Much ado about the death penalty lately... Some places want to reinstate the firing squad, which is interesting if only because one or more of the gun wielders can deliberately miss the target if they choose. And apparently prisons are having a hard time getting the proper chemicals for lethal injection because the manufacturers probably see that use of their products to kill people is bad press. But blood lust is strong in our correctional system and recently, unqualified prison personnel have made up their own formulas with disastrous results.
George Carlin pointed out that the "pro-life" - or rather anti-abortion - crowd is almost without exception, pro-death penalty. The inherent contradiction leads me to suspect the influence of military propaganda, after all they need a constant supply of expendables, don't they? If they kill people in Afghanistan, they're heroes, but if they kill someone here, it's off to death row. But this is another issue.
Let me say up front that I am personally opposed to the practice of state-sponsored executions. But it occurs to me that there is (if there's going to be a death penalty, and I can't imagine states like Texas and Oklahoma, with their preponderance of right-wing Christians, not having it) an easy solution to the problem of how to end the life of a human being by means of injection.
People overdose on narcotics all the time. A few years ago, a good friend of mine did this in Reno, and no one knows if it was an accident or a choice he made. Narcotics are cheap in a world where Viagra is $30 per dose and pills for Hepatitis-C cost $1000.00 each. Enough morphine or fentanyl to kill a two-hundred pound man would probably cost less than twenty dollars from any of the big pharma companies. They might not want the press either, but we're speaking hypothetically here. And the only conceivable reason prisons don't use narcotics on death row is that it might not be an unpleasant enough experience for the one being killed. This is the height of sadism, as if it weren't bad enough to kill the guy, they have to make it painful. Oh well, it's not as though compassionate individuals are drawn to careers as prison guards, officials and executioners.
You should refer to the death penalty as state sanctioned killing. question – can a Christian who walks in the footprints of Jesus condone state sanction killings?
I agree, Jim, but I preferred to say it a different way. As to people who “walk in the footprints of Jesus,” that can be said about precious few Christians.
I would say to the “Christians” who support state sanctioned killings you should read Romans 2 19-21