The paradox of killing a psychopath

reply to post by shushu


According to your bizarre spiritual understanding.

As someone who has looked everywhere - within Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all more or less agree that the afterlife state is determined by the choices one made during his/her life.

The basic principle of the other world is this: If any act accorded with the absolute nature of reality, which is oneness, and love (since love is an expression of oneness) than you are living within the sphere of divine truth. Conversely, if you breached that oneness through selfish acts, whether something as great as murder, theft, etc, or smaller, such as gluttony, hatred, jealousy, greed etc, such energies leave their imprint on your soul and are experienced by the deceased consciousness following death.

So a murderer is punished by his own actions when he dies. Do not worry about that; all religions agree on this. Renowned philosophers like Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon, go into an interesting delineation of how this process works - which more or less adheres to traditional mystical thinking (for instance, in the Kabbalah)... If you're interested, I'd recommend "understanding Islam" by Frithjof Schuon, or "the essential Rene Guenon", although other books by the above two authors discuss this subject.

If the concern is punishment, than of course, keep the person alive, and torture them for the remainder of their lives. But punishment is not the reason behind the death penalty. The first reason is obviously to remove society of a diseased part; A healthy organism cannot survive and thrive if one of its members is diseased. Secondly, there is a metaphysical law of equivalencies. One action has an equal and commensurate reaction. A murderer who murders with forethought forfeits his life. The instance he decided to take another life, he agreed that if caught, he would lose his own. Now imagine the kind of reduction in fear of a criminal who murders in a country that doesn't impose the death penalty, verses one that does? I imagine the former would think twice, and would be wary of the much more serious consequences, than the latter, who would probably be unperturbed by the prospect of life imprisonment - which in any case becomes a surrogate world for the criminal which will provide him or her the norms experienced in the outside world.

reply to post by dontreally


You're projecting. That's not what I said at all. But thanks for your feedback just the same.

If death were delivered as punishment after judgement... then why do you suppose Hitler committed suicide??? Was it an admission of GUILT resulting in self-inflicted punishment... or was he just trying to escape the consequences of his actions??? Think carefully, now... you've got the entire world's attention here.

Originally posted by dontreally


No society can work that way; for one, people would take advantage of it, and two, but most importantly, the blood of the deceased, their memory, cries out for justice. The one who takes a life in cold blood, forfeits his life. This is such a simple, and completely logical idea, and it astounds me that people - mainly due to mindless liberal propaganda - oppose it.

It's not logical because two wrongs don't make a right. If I were murdered, I would be ashamed of my family if they wanted to honour my life by taking someone else's.

The way to kill psychopaths is to stop creating them in the first place.

The way to rehabilitate current psychopaths, is to stop looking at them as psychopaths, and instead as family members we dearly love and would want back in our lives. Make their burdens our burdens.

With Love,

Your Brother

Originally posted by dontreally
If the concern is punishment, than of course, keep the person alive, and torture them for the remainder of their lives. But punishment is not the reason behind the death penalty. The first reason is obviously to remove society of a diseased part; A healthy organism cannot survive and thrive if one of its members is diseased. Secondly, there is a metaphysical law of equivalencies. One action has an equal and commensurate reaction. A murderer who murders with forethought forfeits his life. The instance he decided to take another life, he agreed that if caught, he would lose his own. Now imagine the kind of reduction in fear of a criminal who murders in a country that doesn't impose the death penalty, verses one that does? I imagine the former would think twice, and would be wary of the much more serious consequences, than the latter, who would probably be unperturbed by the prospect of life imprisonment - which in any case becomes a surrogate world for the criminal which will provide him or her the norms experienced in the outside world.

Your argument would make perfect sense if we still lived in small tribalistic communities, but it has no basis in the reality of the modern world. For one, the modern world is not a healthy organism, it is organism in crisis in fact, a crisis it can overcome certainly but not while archaic generalisations are applied to that society. Criminality and deviance, in any given context, are relative. We also live in a society where, while it is claimed we are tried by our peers, we seldom are. Some crimes are overlooked, some punishments dealt more harshly upon some offenders, it often depends upon who you are and what you can afford as to whether justice is dealt out. The death penalty is state sanctioned murder, and seldom serves justice, unless the definition of justice is the waste of much expenditure, and the delivery of revenge and retribution for the benefit of the baying masses.

The psychopath is a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself. You're just knocking the heads off warts everytime they pop up. I'm not saying that the psychopath is blameless, they do make a choice, but they base that choice within a society where corruption, or deviant methods to achieving success are seemingly rewarded. Psychopathy may be carried on a gene, but aggression, sadism, etc belong entirely in the nurturing. A carrier of that gene is not 'born to be bad', just detached to some degrees, it is the nurturing experience that will direct the character of the person. We have all the knowledge required to prevent the majority of violent psychopathy if it was considered feasible to do so.