The Death Penalty should be applied equally to all ages

commonsense · Sunday at 6:53 PM

JudgeRightly said:
Let's be clear here.

The system we have currently is NOT the system I am advocating.

I am not defending the modern prison state. I am opposing it.

OK, fair enough.

JudgeRightly said:
The punishments God authorized are restitution, corporal punishment, and death, depending on the crime. Pointing to America’s bloated incarceration rate does not refute my position. It refutes the prison-heavy, bureaucratic, sentimental mess we have now.

Correct me if I'm wrong (haha), so you want to follow the bible for punishments called for for various crimes. You are calling for death for murder, adultery, incest, blasphemy, sabbath violations, striking parents etc. Seems a little harsh. And corporal punishment would entail what? Public lashing? Flogging? I don't think you're going to get a lot of public support for such measures though. Would you be willing to water down biblical pronouncements... you know, go along to get along?

JudgeRightly said:
They are also socially destructive. They mix lesser offenders with hardened criminals, degrade them, harden them, and then dump them back into society worse than before. In many cases they function less like justice and more like state-run breeding grounds for further criminality.

That's true.

JudgeRightly said:
My point is that refusing to punish grave evil appropriately teaches the wrong lesson, sets a bad precedent, and corrodes society over time.

A just system reduces crime so effectively that such cases become extraordinarily rare to begin with. The goal is not that children would often need punishment, but that the social order produced by equal justice would make such cases almost unheard of.

It's quite interesting, the tension between the different scripture writers, some who emphasized the justice and retribution of God, versus those who emphasized the merciful nature of God.
You can find a verse in the Bible to support almost any point of view.

Nick M · Sunday at 7:01 PM

annabenedetti said:
You make sense to me!

I have no doubt.

JudgeRightly · 2026-05-04T02:55:52-0400

commonsense said:
OK, fair enough.

Correct me if I'm wrong (haha), so you want to follow the bible for punishments called for for various crimes.

Essentially, yes, with important caveats.

Unlike Arthur, however, I’m happy to actually explain those caveats rather than just wave around ‘common sense,’ emotion, and current custom as though that settles anything.

You are calling for death for murder, adultery, incest, blasphemy, sabbath violations, striking parents etc. Seems a little harsh.

Some of those yes, others no.

Let's back up a moment, so we have a better frame of reference, because otherwise you’re just throwing a pile of laws together with no distinctions.

The Mosaic law is not a random pile of commands. It contains moral principles, civil case laws, and symbolic or covenantal ordinances tied specifically to Israel.

I am not arguing that every penalty found under Moses is mechanically transferred wholesale into modern civil law with no distinctions.

The question is which civil principles reflect enduring justice for human society as such.

For that, the core civil standards are things like murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness as a window into motive. Those are foundational to any civilized society because they protect life, marriage, property, truth, and social order.

By contrast, things like blasphemy and sabbath violations belong to a different category, because they were tied to Israel’s covenantal status in a way that is not identical to ordinary civil administration now.

At bottom, the law is not arbitrary. It is the golden rule expressed juridically. It tells you not only what you may not do to others, but what justice requires when someone has done those things.

So to answer your question, things like murder, rape, incest, adultery, would indeed result in the death penalty, and in the case of adultery, for both participants.

And corporal punishment would entail what? Public lashing? Flogging?

Yes, actual corporal punishment.

The biblical standard is proportionate justice: eye for eye, hand for hand, life for life.

It's not cruelty, but a restraint on cruelty. It keeps punishment proportionate to the offense instead of letting the state either indulge in excess or dissolve justice into sentimentality.

So yes, flogging would apply to many crimes, such as assault. Scripture builds in restraint. Even the forty-lash maximum shows that biblical corporal punishment was not open-ended brutality, but justice bounded by restraint, literally by God's merciful command.

So if, in the commission of a crime, you caused an innocent person to lose an eye, the punishment would correspond to that injury directly. The point is measured justice, not sadism.

I don't think you're going to get a lot of public support for such measures though. Would you be willing to water down biblical pronouncements... you know, go along to get along?

