Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of the death penalty. In fact, I don't think the death penalty is used enough. I think it should apply to serial rapists and child molestors, or just anyone like that who you know will never be reformed and in most cases don't even want to, folks who just destroy families and ruin lives and don't care one way or another.

 

Now that I'm saying that, I'm wondering if we shouldn't apply it to people who cut me off in traffic.

 

Having said that then (and please keep it in mind as you read the rest of this), let me just say why I hate it when people use the "eye for an eye" passage to justfy themselves. They say, The Bible says 'an eye for an eye' so that's what we should do! As if God required an eye for an eye, and if we don't put folks to death, He's going to be mad at us.

 

Right.

 

See, back in the old-timey Bible days, there was this guy named Joseph. Joseph was the coat-of-many-colors guy, whose brothers sold him into slavery and he was carried off into Egypt and eventually wound up being the right-hand man for the pharoah. Then his brothers and his dad came to live with him and there you go.

 

Eventually what you wound up with was thousands of these folks all living in Egypt, with their own customs and their own culture but nowhere else to go. They didn't have a homeland; remember Joseph was just a guy, not a King or a governor of somewhere. They didn't have their own laws, they'd never been organized into any kind of government, they were just this big mass of people all looking to get out of Egypt.

 

And that's when Moses comes along saying "Let my people go, let my people go" and they're all getting pumped up about it but no one seems to think to ask him "Go where? How we gonna get there? What are we gonna do when we're there?"

 

There's thousands of people now wandering in the desert with no rules and no organization and no civil authority. No court systems, no means of enforcement. It was like a big spring break road trip, Israelites gone wild! Whoo hoo!

 

They had their share of problems, sure. Like, food and water. But let me tell you one problem they didn't have.

 

They weren't going around forgiving each other too much. What I mean is, Schmuel didn't keep killing Moab's goats, only to have Moab turn around and forgive him over and over. And God didn't intervene to say "Whoa, there! Hold on a minute! I can't have all this forgiving going on. Moab, you go kill some of Schmuel's goats and lets get everything even-steven here! And I don't want any arguing over it!"

 

What happened was, Schmuel killed Moab's goat, Moab turned around and killed all of Schmuel's goats and two of his cows, and that got Schmuel so worked up he burned down Moab's house, and then Moab murdered Schmuel's wife. And then other folks, who might not even had anything to do with it, started taking sides, and the feuds lasted generations, and they were putting curses on each other and it was all a big mess.

 

I'm not being anti-Semetic by inferring that the Israelites were like this. I'm just saying that they were like everyone else. Because anyone, anywhere, gets hurt by someone, and their immediate reaction is not just to hurt that person back, but to hurt them back 1000 times worse. It's human nature. And it's the plot of every Steven Seagall movie ever made.

 

This eye for an eye business wasn't meant to say that this is what God is requiring us to do. It was saying, "This is all you're allowed to do. This much, and no more." When people say "an eye for an eye", today, what they're talking about is revenge, they're tired of watching criminals get away with stuff. What the law was meant to address, though, was exactly the opposite: That minor offenses were turning into all-out wars. And, it didn't mean that if someone killed your son, you got to go kill him (or his son!); it meant that the government got to do it. This was their law, remember, they didn't have any laws of their own?

 

This all is not to say, again, that I am against the death penalty, or even to ignore the fact that there were certain offenses in the Old Testament where God did require that someone be put to death. The Law was so tough in places that you get the sense they'd kill you twice if they could.

 

You might wonder, if I'm not against the death penalty, why any of this even bothers me.

 

I'll tell you.

 

It's because the doofwads who go around saying "An eye for an eye" aren't usually talking about the death penalty, they're just using it as an excuse to go kick someone's ass. And if they are talking about the death penalty, they act like it's so right and so moral, and not just something that we as a society sometimes have to do to prevent more innocent folks from being hacked to bits and buried in the crawlspace of some psycho's house.

 

Anyway, this is what I think.