Blog in haste, repent at leisure

This is a wonderful passage. I agree completely with the spirit of it, but we are all liable to the sin of anger. I constantly find that when bad things happen to evil people, or to people who have done something really evil (or, sometimes, just really stupid) my first response is liable to be "Good." That's an emotional response, but I recognize that I need to try and move beyond that response.

Thank you for posting this.

Although I give you a hard time, you deserve credit for admitting mistakes and acknowledging missteps. Too many people in the blogosphere just write and write without reflecting. Instead of admitting a misstep, they try to justify it. You are always willing to reflect on comments that may have been poor judgment and admit you crossed the line.

Rod, thanks for showing us this side of you. It's too easy in the rough-and-tumble world of political blogging to forget that the writers of these opinions are human beings, first and foremost. Thanks for having the courage to remind us of this.

Thanks for the shout out to St. Nikolai Velimirovich. I have his Prayers by the Lake. The man knew what's what.

Thanks for sharing that amazing quote.

There aren't too many people in the blogosphere who have the face to come out and say something like this. Thanks for setting an admirable example.

Sally, I think you may be misreading Matthew 18:6 and the words of Jesus:
"If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a large millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned at the bottom of the sea."

Jesus is saying that it's better to suffer a horrific form of execution than to hurt one of the little ones. He's not saying "If you do this, I will punish you by executing you," and he's not saying "If someone does this, YOU should execute them." He's just observing that it's better to die horribly than to become a perpetrator of violence against the innocent.

Rod, thanks for the good quote and for the good example. It takes a big heart to say you were wrong. Compassion is a blessing, and I'm glad you have it. "Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy."

Sally, I don't think anyone has a problem with the idea of sometimes--regrettably--having to kill an attacker to save his victim. In this case, the victim was already dead. What some of us found objectionable was 1) not just accepting, but rejoicing that the perpetrator was killed, even though it didn't help anybody; and 2) asserting that if someone does a bad thing, it is right not only to wish him dead, but to go ahead and kill him.

What about some other scenarios? If I see a man beating a child, and the child isn't dead yet, do I have a right to pull out a gun and shoot him? If a man rapes a woman, does she have a right to kill him? If a man beats a woman, does she have a right to kill him? If two people get into a traffic accident, and someone is hurt or killed, do the passengers in that car have a right to decide that the other driver is responsible, then get out the tire iron and beat him to death? Does an abused altar boy have a right to shoot the priest who did it? I admit I find some of those possibilities attractive, but I think you're going to run into difficulties if you pursue this line of thought.

The legal rules about the justified uses of force are rather straightforward, and they are based on a moral judgement about intentions and necessities. The idea is that if one is reasonable in concluding that the use of force is necessary to prevent an illegal violent assault threatening death or serious injury upon oneself or another, one is privileged to use reasonable force to ward off the aggressor. There are ancillary rules relating to a duty to retreat in some circumstances if you can do so in complete safety, and rules relating to the use of force to defend one's home, and rules relating to when, if ever, the initial aggressor can use force in self defense. The basic idea is that the use of force is justified in defending yourself or another from an unjustified use of force by another. By "justified" we mean that we agree that it was the right thing to do; praiseworthy and not merely excused.

Applying these rules to the case of the man beating the child, it would appear that the shooting was justified, and would have been equally justified whether the shooter was an officer or a private citizen. This conclusion assumes that the officer who shot the man beating the child had no way of knowing that the child was dead at the time he shot the beater (if it is indeed the case that the child was already dead -- I hadn't heard this). I would guess from the facts I have read that the officer believed that the use of force was necessary in order to stop the beating and get the child some help.

Though I don't know the facts of the shooting of the person who had broken into the home, traditional legal rules of self-defense suggest that a homeowner is justified in using such force since there is an implicit threat of violence presented by breaking into someone's home.

Shooting someone in these situation is only "justice" in an ancillary or secondary sense, in that the proper intention of the defender is not primarily meting out "punishment", but is rather that one is trying to stop an evildoer from perpetrating an illegal and violent assault. But sometimes an appropriate act of self-defense or defense of others has the side effect or further effect of also meting out an appropriate kind of desserts to the wrong-doer. It was those kinds of situations I had in mind when I wrote that it's not wrong to feel some measure of satisfaction in such justified uses of force.

Several of the hypotheticals about the use of force proposed by sigaliris would not constitute proper uses of force in self-defense and therefore would not be considered justified. For instance beating someone to death after they had done something wrong is vigilantism and wrong, especially in a situation where there is a functioning justice system. Such violent reprisals are not considered legally justified, though in some circumstances they might be partially excused by charging someone with a lesser crime (for instance, voluntary manslaughter rather than murder) based on the provocation of the one who was killed.

Such acts of vigilantism are different from using force in pursuit of stopping or preventing a culprit from inflicting violence on another.