That is just an appeal to popularity.

Whether a law is fashionable has no bearing on whether it is just.

And no, I would not water down divine justice to make it more palatable to a crowd. “Go along to get along” is precisely how societies lose the moral courage to punish evil at all.

That's true.

And that point alone should already tell you that the prison-heavy system you appealed to earlier is not a serious refutation of my position.

It's quite interesting, the tension between the different scripture writers, some who emphasized the justice and retribution of God, versus those who emphasized the merciful nature of God.

There is no contradiction there.

God is not a one-dimensional Being.

He is loving and merciful, and He is also just and wrathful toward the unrepentant wicked.

The tension is not in God nor in His word, but in man’s tendency to redefine mercy as indulgence and justice as cruelty.

Mercy does not mean pretending evil is less evil than it is. And justice does not mean the absence of compassion. In Scripture, both belong to God’s holiness.

You can find a verse in the Bible to support almost any point of view.

Well, you can rip verses out of context and twist them to support almost any point of view, sure.

That does not mean the Bible supports all those views. It simply says more about what people are willing to do with Scripture than about what Scripture actually teaches.

Scripture gives a man the rope he needs either to pull himself out by truth or to hang himself by twisting it.

The real question is not what people can make isolated verses sound like, but what the Bible actually teaches when read rightly.

Arthur Brain · 2026-05-04T14:05:34-0400

JudgeRightly said:
No. I got it only after several pages of evasion, and even now you are still hiding behind the same caveat rather than defend it.

Calling it “common sense” does not prove it is either common or sensible. It is just another label doing the work of an argument.

Then start arguing rationally instead of appealing to sneers, revulsion, and crowd reaction.

This is exactly the sort of non sequitur I have been talking about.

A five-year-old not competing with adults at the Olympics does not tell you where moral or legal accountability begins. Physical development and criminal accountability are not identical categories, and pretending they are is just another dodge.

Again, appealing to what “the West” currently does is not an argument. Men make laws, and men are perfectly capable of making bad, inconsistent, cowardly, or sentimental laws.

No, the abstraction is in your standard.

“Sufficient development” is vague, movable, and undefined. That is why you keep repeating it instead of defining it.

You keep saying “science” as though that settles a moral and legal question. It does not. Pointing to development does not tell you where accountability begins, what degree of understanding is sufficient, or why your preferred threshold is anything but arbitrary.

You are pleading for an exception. That is exactly what you are doing.

You already admitted the general rule: letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent.

Now all you have left is insisting that your preferred exempt class somehow does not create the very problem you already admitted exists.

Thank you for proving my point.
If different countries draw different lines, then your supposedly scientific threshold is not actually giving you one clear moral standard at all. It is a sliding social convention, dressed up after the fact with scientific language.

Back to the same bad analogy. Running a sprint and bearing criminal guilt are not the same issue.

Again, irrelevant. You are comparing athletic capacity to moral accountability as though they were interchangeable. They are not.

No, your “legitimate point” has been to keep counting downward until people flinch.

That's emotional escalation, not reasoning.

A five-year-old is an extreme but still plausible hard case. Your move is to flee from that hard case into younger and younger absurdities because you still do not want to defend your exception on principle.

Because crowds react emotionally to hard cases.

That tells us something about crowds. It does not settle the truth of the principle.

And this little pile-on from Commonsense does not help either:

No, it is not hard to nail down at all. The answer has been stated plainly. You and Arthur just do not like what it implies.

Vlad has already answered you directly:

And then even more plainly:

That is not “slippery” at all. It is direct.

What is actually happening here is that the answer has been given, and you just do not like it. So instead of engaging it, you keep counting downward... five, four, three... hoping that if you push the age low enough, revulsion will do the work that argument has failed to do.

You're just manipulating, not responding reasonably.

No. You conceded the rule and attached your preferred exception to it. That is still a concession of the rule.

It did give me pause for thought. That is why I kept pressing the principle while you kept appealing to revulsion.

And once again, no one is arguing that infants should be executed. That's just your absurd caricature.

