5 Responses to “Evening Links”

1. #1 |  cramerj |  January 2nd, 2008 at 7:30 pm

   Sounds like your dream people graduated from guantanamo bay the way they torture rats with sleep deprivation etc.
   very american

      --1
2. #2 |  David |  January 2nd, 2008 at 9:45 pm

   The National Motorists Association issues a $10,000 challenge: They say better engineering of intersections will do more to cut down on accidents than red light cameras.

   Ah, but then the argument will be that better engineering and red light cameras will really minimize accidents.

      +1
3. #3 |  MikeT |  January 2nd, 2008 at 11:20 pm

   The thing is, Radley, the Bible actually has a more humane approach to law and order than America does in many respects. I’ll give you a few examples:

   1) Under the Mosaic Law, you cannot be put to death without two credible witnesses.
   2) It was Jewish custom, backed by biblical legal principles, that anyone with any evidence or good argument in favor of the accused could, at any time, present their case in order to exonerate the accused. Quite simply, there was no such thing as evidentiary rules that prohibited entering exculpatory evidence or arguments.
   3) Both covenants teach mercy toward the repentant where possible.
   4) The Mosaic Law has a very powerful defense against malicious charges: the accuser will face the full punishment, no matter what it is, for the crime they knowingly falsely accused an innocent person of. Under the Mosaic Law, Allgood would be executed for murder with the way that he behaves because his actions, if they resulted in an execution, would be labeled as “murder by proxy” under the Mosaic Law.

   The fact is, there are a lot of good things we can and should draw from the Bible’s approach to law and order for our secular system. If you want to terrify women like the one who recently made headlines in Britain for serially falsely accusing men of rape, just add into every state’s law the Mosaic law on false charges. If you want to discourage prosecutors from being zealous, bring the standards of evidence closer to the Mosaic Law from what they are today.

   The people you ought to be wary of, and rightly so, are the “Christians” who think that “pardon” is a dirty word. These people are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

      --1
4. #4 |  MikeT |  January 2nd, 2008 at 11:23 pm

   Another thing, if you added the law on false charges to the books, you’d bring the War on Drugs crashing to a halt because of the number of police and informants who’d face criminal charges. The charges would stick this time because, if we were to once again draw from a biblical principle, any private citizen could bring charges in a court for preliminary hearing from a judge.

      +1
5. #5 |  Jeff |  January 3rd, 2008 at 11:17 am

   The unfortunate part, MikeT, is that the conservative Christianists have, in lefty and many libertarian minds, so tainted the idea of drawing inspiration from the Bible that such things are going to be dismissed out of hand by anyone who cares about maintaining our secularity. Which is really too bad. So until people realize that a government can take inspiration from the Bible and still be secular, good luck with that argument.

      +0

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