluctant "yes." 2. The more reluctant someone is, the less quick I'm going to be to judge them. You, frankly, are not the type of person I was considering when I made my OP, even if you techncially qualify. You're against legal torture and you agree that its almost always wrong. There are a lot of people who support legal torture and who think at least some of what was in the Senate Report was morally permissible (At least at my school there are, admittedly, my school is pretty "conservative"). I much more had in mind the neoconservative who says "torture is always justified against terrorists if there's a chance to save even one life" than I am a generally peaceful person that reluctantly says they could justify torturing someone if it meant saving their family, or something like that.
OK, so in that situation you're almost dealing with Hiroshima and Nagisaki again (not as it actually occured, but what most people think of it as.) Fair enough... Still distressing.... I'm not sure what that says of those people who actually think these were all ticking time bomb situations.
First, I said that I only view it as being acceptable in a ticking time bomb situation, when millions of Americans would die if nothing was done. I doubt if that ever occurred, and I'm not defending anything that was done in the program. I think a better way to phrase it would be in such a situation, both choices would be evil. The choice of using torture would be evil, and the choice of doing nothing and allowing millions of Americans to die would be evil. You would then be left with the choice of deciding what the lesser of two evils would be.
Do you think it would ever be moral to let someone die of hypothermia in a cold cell? Do you ever think it would ever be moral to break someone's legs and force them to stand for hours or days? Do you ever think it would be moral to consecutively waterboard someone 183 times? Is your only issue with this the potential for abuse, or do you understand that there is something deeply immoral about this?
I agree. I'm not one of these people defending the CIA torture program and what went on during that.
There's something sickening and inhumane about about what was described in the CIA report. Killing someone in self-defense when they are trying to shoot you isn't comparable to that.
Torture is always inhumane. No one should ever want to torture anyone. But in the example that I gave, if a man's son was kidnapped, and the man came across someone who knew where his kid was, I don't believe it would be immoral for the man to torture that person in order to get information about where his son was. It wouldn't be any different than killing in defense of others, in my opinion. I believe that killing is almost always wrong, but not always. I believe that torture is almost always wrong, but not always. I also haven't seen any verse in the Bible which says that torture is wrong in every single situation.
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