The rape gang scandal in Britain is public knowledge, not a social media myth. Your refusal to engage it does not make it disappear.

Right, because repeating “sufficient development,” “common sense,” and “science” is easier than actually defending the exception.

Thank you for admitting it is ridiculous.

You keep escaping into ridiculous examples because the hard case actually on the table is harder for you to evade.

You can underline it, bold it, italicize it, or put it in all caps. It still will not turn your exception into a principle.

And here again you retreat to infants, because you still do not want to deal with the actual principle under dispute.

You are the one insisting on an age-based exception. So yes, the burden is on you to show where Scripture makes age the determining principle in the administration of justice for capital crimes.

All I have to do to prove my universal principle of "put murderers, rapists, etc., to death" is quote the verses that say as much.

You, on the other hand, have to show from Scripture why we should not do what God commands in a whole class of cases you want exempted.

Instead, you keep appealing to revulsion, current law, and neuroscience buzzwords, because you still have not produced a biblical principle for your exception.

You stated that letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent. That is the rule. Denying that you stated it does not change the fact that you did.

Yes, we all saw earlier. That is where you conceded the rule and then have spent the rest of the thread trying to avoid the implications.

Love is the comittment to the good of someone. Punishing criminals is good not just for the victim, but for the criminal as well.

So invoking love does not help your case. Love is not sentimental indulgence, and it is not the shielding of grave evil from consequences. You keep speaking as though love and justice pull in opposite directions, but they do not.

Refusing to punish grave evil is not love in any serious sense. It's just moral softness masquerading as virtue.

No, emotion is not the antithesis of reason. But in your case it keeps displacing it.

A hard case provokes revulsion in you, and instead of disciplining that reaction with principle, you keep treating the reaction itself as though it were the argument.

My premise is that punishing criminals appropriately keeps crime to a minimum across society.

Are you suggesting that that isn't a good effect?

Because they do bolster it. Hard cases test principles.

No. The solution, which you seem incapable of making the connection to, is to punish crime appropriately so that crime is deterred so effectively that such edge cases, such as children raping other children or even younger children try to kill adults, become virtually nonexistent, and if they do occur, they are vanishingly rare, to the point of being unheard of.

Under a just system, the point is not that children would often need to be punished. It's that they would almost never be in a position to commit such crimes in the first place.

Yeah, I'm not wading through this whole bunch of self impressed verbiage piece by piece this time thanks. I'll pick up on a few bits and remind myself that even that much is a waste of time.

What crowd am I supposedly appealing to on here nowadays JR?! anna and commonsense? I'm not making any argument for 'waves from the peanut' gallery, this place was once a thriving and bustling forum to be a part of until the clowns took over and now it's not even a faint shadow of what it once was.

The "caveat" and context is obvious and you don't have to be a professor of neuroscience, heck, you don't need to have even studied it particularly, to understand that in much the same way that a child of five is underdeveloped physically, the same goes for mental development, it's bloody obvious...

You prattle on about me reducing the age as if that could ever help your position in the first place. It's not me with an untenable position to start with...

Oh, and the stuff with rape gangs marauding and Biblical support for your thread premise? Well, provide the evidence for the former so it's not hyperbole and with the latter, live up to that insufferably pompous username of yours, do the math and then figure out why there isn't any.

Or, smugly self congratulate yourself on being a mod who would have been kicked off these boards years ago for advocating the stuff that you do nowadays with impunity (much like ICE funnily enough)

I miss this place when there was self admitted conservative bias but not bat crap crazy city as it's unfortunately become...

JudgeRightly · 2026-05-05T04:09:54-0400

Arthur Brain said:
Yeah, I'm not wading through this whole bunch of self impressed verbiage piece by piece this time thanks. I'll pick up on a few bits and remind myself that even that much is a waste of time.

That's a convenient way of saying you can't answer it.

The "caveat" and context is obvious

Then it should be easy for you to defend it.

But you still have not.