It's the loss of the soul that grieves our lord, and that has very little to do, it seems to me, with the justifiable loss of their bodily lives.

And the way one loses their soul is by choosing to do evil and refusing to repent or accept God's mercy. That is a tragedy. Being prevented from inflicting more violence on the defenseless is not a tragedy, even if the only way of bringing that about is by taking the life of the culprit.

Nor is calling someone a culprit or evil doer the same as calling them a scumbag. It is paying the culprit their due - this is what they chose to become, and pretending they are not culpable is denying them the dignity of believing them to be morally accountable agents.

This past week there was a story of Mugabe's thugs hunting down political opponents and savagely torturing and killing them. They arrived at one opponent's home and couldn't find the man. But they found his one year old baby. The mother of the baby was hiding but heard the men say "let's kill the baby". They took the baby and slammed him into the floor, shattering both his legs so that he will never walk again. Worse acts are done every single day. If someone had been there to protect that baby from these evil doers, would we really be wrong to rejoice that the evil was thwarted, even if it meant killing the culprits?

I don't think it's wrong to acknowledge that while, in some sense, all deaths are regrettable, some are much less regrettable than others. Death is certainly not the worst thing that can happen to you. Losing one's soul is much worse.

I think your initial reaction was the right one, Rod.

Four men rape an 11-year old girl, and then kill her by stuffing her panties down her throat (real case). I think they should all be executed, and I would take pleasure in their execution. I would consider their death to be life-affirming. (Whose life? The 11-year old girl that was raped and murdered. Her value and worth as a human being is vindicated by the execution of her murderers.)

On this matter, I agree with what John Derbyshire recently wrote here:
article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2ExYjAzYTkwNTFhNDZkNmQ5MzM4ZWY1ZGYxYjU5YjY=

His conclusion (after summarizing two recent murder cases):

"Capital punishment? I’m all for it. In fact — and I know, I’m a Neanderthal, avert your eyes please — if we were to bring back public execution for vile bezonians like these, I’d go watch. Heck, I’d take the family, and a picnic lunch."

As far as I know, Darbyshire has never claimed to be a Christian. Thus, his comment makes perfect sense. It's perfectly okay to rejoice in the death of your enemies, if you are a barbarian. There is much that's ridiculous in Christianity, from the barbarian point of view. Forgive your enemies? Insane! Turn the other cheek? What a stupid idea! Be kind to people who aren't going to pay you back? Absurd--you'll soon go broke that way. Respect the poor and the weak? Don't make me laugh--if they deserved respect, they wouldn't be poor. Care about some crazy unworldly religious ideals more than the opportunity to make a quick buck? Har de har har . . . what foolishness.

Being a barbarian is pretty straightforward. Everything for me and mine; nothing for you--unless there's something in it for me. Kill your enemies now--the only reason to let them live is so you can kill them more conveniently later. Trickery and deceit are great when it's our side doing it--punishable by death if it's your side. Women who belong to me are inviolable--your women are fair game. Focus on amassing great piles of wealth, or its abstract equivalent, status and power, which usually goes with wealth, because you can use your power to do other people out of their money. All you take with you into the next world is your reputation, so inflate it as much as possible. Worship a God who is much like me and will approve my deeds. Destroy everyone who doesn't worship my God--He will love me for it.

Being a barbarian is a time-honored and consistent philosophy of life--more conservative than Christianity, really. It makes more sense, too, in many ways. My natural inclination would have been to be a barbarian--though I fancy I would have been the more evolved type of barbarian, the kind with a little bit of magnanimity and the glimmerings of a sense of honor. Then I ran into this guy called Jesus who had a whole different outlook on things.

You can be a barbarian, and you can rejoice in the death of your enemies all you want. But why then call yourself a Christian? You need to make up your mind. I'm not minimizing the problem. Charlemagne struggled with it, like many other people. But Jesus did say you can't serve two masters.

Well, this discussion has gone rather far from the starting point. I do of course reject the barbarian perspective set forth by sigaliris. Nor would I bring a picnic to an execution, which I oppose in any case.

But if someone here claims that, had they been at the home of the political opponent in Zimbabwe where the Mugabe thugs were going to maim a baby in order to protect a tyrant, that they would weep tears if someone used lethal force to stop those miscreants, I would find it simply incredible.

I would have no problem praying for the souls of the attackers. But I would shed no tears for them - Indeed, perhaps they really did "need killing" in order to give their souls a chance to make it into eternal life. If I were that far gone that I could do such a thing, I could see it as an act of mercy to stop me from wreaking more havoc on the innocent by killing me.

I should perhaps make it clear that I don't consider you a barbarian, Sally, nor do I think that I'm morally superior to you or anyone else. I have the same violent feelings that many people here consider natural. It's just that, rather than rejoicing in them, I have come to see them as questionable.

