I couldn’t agree more. Which is why I originally made that point in responding to the assertion in Qin Shi Huangdi’s post #3 that ‘not all “crimes” are deserving of the same punishment or are even “crimes” in the first place as in this case’.
If you want to make the claim that one act should be considered a crime while another shouldn’t, or that one crime should be considered a capital crime while another shouldn’t, you have to argue for it, not just assert it.
Very simple. The punishment should match the crime. Those who have taken others’ lives should have theirs taken away from them. Those who pose a threat to society by theft, robbery, violence, or rape should be confined.
Again, that’s not an argument, that’s an arbitrary assertion based on a subjective opinion of what constitutes “matching” a punishment to a crime.
Does this “match” apply equally to every case of first-degree murder? Murder with aggravating circumstances? Second-degree murder? Vehicular manslaughter? Says who?
If a sixteen-year-old new driver inadvertently runs a red light and takes the life of a pedestrian, do we send them to the chair? If not, why not? They took another’s life, after all, and that was the condition upon which you based your abovementioned justification for capital punishment.
You have to draw a line somewhere, and where you choose to draw the line is fundamentally an arbitrary decision. There are no objective criteria for determining which crimes deserve which punishments.
I was making a funny. Not a good one, perhaps.
So are you advocating moral relativism?
Do you have a response to the rest of what he said?
Nope, not any more than I’m advocating gravity, evolution or the second law of thermodynamics.
The fact is that specific moral judgements, such as penal laws concerning appropriate criminal sentencing, are inherently relative. Different individuals and societies naturally devise moral frameworks that have major differences among them. Our lack of a coherent and universal objective moral framework is just part of human nature, like it or not.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to prefer one moral system over another or condemn some aspect of a different system as immoral within our own moral framework. Resolving moral conflicts and working out consensus and compromises between different systems of morality is also part of human nature.
But we don’t get to pretend that our own particular moral choices are automatically objectively true, and that therefore we can be satisfied with merely asserting them instead of rationally arguing in favor of them. That’s intellectually dishonest.
Well to summarize my views, I believe my views firstly reflect the will of God as found in the Bible and that secondly clearly the West has been the most successful civilization/society in history.
Well then, there you go. That’s an argument in favor of your preferred moral framework.
To what extent it’s a rational argument may be subject to debate, but it’s a legitimate subjective defense of a particular moral view.
I am aware of what a strawman argument is. Your post for example.
What I attributed to Qin was that he believed treason should be a capital crime. I then said that I think treason and apostasy are equivalent crimes - they both represent somebody being convicted for an issue of loyalty to an idea rather than an action against any specific individual.
You have the wrong idea about what constitutes treason in America. Incidentally, that same definition conflicts with what Qin has stated he supports. Providing material aid and comfort to an enemy of the state is not a thought crime. The keyword is “material”. You have to DO something in order to be convicted of treason.
Yup. For example, in 2006 the first US federal indictment for treason since 1952 was issued against US citizen and al-Qaeda supporter Adam Gadahn, for acting as an al-Qaeda propagandist in recruiting videos.
AFAIK it isn’t known whether or how Gadahn may be participating in other ways in al-Qaeda terrorist activities, but the point is that just making the pro-terrorism videos for al-Qaeda is enough to count as treason.
Even if he personally never physically harmed another human being and never even participated in any planning or execution of terrorist plots, the mere fact of publicly advocating and encouraging anti-US terrorism qualifies him to be charged with treason, for which he’d be liable if convicted to a capital sentence.
That kind of treasonous activity is not the same thing as “thought crime”, and very different from a matter of individual religious belief such as apostasy. It’s not about just being “disloyal to an idea”, it’s about explicitly and actively encouraging people to express opposition to that idea in terms of violent action.
And what should be the punishment for refusing to accept a punishment? Because it seems to me that in the case of Nadarkhani, he was initially given a sentence which matched the crime: he was charged with apostasy, so he was asked to repent. It was only when he refused to do so that a more severe sentence was dealt.
You think apostasy should be a crime punished by the State?
This is an awful argument. I can’t tell if you think apostasy ought to be criminal or not. I believe Qin’s position (which I happen to agree with) is that being required to repent is an unreasonable sentence for any crime, and that it is unreasonable to criminalize apostasy. Do you disagree?
Of course not. I just suspect that Curtis’s logic is inconsistent and am challenging him to apply it to this case.
Except apostasy as others have pointed out shouldn’t be a crime at all.
When has he ever advocated the killing of people who converted from Christianity to another religion?
Please provide links.
Er… It goes back long before that.
Check out Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose, both of whom were propagandists convicted of treason by the US and the UK.
Anyway, he was guilty of treason for being an active participant of Al Quaeda, a group at war with the US.
Don’t worry, making YouTube videos isn’t enough to get someone spoiled white ass shot off.