You keep repeating the caveat as though repetition turns it into a principle. It doesn't.

and you don't have to be a professor of neuroscience, heck, you don't need to have even studied it particularly, to understand that in much the same way that a child of five is underdeveloped physically, the same goes for mental development, it's bloody obvious...

No one disputes that children are less developed than adults.

What you still refuse to show is how incomplete development gives you a clear, objective, and non-arbitrary basis for exempting an entire class of offenders from the rule you already admitted: that letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent.

You prattle on about me reducing the age as if that could ever help your position in the first place. It's not me with an untenable position to start with...

You keep reducing the age because you're trying to provoke revulsion, not defend your exception.

That's been obvious for pages.

Oh, and the stuff with rape gangs marauding and Biblical support for your thread premise? Well, provide the evidence for the former so it's not hyperbole and with the latter, live up to that insufferably pompous username of yours, do the math and then figure out why there isn't any.

On the biblical point, the issue remains simple.

I can point to passages commanding that murderers be put to death.

You're the one insisting on an age-based exception.

If you want to say my view lacks biblical support, then show where your exception gets its authority. Otherwise, be honest that your standard is coming from somewhere else entirely.

As for Britain, hand-waving at “hyperbole” is not engagement. The scandal is public knowledge, and your refusal to deal with it does not make it disappear.

Or, smugly self congratulate yourself on being a mod who would have been kicked off these boards years ago for advocating the stuff that you do nowadays with impunity (much like ICE funnily enough)

I miss this place when there was self admitted conservative bias but not bat crap crazy city as it's unfortunately become...

Saying I should have been kicked off years ago isn't an argument. It's just an admission that you'd rather the position be suppressed than answered.

And complaining about how the forum is run does nothing to answer the issue either. It just confirms that when your exception can't be defended, you retreat into grievance, revulsion, and venue complaints instead.

You still haven't defended your caveat as a principle. You still haven't shown that your exception rests on any clear, objective, non-arbitrary standard.

All you have left is ‘it’s obvious,’ ‘it’s science,’ ‘people would be revolted,’ and ‘you should be banned.’

You have no argument.

All you can do is retreat.

The wicked flee when no one pursues,But the righteous are bold as a lion.

Bible Gateway passage: Proverbs 28:1 - New King James Version

The Righteous Are Bold as a Lion - The wicked flee when no one pursues, But the righteous are bold as a lion.

www.biblegateway.com

Arthur Brain · 2026-05-05T14:01:08-0400

JudgeRightly said:
That's a convenient way of saying you can't answer it.

Then it should be easy for you to defend it.

But you still have not.

You keep repeating the caveat as though repetition turns it into a principle. It doesn't.

No one disputes that children are less developed than adults.

What you still refuse to show is how incomplete development gives you a clear, objective, and non-arbitrary basis for exempting an entire class of offenders from the rule you already admitted: that letting the guilty escape punishment sets a bad precedent.

You keep reducing the age because you're trying to provoke revulsion, not defend your exception.

That's been obvious for pages.

On the biblical point, the issue remains simple.

I can point to passages commanding that murderers be put to death.

You're the one insisting on an age-based exception.

If you want to say my view lacks biblical support, then show where your exception gets its authority. Otherwise, be honest that your standard is coming from somewhere else entirely.

As for Britain, hand-waving at “hyperbole” is not engagement. The scandal is public knowledge, and your refusal to deal with it does not make it disappear.

Saying I should have been kicked off years ago isn't an argument. It's just an admission that you'd rather the position be suppressed than answered.

And complaining about how the forum is run does nothing to answer the issue either. It just confirms that when your exception can't be defended, you retreat into grievance, revulsion, and venue complaints instead.

You still haven't defended your caveat as a principle. You still haven't shown that your exception rests on any clear, objective, non-arbitrary standard.

All you have left is ‘it’s obvious,’ ‘it’s science,’ ‘people would be revolted,’ and ‘you should be banned.’

You have no argument.

All you can do is retreat.

The wicked flee when no one pursues,But the righteous are bold as a lion.

