# Mother sets fire to her daughter's gloating rapist

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mother-sets-fire-to-her-daughters-gloating-rapist/487363>\
**Category:** The BBQ Pit\
**Created:** [February 25, 2009, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mother-sets-fire-to-her-daughters-gloating-rapist/487363 "2009-02-25T14:27:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 250

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**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\
**Post date:** [February 27, 2009, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mother-sets-fire-to-her-daughters-gloating-rapist/487363/250 "2009-02-27T21:36:43Z")

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> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#):
>
> How on Earth do you reach this conclusion?

I examined my moral sense.

> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#):
>
> Please share with me your logic.

I’ll try.  
I believe that the taking of another person’s life is the worst thing anyone could do, morally. I also don’t think anything anyone does, however evil, can make them not human, as is often stated here so vehemently.

I am also aware that there is a natural instinct to self defence, to react violently to immediate threat. However, I think it is possible to subsume my instincts to my moral sense.

I do not rape every woman who gives me a hard-on, for instance.

So, anyway, I have made the choice not to return violence with violence. For both philosophical (game theory, in this case) and religious reasons, I do not believe it accomplishes as much as is lost in the act.

> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#):
>
> By those lights, the evil and violent will inevitably become masters of the earth\*\* (well, more so than they are already)\*\*.

I bolded that bit because it’s the truth, and has been as long as we’ve been civilised.  
The world is bound in chains of violence, or the threat of violence, which we mistakenly call Law, and Order. I believe _true_ order comes from within, and it is only when we, as a collective, master our instincts for violence and greed, that we will progress beyond the fetters of imposed order. I do not believe this will happen in the forseeable future, but in addition to “Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”, Gandhi said something that I believe is even more profound - “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” I try to live by this - I try to be a better man than the one that strikes me.

Yes, I know, “only because violent men stand ready to defend me blaah, blaah…”. My only answer is that I didn’t ask them to, and I would practice as I do even if they didn’t do that, and I have in the past, when the violent men were on the other side of the whip. I still have the scars to show for it, too.

And can I politely ask that we leave any hypotheticals about my wife or kid being raped out of any further discussion, if there is any? That always seems to happen when I declare my pacifism here. Ditto for the Holocaust, which, yes, I would not have killed _anyone_ to prevent. Done anything else in my power, but not killed.

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