For instance, retributivist, you use an extreme example to justify violence, and happy thoughts about violence. If I were to act on my own feelings, I would go farther than you do. As far as I'm concerned, any man who rapes any woman, any time, should be killed, and the planet would be better off without him. In fact, any man who ever strikes a woman should be killed at once. We need to eliminate abusers from the gene pool. You might find that extreme . . . but, you know, one person's extremism is another woman's "God-given instinct." Once you open the door to violence, you find yourself confronting many kinds of violence that are not the kind you approve in yourself.

But if someone here claims that, had they been at the home of the political opponent in Zimbabwe where the Mugabe thugs were going to maim a baby in order to protect a tyrant, that they would weep tears if someone used lethal force to stop those miscreants, I would find it simply incredible.

I would not weep tears. I would be satisfied that the Mugabe thugs got what was coming to them. But I would hope to guard against taking too much satisfaction, or even pleasure, in their deaths. I think it's the most natural thing in the world to rejoice when bad things happen to bad people. But I think we as Christians are called to a higher standard, as I constantly, constantly have to remind myself.

My mom used to say something when I was a kid, and we'd see something on the news about a criminal doing some horrible thing, or a drug addict, or a bum, etc. She'd say, "And to think that once upon a time, he was somebody's precious baby boy." Yes, it's sentimental to put it that way, but there's a point there. People don't come into this world utterly depraved (sorry, my Calvinist friends). Many people who turn bad later arrived in this world loved and welcomed. And for whatever reason, they slipped away. This is a tragedy.

There's a passage in Paul Fussell's WW2 memoir, "Doing Battle," in which he is creeping through a wood among the bodies of Nazi infantrymen. This was late in the war, when the Germans were drafting younger and younger men. He comes upon the dead body of a Nazi soldier, and the soldier was just a kid. As I recall, he was maybe 14. Fussell was struck by the utter waste of a kid's life. I'm sure he was not sad, really, to see the Nazi soldier dead. Certainly the Nazi would have killed him had he the chance. Still, it was a noble gesture to look upon the body of a man killed serving an evil government and a wicked cause, and reflect upon the deeper tragedy here.

Rod, your quote from your mom ("My mom used to say something when I was a kid, and we'd see something on the news about a criminal doing some horrible thing, or a drug addict, or a bum, etc. She'd say, "And to think that once upon a time, he was somebody's precious baby boy.") puts me in mind of a Roald Dahl short story about an anxious mother who has just given birth to a baby boy who is quite ill. She fears he may die because she has lost other children. Guess who this precious baby turns out to be?

J Dave G, I don't know if you were including my comments in your description of "typical conservative anger."

Of course, that's it. Just anger. No rationality, no objective thought. No consideration leading to a conclusion. Just an emotional knee-jerk reaction.

I used to think one way on the death penalty (as a liberal who wanted the death penalty abolished), and then I matured, gave it more thought, and came to different conclusions. I became a retributivist in part by reading Kant. I now support the death penalty for certain crimes whole-heartedly. I also am not troubled by cases in which a very evil criminal perpetrator dies in the course of committing his crime.

That's not "typical conservative anger," any more than the opposite perspective is "typical liberal bleeding-heartism."

"You said you are a Christian but nothing you have since said gives any indication that you take the claims of your faith seriously. "

Only in your opinion, according to your perspective. I take my faith, and the claims of my faith, very seriously. Nowhere in the Bible is there a command about what I must believe concerning death in general or anyone's death in particular. My faith is unaffected.

I'm curious, what do you think about these verses:

"And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him." - Genesis 38:7

"And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon." - Ex. 12:29

"Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour." - Ex. 32:27

"And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost." - Acts 12:23

I guess this will be my last post, as I don't think I've much more to contribute to this. But one last point - Rod, I take your mom's words to heart. But isn't the real tragedy that would break a mother's heart the fact that her son had so degnerated in his behavior towards others that he was capable of the kinds of horrors we've been discussing? The physical death of such a person seems kind of secondary to the tragedy in such cases. As the second vatican council says such actions that deny human dignity are a supreme dishonor to the creator, and those who perpetrate them do more harm to themselves than is suffered by their victims. They make themselves into moral monsters, which is really the worst thing that can be suffered by anyone.

It's a mystery as to why some go down that path where others resist, and I leave it to God to determine culpability. But that we can reasonably judge that the justifiable death of such a person is no occassion for particular sorrow seems to me to be compatible with Christianity as I understand it.

When you have to get out the theology and metaphysics textbooks to try to explain why the death of such a one should nonetheless be mourned as a kind of general principle, I think we've entered into a whole different discussion. And I think it also kind of proves the point - you don't have to explain to anyone why the death of a good or even neutral or morally flawed person should be mourned.