Baptist views on the recent CIA Senate Report on Torture

[Sandy]

http://www.ethicsdaily.com/baptists-dif ... -cms-22328

Sometimes the writers for Ethics Daily get into a sing-song tone with flowery words that amount to not much more than "religious cliches". But on occasion, one of their younger writers sheds the churchy, stained glass tone and breaks out with a good comparison and analysis, and even gets beyond the snide resentment of all things SBC. This is pretty good.

Richard Land was tied, in many ways, to the Bush Administration, both indirectly as a staunch Republican partisan, and because of personal relationships. Al Mohler is a committed, Republican partisan. I imagine admitting that Dubya wasn't perfect comes hard, though to equivocate on an issue like torture to avoid being critical isn't a tenable position.

The United States represents a pretty high standard when it comes to the value of humanity, and respect for individual rights. But it is not perfect in that regard, nor has its elected leadership always followed its principles in carrying out its mission. We are, after all, the first, and still the only, country in the world community to have used a nuclear weapon to wipe out a couple of cities. And I honestly don't think we've ever thought much, collectively, about the morality or humanity of that.

The war on terror was a relatively new thing that exploded onto the scene for America on 9-11. And in a political atmosphere where everything was crafted to fit into the agenda of a high degree of partisan advantage, (including using the emotional reaction and political capital gained to attack, invade and remove a sovereign government from power that had nothing to do with 9-11) the administration pushed the intelligence agencies to work fast and gather as much information as they could to take out Osama Bin Laden. So mistakes were made, in procedure and in judgment.

It's a little bit disturbing to me to realize that there are those in the intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, and in a Presidential administration, who are willing to sacrifice the expressed principles and ideals of the nation, for the sake of simply following orders and doing their job. Do these people have no morals and principles? If they don't that's scary. And if they do, that's even scarier. And how much did the President know, and approve?

[KeithE]

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In short, the US government did it, we , the methods were abhorrent (rector feeding, etc...) and against the law (ours and international), we paid 2 psychiatrists $81M to give it cover and recommend approaches, it has done no good, and caused much bad (new hatred’s - e.g. ISIS).



Bush, Cheney and more should be tried in an International Court as war criminals. Obama should be charged with maintaining illegal detention w/o timely trials at Gitmo.

[Haruo]

I don't know which worries me more, that 49% of Americans support torture, or that 62% of white evangelicals do so.

[KeithE]

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

Or maybe some of them view it as a special form of ("tough") love: like the Apostle Paul said, "love your enemies by heaping burning coals on their heads"...

And they will spend all eternity in heaven with the demons, because the Bible says the demons believe...

[Sandy]

[Haruo]

In other words, they can't Repent.

[Haruo]

Which is reason enough to feel sorry for them.

[Sandy]

[Haruo]

Yes, I should have said "can't bring themselves to" rather than simply "can't".