I do not hate anyone.
People that I cannot stomach though are a different story.
As I have diaried before I *cannot stand* when Christian fundamentalists use my religion, Judaism, to support their twisted ideology. I wrote a diary about abortion on this very topic.
Now I came across uncle Pat using what he calls the “Old Testament” and which I call.. the Bible, to support the death penalty.
When asked if the bible supported the death penalty he of course turned to the “OT” as the basis for his answer and said how not only is the death penalty OK but that the “bible” says parents can kill their disobedient children.
I know that Israel has no death penalty and I tried to square this with Uncle Pat’s words.
What he fails to realize is that Judaism does *not* have a huge history with the death penalty and in fact looks at it with unease. Why? Since Jewish law is NOT just made up of the “OT” but consists also of the oral Torah and the Talmud.
The Talmud on the DP:
The rabbis who wrote the Talmud created such a forest of barriers to actually using the death penalty that in practical terms it was almost impossible to punish anyone by death…
...throughout the Talmudic literature, this whole subject is viewed with unease, so much so that according to the rules stated in that literature the death penalty could hardly ever have been imposed.
Yes the death penalty occurred but their were so many barriers to its use it was never usually done.
...capital cases had to be decided by a Sanhedrin of 23 judges. If the conviction in a capital case was unanimous, the accused was acquitted. Perhaps most onerous of all, the offense had to be witnessed by two people who warned the perpetrator immediately prior to committing the act that it was a capital offense. Such stringencies are often understood to account for the famous Mishnah passage that states that if a Sanhedrin executed one person in seven years, it was considered destructive. Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah objects that the standard is actually once in 70 years, and Rabbis Tarfon and Akiva say that had they served on the court, no one would have ever been executed.
So although on the surface it might seem that the Jewish religion is pro-Death Penalty if he actually *studied* what he seems to preach he would realize the folly of his ways.