MR CHRISTOPHER SPENCER in his letter titled Consequences Of The Death Penalty (B’dos Advocate, October 25) set forth what he no doubt considers to be the most compelling reason to abolish capital punishment for murder namely “the possibility of the putting to death of innocent people”.
Mr Spencer may be interested to know that God, the intelligence and source behind the creation of life, the same God who instituted the death penalty for murder (Genesis 9:6), also demands of us that innocent people are not put to death for crimes they did not commit. As He said: “Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty”. (Exodus 23: 7).
God, the originator of moral law, demands that we make sure we make righteous judgments without abolishing what He has ordained, in this case the death penalty for murder. Of course, many people both within and without the halls of academia and jurisprudence do not believe that God ever instituted these laws since they don’t believe in God.
To them man is just an animal, the apex of a meaningless long line of lucky chance evolutionary processes, and moral law is just a human social construct which man can change at will as he sees fit. But if evolution is true and man is just an animal, what’s so wrong with executing one animal for slaying another?
After all, taking the evolutionary worldview to its logical conclusion, such feelings of the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment are just a matter of irrational human sentimentality, illusionary social constructs of the mind, without any objective absolute basis.
On the other hand, if biblical creation (which reveals God’s moral law) is true then again there is nothing wrong with capital punishment because God Himself has instituted it.
– ROGER MARSHALL
