Thank you Matt for this thought provoking contribution.
I do not have the time right now to follow up all the references you give us, but will certainly endeaver to do so. Do you think we should make this a topic for one of our future Albert Schweitzer Days?

Hi Matt...

I saw this on DVD, not the play, but like you, I was deeply moved by it. I'm not totally sure how Reverence for Life applies in this case but would love to know as there are nine of my fellow Austrailans currently on Death Row in Bali for drug smugling.

Which raises another question in my mind. We speak of Reverence for Life in terms of people who (rightly or wrongly) are on Death Row for the crimes they have (or have not as the case maybe) committed, but what about Reverence for Life for the victims of their crimes,  their families, friends, their community and society at large? Why must the majority be punished for the actions of the few? By this I mean  things like having my bags searched at the airports, tighter restrictions on travelling internationally and the like.

Having said that though, I am glad that my country (Australia) no longer uses the Death Penality and hasn't since Ronald Ryan was hung in Melbourne in 1967. (There was some doubt over Ryan's crime and he later found totally innocent  of the crime that led to his death.)

This is very personal for me as I lost two very close friends in the 2003 Bali Bombings and had two friends badly injured in the London Bombings. I'm all for respecting live as Doctor Schweitzer has written but sometimes I wonder what these people are thinking when things like this happen and things like this show how little human life and life in general means to some people.

Sorry for the ranting and raving everyone. This is just my opinion. I hope it makes sense and no-one is offened by it. I would love to hear anyone else's viewpoints on it.

Megan.

Thanks for the reply Matt but I think I'll exercise my right to agree to disagree with you on it.

What you say makes perfect sense to me but as I said, this is a very personal issue for me based on the reasons given previously. You mentioned Jesus' teaching of loving one another as yourself, but what about the teaching that states "eye for an eye....tooth for a tooth"? I'm not saying we should use this as a reason to punish people, but what about the victims of crime as well as those who commit them? You said that you find it easy to forgive even the most henious crime, but I wonder if you'd feel the same if you or someone you loved were the victim of that crime. Could you honestly say you would feel the same? I know I wouldn't...

Like I said, I think we'll have differing opinions on this Matt, which makes the world a more interesting place don't you think?

Megan

I'm all for forgiveness and turning the other cheek Matt, but there are some crimes that just cannot be forgiven. Maybe this means I don't believe in Reverance for Life as strongly as I thought I did..

I have been privileged to work at the Sydney Jewish and Holocuast Memorial Museum which is one of three museums in the world to have suriviors working as guides (the other two are Yad Vashem in Israel and New York's Holocaust Museum). One of the guides there is Lottie Weiss...the youngest person to go into and come out of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp...a lady I'm proud to know and call friend.

She was 11 years old when she saw her family slaughtered in front of her and was subjected to the brutallity of the Nazi Regime. I asked her once if she ever wanted revenge against the German People for what happened to her and her family. She smiled and said "Revenge will only make me as bad as them."

How can you tell me that the Nazi's deserve forgiveness? I'm lucky enough to say that the only wars I've ever seen are in movies and on television, although I am currently researching a book on my Great Grandfather who was on the Western Front in World War I. Maybe this makes me a little naive. Who knows?

I agree with Lottie's thoughts about revenge making us as bad as our enemies...but how can we forgive those who took 6 million innocent lives just because they were different to them?

Maybe I'm drawing a long bow comparing  those on Death Row to the Nazi Party, but don't the innocent victims of crime and war deserve someone to stand up for them too? Guess I shouldn't care so much because it happened 35 years before I was born and I'm not even Jewish...but if I don't...who the hell will?

Edmund Burke, a scholar and historian of the time said (and I'm paraphrasing) "The only thing needed for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." I guess the world's current situation is a case of good men doing nothing to prevent the mistakes of history being repeated. I mean, we all know how the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials ended up don't we?? Show trials so the world could see that "justice" had been done...

I truly believe there is no such thing as justice in our world, which is a rather pessamstic view for a 31 year old woman to have. But sadly it's the truth. There is far too much corruption in the world for me to believe that true justice can be done. Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe being a case in point.

Hope the interviews go well for the documentry Matt. It sounds very interesting. Like you said, if you can change one young person's life from a life of crime to something worthwhile, it will all be worth it.

Sorry for the long winded rant. I hope it makes sense as it is way past my bed-time and I'm seeing double as I type it.

Megan

The absolutely amazing thing is: that the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Mugabes, the Napolions of this world have always - so far anyway, - been a passing phase: - a storm in an otherwise tranquil sea. Of course, for those caught up in such storms the evil may seem all-pervading and there will appear to be no escape.
Yet they remain isolated storms. It could be otherwise. The balance is overwhelmingly on the side of LIFE, - as yet.   Why is that?
Because, as Schweitzer says, -each spring the meadows are greened again with the renewed vigour and life of each individual blade of grass, and each generation's youth are filled again with new idealism and hope.
Evil or Ignorance is as much part of life on this earth as darkness and they will always be with us; but Reverence for Life says that Humanity will eventually outgrow the need for the death-penalty, as it has outgrown the need for the concept of slavery.
The best defence for the victims of evil is the removal of the environment in which it flourishes and the acceptance that only love can dissolve it.

