Amazing How Often People Give Away the Game and Make Clear What Torture is Really About

Whenever you hear somebody say that torture is not as serious as abortion because it’s inflicted against evil terrorists and not innocent babies, remember that what they are really saying is that the purpose of torture is punishment, not information gathering, and we can be sure that the people we are punishing are guilty. In one of the more spectacular feats of intellectual compartmentalization they will say this at the very same time they will tell you that we have to torture people in order to find out what they know so that we can be safe (by which they mean “We have to torture people in order to find out if they are people who deserve to be tortured.”). Again and again, people who argue this way simply never seem to consider the reality that when you torture people to find out what they know, one of the things you often find out is that they knew nothing and were innocent people–and that you have now just committed a sin which places you in danger of the everlasting fires of hell if you do not repent. They also fail to grasp that when you commit such a sin (or make excuses for it) but don’t, you know, *repent* of it, you actually complicate your sin with further sins of the intellect that will only make your damnation surer if you don’t repent.

And that’s why I’ve fought this sort of stuff on my blog for years.