Bible Gateway passage: Proverbs 28:1 - New King James Version

The Righteous Are Bold as a Lion - The wicked flee when no one pursues, But the righteous are bold as a lion.

www.biblegateway.com

Gordon Bennett, I don't need to reduce the age from five, it's so obvious why we have laws that reflect mental development and take such into account where it comes to accountability (and lack thereof) for crime(s). It shouldn't even need to be explained at all and it certainly doesn't need defending against what are effectively just a bunch of whacked out musings from yourself. I reduce the age to underscore just how inconsistent (as well as absurd) your position is. Even you aren't stupid enough to argue that babies should be held accountable for crimes and yet the title of your thread is that the DP should be applied to all ages. So why not? if it's absurd to hold a new born accountable for their actions then consider why our respective laws don't hold five year old's to the same standard as adults. Never mind the "revulsion" side for the present - although obviously that comes naturally to most people.

You admit that five year old's are less developed than adults (not that you have any choice in the matter) so why should they be held to the same standard? Common sense should tell you why, they might be more developed than a newborn baby but in much the same way as a five year old hasn't reached anywhere near the peak of physical maturity, nor have they developed to any such a degree mentally. It really is that simple. That's why no civilized country would enact any of the type of laws that you posit. Because they're insane.

Unless the Bible is supposed to lay down the transparently obvious at every given turn, it should be obvious that any verse where it comes to crime/punishment applies to those who have reached an age of accountability where they can be held responsible, In other words, not young children. So either find a verse that specifically supports your contention or concede that there isn't one. The onus was and still is on you for that.

Britain is not a island of marauding rape gangs JR so either find a link that isn't from social media or don't.

I'm not saying you should be banned. I'm pointing out that when this forum was in its heyday that you would have been. A conservative site this has always been and upfront about it but it wouldn't tolerate bat crap crazy and from any side of the aisle. Frankly, I'd rather any extreme views are allowed to be expressed so that they can be confronted, torn apart etc.

Frankly, why we have the laws we do and not ones aligning with your own ideals is darned obvious. Sanity. That's why we don't let five year old's create laws funnily enough. And I had to laugh at your last. You consider yourself as bold as a lion? Did you type that with a smug, self righteous grin on your face. Please....

VladtheDestroyer · 2026-05-05T15:02:53-0400

Arthur Brain said:
Britain is not a island of marauding rape gangs

Britain is an island of marauding rape gangs

JudgeRightly · 2026-05-05T17:16:46-0400

Arthur Brain said:
Gordon Bennett, I don't need to reduce the age from five, it's so obvious why we have laws that reflect mental development and take such into account where it comes to accountability (and lack thereof) for crime(s).

"Obvious" is not an objective standard, and it is certainly not textual warrant.

You keep asserting the exception. You still have not justified it.

It shouldn't even need to be explained at all and it certainly doesn't need defending against what are effectively just a bunch of whacked out musings from yourself.

If it does not need defending, then defend it.

So far all you have done is repeat that your exception is “obvious,” “common sense,” and “scientific.” None of those tells us where the line is, why it is there, or why it is anything other than assumed.

I reduce the age to underscore just how inconsistent (as well as absurd) your position is.

No, you reduce the age to provoke revulsion.

That is why you keep counting downward instead of defending your exception on principle.

Even you aren't stupid enough to argue that babies should be held accountable for crimes and yet the title of your thread is that the DP should be applied to all ages. So why not? if it's absurd to hold a new born accountable for their actions then consider why our respective laws don't hold five year old's to the same standard as adults. Never mind the "revulsion" side for the present - although obviously that comes naturally to most people.

Again, you are trying to smuggle your conclusion into the premise.

No one disputes that a newborn and a five-year-old are different. The question is what clear, objective, non-arbitrary principle you are using to convert developmental difference into legal exemption.

So far your answer is still just: “it’s obvious.”

That is not a standard.

You admit that five year old's are less developed than adults (not that you have any choice in the matter) so why should they be held to the same standard?

Because developmental difference is not itself a legal principle.

That is the part you keep skipping over.

You have not shown how “less developed” yields a clear threshold for accountability. You have only assumed that it does.