When considering capital punishment, we must first consider the whole process of justice as a whole, do we not? Do we accept that the trials are in fact ethical and honest? If you were tapped for a trial, would you do your duty to society? Or, would you seek a way out? Are trials honest and the best way to determine the facts regarding the criminal behavior of an individual?

Much has been written regarding the reliability of eyewitness testimony. And what about the trial activity, is there a reliable method of testing the jury’s attention to detail? Have you personal participated in a trial? Would you be comfortable in sentencing an individual to death? Could you live with the idea that if you voted to take the defendants’ life that you have made the correct decision? Personally, I was part of a trial, not a capital case, but a trial, nonetheless, what I saw made me question the jury trial efficacy. Without, veering too far off the subject, what I witnessed had less to do with the facts of the case and much more to do with the prejudice, my fellow jury members brought in the jury room.

While I will agree that I have no alternatives, readily at hand, I would suggest that as civil society we be very sure of the consequences of our decision process. Standing outside and looking in at a trials should be made mandatory for all before we continue the process. For once the switch is thrown there are no chances to correct a wrong decision.

If you can be so sure that the proper individual has be identified and correctly tried, are we any better for taking this person life then the defendant in taking their life? Do two wrongs make a right? As a child I am sure at some point in your life someone asked you regarding a desire you had if “Johnny, did such and such would you join in?”  Does the justification of the Biblical law of an eye for an eye make any more sense today then it did when it was first proposed?  

Are we seeking justice or are we seeking vengeance?

Hi Matt,

I'm a seminarian training for the Catholic priesthood. The Catholic Church has been the most vocal and public defendant of the basic right to life of each person in modern times, this basic tenet of our faith reaching its zenith under John Paul II who personally expended untold wells of his own emotional and spiritual energy appealing for an end to the barbarian practice of capital punishment. Very often this was expressed via his personal intervention in particularly unjust or pointless cases in the US, whereupon he would phone, write to, and generally harass in a public manner both Presidents and state governors alike.

No one can question the Church's commitment to the defence of life.

I liked your post, yet I was disturbed to see your reference to utilitarianism as a possible source for defending a penal response to murder. Utilitarianism ought never to be referred to on any grounds as a defence for *anything*. It is without a shadow of a doubt the most amoral false logic man has yet asserted in the pantheon of philosophical pursuit. It rests on a notion which denies the fundarnetal liberty at the heart of....the human heart!

It is perfectly admissable, for example, to present an argument that the greatest public or societal utility lay in murdering (by capital punishment) Jesus Christ. It is also not beyond a warped genius to argue that apartheid served a greater utility by sustaining the most powerful economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Utility can even be used (and the likes of Marie Stopes virtually do) to argue that the ending of life in the womb serves mankind as some form of perverse altruism; that mankind has progressed his society by making the ending of human life easier and quicker. In simplest form, utilitarianism is the philosophy of facism and can be disproved with simple questions such as - if 10 million Europeans would live more comfortable lives if 2 million elderly Europeans were gotten rid of, would that make their murders justified? The obvious answer is actually "Yes", according to Bentham, Mills et al. Utilitarianism is absurdly attractive when defending easily defended positions but if you ask a person "would murdering Hitler in 1939 have been a good idea?" they are most likely to answer "of course". When the answer is always actually "no". Without human life as the sole absolute in this world there is no basis for human society. And the disappearance of this most blindlingly obvious fact is how we've ended up having astonishing 'debates' about the right to end one's life on the NHS!!! We have now officially crossed the line from sanity to hysteria. We've clearly not paid attention to the disasters 'assisted suicide' has unleashed in Holland.

The most fascinating reading on the notion of crowd mentallity can be had in the biblical scholar Girard, who essentially says whenever the majority calls for blood you can be sure that something isn't quite right about the prosecution's case.

I personally don't think the Church has gone far enough - I think that our already tight set of criteria need to be tightened so that what the catechism of the RCC calls "a virtual impossibility" (a justifiable execution) should become a plain impossibility.

Capital punishment is worse than murder. A jury of twelve calm, collected, well-fed individuals sits in a room, drinks coffee, chats about a case and then decides (again, nice and calmly) that a fit response to an attrocious action is to take away that person's very existence. This is far worse than any gangland killing, psychopathic slaughter, act of self-defence or other form of murder could ever be. And woe betide the state or government that inflicts such a decision making process on that jury. It is beyond belief that the US, regularly billed as the most publicly Christian nation in the west, cannot see the woods for the trees- they speak of a Christian duty to take life when Jesus himself said "You have heard it said 'an eye for an eye', yet i say to you that if a man strikes your cheek turn the other one to him also". Wasn't it Gandhi who wrote "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".  

St Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, once wrote a priceless description of the difference between Justice and Mercy:

"In the courts of the mortal world one admits one's guilt and is then condemned. In the court of the Lord, one admits one's guilt and is immediately set free."

No to utilitarianism (no matter what!), and yes to liberty!

Best regards and the peace of the Risen Christ to you all,

David.