[net.religion] Capital punishment, abortion, sacredness

carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (11/11/84)

[] 
[Note:  Thanks to Ken Montgomery for making the long-overdue point that
conception, like any other biological event (birth, death, whatever), is a
*PROCESS*, not an instant.  There are NO sharply defined boundaries in
biology, and in particular, there is no determinate boundary between
individuals.  I'll save this topic for a later posting.]

Tom Albrecht writes:

>In the case of capital punishment, God's law requires that an individual
>should forfeit his/her own life for taking another's life for the exact same
>reason, i.e. humans are created in the image of God and therefore human life
>is sacred.  

   It is a complete confusion to assert that taking human life is wrong
because human life is "sacred" and that we must execute the murderer because
he has lost his own sacredness, as the quotation above seems to imply.  The
opposite of "sacred" is "profane", not "defiled", "unholy", or "evil".
Emile Durkheim wrote in his classic *The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life*:

	"All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present
	one common characteristic:  they presuppose a classification
	of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into
	two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two
	distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words
	*profane* and *sacred*....

	"But if a purely hierarchic distinction is a criterium at once
	too general and too imprecise, there is nothing left with which
	to characterize the sacred in its relation to the profane except
	their heterogeneity.  However, this heterogeneity is sufficient
	to characterize this classification of things and to distinguish
	it from all others, because it is very particular:  *it is
	absolute*.  In all the history of human thought there exists no
	other example of two categories of things so profoundly 
	differentiated or so radically opposed to one another....[T]he
	sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived
	by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between
	which there is nothing in common."

	[~300 pages further on, Durkheim discusses the ambiguity of the
	notion of sacredness:]  "Religious forces are of two sorts.  Some
	are beneficent, guardians of the physical and moral order, dispensers
	of life and health and all the qualities which men esteem....On the
	other hand, there are evil and impure powers, productive of 
	disorders, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege....

	"Between these two categories of forces and beings, the contrast
	is as complete as possible and even goes into the most radical
	antagonism....But while these two aspects of the religious life
	oppose one another, there is a close kinship between them.  In the
	first place, both have the same relation towards profane beings:
	these must abstain from all contact with impure things just as
	from the most holy things.  The former are no less forbidden than
	the latter:  they are withdrawn from circulation alike.  This shows
	that they too are sacred....There are two sorts of sacredness, the
	propitious and the unpropitious, and not only is there no break
	of continuity between these two opposed forms, but also one object
	may pass from the one to the other without changing its nature."

Thus there are two polarities or dimensions here, sacred/profane and
pure/impure (clean/unclean).  The Mosaic Law is full of prescriptions of what
things are to be regarded as clean and unclean and how they may pass from
one category to the other.  Menstruating women (Lev. 15) and the Devil are
examples of beings who are at once sacred and impure.  

   The life of the murderer on Death Row is, if anything, *more* sacred than
that of the law-abiding citizen.  The murderer is certainly impure, but his
death serves the sacred purpose of expiating an outrage to the conscience of
society.  The sacredness of a being has nothing to do with whether it is
right or wrong to kill that being.  Human life may be sacred:  this says
nothing whatsoever about whether abortion, murder, or capital punishment are
right or wrong.

   While we're on the subject of the meanings of words, here's another word
that gets bandied about a good deal in abortion debates:  The platform on
which Ronald Reagan was reelected states that all appointees to the federal
judiciary must respect the "sanctity" of human life, or some such phrase.  I
watched pro-life Rep. Henry Hyde (R, IL) wriggle and squirm as he tried to
avoid answering the question of just what does that all-but-meaningless
phrase mean.  Obviously the drafters of the Republican platform intended the
phrase to convey to the religious right that appointees to federal
judgeships would oppose legalizing abortion, oppose Roe v. Wade, etc., while
at the same time giving pro-choice groups little of substance to attack.  A
fine example of Newspeak.  Now, back to the English language.  "Sanctity"
means either "holiness of life" or "sacredness"; I suppose it is the latter
that people have in mind when they speak of the "sanctity of human life",
and so this merely takes us back to the problems associated with the concept
of sacredness.

   Concerning capital punishment, attempts to justify it on the basis of a
system of moral beliefs generally lead to the following bizarre logic:

   1.  Killing another human being is the worst crime anyone can commit.
   2.  Therefore anyone who kills another human being SHOULD BE KILLED.

Put another way:  wrong + wrong = right.  It does not make any sense at all.

   My conclusion from all this:  Advocates of capital punishment should be
shot.  No?  Let me try again:  People should think carefully about the
meanings of words before using them to arrive at momentous conclusions.

				Richard Carnes
				ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes

"Think!  It ain't illegal yet."  (11/10/84)