Common sense should tell you why, they might be more developed than a newborn baby but in much the same way as a five year old hasn't reached anywhere near the peak of physical maturity, nor have they developed to any such a degree mentally. It really is that simple. That's why no civilized country would enact any of the type of laws that you posit. Because they're insane.

Physical maturity and criminal accountability are not identical categories, and appealing to what "civilized countries" currently do is still just an appeal to consensus.

Calling your own position "sanity" does not make it a principle. It just means you are borrowing social approval where argument is lacking.

Unless the Bible is supposed to lay down the transparently obvious at every given turn, it should be obvious that any verse where it comes to crime/punishment applies to those who have reached an age of accountability where they can be held responsible, In other words, not young children.

No. The issue is textual warrant.

If Scripture states a rule, command, reason, or judgment, we are not justified in carving out unstated exceptions unless Scripture itself gives us warrant to do so.

Silence is not warrant. Compatibility is not warrant. Discomfort with the rule is not warrant.

When God says, "You shall not murder," and commands that murderers be put to death, I have textual warrant for the general rule.

You are the one asserting an age-based exception.

So where is your textual warrant for the exception?

You do not get to insert “except for the young” into the text and then call it obvious. That is eisegesis, not exegesis. That is you importing a standard from outside the text because you prefer it.

So either find a verse that specifically supports your contention or concede that there isn't one. The onus was and still is on you for that.

No. I have textual warrant for the rule: put murderers to death.

You are the one asserting the exception.

So again: where is your textual warrant for the exception?

Britain is not a island of marauding rape gangs JR so either find a link that isn't from social media or don't.

That is just caricature in place of engagement.

The point was never that Britain consists of nothing but rape gangs. The point is that Britain has had a very public scandal involving rape gangs, weak enforcement, and institutional cowardice.

Minimizing that does not answer it.

I'm not saying you should be banned. I'm pointing out that when this forum was in its heyday that you would have been. A conservative site this has always been and upfront about it but it wouldn't tolerate bat crap crazy and from any side of the aisle. Frankly, I'd rather any extreme views are allowed to be expressed so that they can be confronted, torn apart etc.

That is still not an argument.

And it is not even a very good claim about the rules.

Under the older TOL rules, the site explicitly distinguished between advocating lawful government punishment and advocating criminal activity or vigilantism. The example given by Nathan was that saying “the government should execute murderers” was allowed, whereas personally advocating execution outside the criminal justice system was not.
Thread 'ARCHIVE:The 16 commandments at TheologyOnLine (OLD)' https://theologyonline.com/threads/archive-the-16-commandments-at-theologyonline-old.33/

The 2009 rules and the current rules likewise bar advocating criminal behavior, while also reserving broad discretion to moderators in how they enforce the rules. In other words, your complaint is not really that my position violates the written rules. It is that you dislike the position and would rather see it suppressed than answered.
Thread 'The NEW-UPDATED 10 TOL Commandments' https://theologyonline.com/threads/the-new-updated-10-tol-commandments.9648/
Thread 'The Current UPDATED TOL Ten Commandments' https://theologyonline.com/threads/the-current-updated-tol-ten-commandments.59431/

So no, waving vaguely at some imagined golden age of the forum does not answer the argument. It just confirms, once again, that when your exception cannot be defended, you retreat into grievance about the venue instead.

Frankly, why we have the laws we do and not ones aligning with your own ideals is darned obvious. Sanity. That's why we don't let five year old's create laws funnily enough.

Again, "sanity" is not a standard. It is just a congratulatory label you attach to your own assumptions.

And nobody argued that five-year-olds should create laws. That is another non sequitur.

And I had to laugh at your last. You consider yourself as bold as a lion? Did you type that with a smug, self righteous grin on your face. Please....

No, I cited a proverb because it fit.

And judging by how quickly you retreated from principle to sneers, venue complaints, and tone-policing, it fit rather well.

The Death Penalty should be applied equally to all ages

commonsense

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Bible Gateway passage: Proverbs 28:1 - New King James Version

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