Let’s Clarify Torture

Update: See below.

You can ramble on for days about official definitions, provisions, and every other semantic weaseling you like, but we all know what torture is. Any honest definition includes using fear, repulsion, hatred, pain and other highly emotional manipulations of captured or detained people.

As always, I don’t apologize for basing such declarations on my religious faith. Crucifixion was a form of torture which everyone knew was fatal. If simply executing the prisoner was the purpose, there are far more efficient ways to do it. We go on and on about humane procedures for ending life in animals, and it’s patently illegal in just about every place on earth I’ve visited to torment them for any reason. But somehow it’s our policy to treat captured enemies so badly no one wants to describe it in plain terms.

Bad as all that may be, the person administering the torture has to be someone you’d never want to meet. What happens when someone finds it “okay” to torture for any reason? Here’s that religion thing again: Demons enter their souls. They become demon-possessed, literally possessed by demons. There’s a plethora of studies in human behavior science showing people capable of torture are broken, bent and have entered far into the realm of “abnormal” — they are sick, dangerously psychotic — by conditioning to which they voluntarily submitted.

Let’s pretend I had a much beloved pre-teen daughter. Let’s further pretend she was captured and held by a band of nefarious terrorists, and we had managed to arrest one. Would I sanction terrorizing and torturing this man to get the information on her location for a rescue? No. If she were my daughter she would know that, too. She would know any society which finds it must torture to gain anything worthwhile, that society is already doomed, dead, and hopeless. If I permit torture, the demons enter my soul. If I rescue her by torture, the demons enter her soul. You cannot do God’s good work using Satan’s methods. God calls torture “sin”. I’d rather my daughter suffer and die and go to Heaven than let demons take over her life on earth, and mine, along with whomever we commission to do that torture. I’d certainly rather take her place in a heartbeat, but the cost to the rest of humanity is just too high for my personal wishes to take precedence over everything else. I loved my own daughter all her life; love her still. I love other humans, too.

Life isn’t worth much when you slam to door on God. Don’t comprehend that value system? Then it saddens me to inform you Satan is your God, and Hell is your eternal destiny. The real battle in this world has nothing to do with any political division between humans. That’s just background noise, and any nation which tortures is doomed, already under the judgment hand of God. America is already dead.

Addenda: I’ve been challenged on my assertion Scripture forbids torture. There are several websites, all of which reject the authority of Scripture in the first place, which collect a laundry list of places where beating is mentioned, burning with fire, stoning, and the favorite is King David’s treatment of the Ammonites. Mention is not necessarily approval. It’s easy to take stuff out of context and twist meanings when you refuse to honor the source in the first place.

Without making this overly long, let’s dispatch most of it. King David made numerous huge mistakes. They were mixed in with some pretty smart and heoric moves. We aren’t permitted to know the full context of why he treated the Ammonites so poorly, but we should assume in the historical context he conquered them, then judged their “crimes” and executed their leaders. It is highly unlikely he slaughtered peasants, since no one did back then, unless they were evil and nasty — sort of like the Amonnites had been with Israel. Chances are he was not aiming at terrorizing innocent folks, but executing judgment on the guilty, even if it does seem grisly to our modern Western sensibilities (which generally defy Scripture, anyway). It’s possible he went too far, but the context doesn’t say.

Executions are executions. Grisly ones are reserved for exceptional violations. Jesus was tortured in the sense He committed no crime by any just standard. The Jewish leaders were utterly wrong. Beating is not torture if the punishment is deserved according to standards elsewhere in the Law. Beating someone to make them talk is torture. The general rule of dealing with enemies is covered by David’s son, Solomon, in Proverbs 25:21-22:

If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; for so you heap coals of fire on his head. And the Lord will reward you. (NKJV)

There is nothing to take out of context there, because that portion of Proverbs is a list of epigrams and wise sayings, many quite unrelated to each other. However, we can surely see that an epigram is meant as a starting point for discussion, and expansion of the principle was expected.