War, Religion and Capital Punishment
intellectual properties has a thread going right now about Christianity and murder and the sixth commandment that's worth a read. My own beliefs are pretty straight forward.

I believe there are crimes that are and should be punishable by death. It is definitely possible to commit such heinous acts that you forfeit your right to live.

I don't believe in God or Gods. I believe in a process of evolution that some might attempt to misconstrue as God but it is not. The difference is that there is no will, no directive personality behind evolution. It is cause and effect, experimentation and success gets to go on to the next round.

The very simple application of Occam's Razor ("Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" or "plurality should not be posited without necessity." which is generally further interpreted as, the simplest answer is usually the most correct.) indicates to me that all of this extra-dimensional personages, heaven, hell, God, the devil and all the other after life is like trying to explain 1+1=2 with quantum physics. Its just not necessary.

War is a natural human condition but not the massive assaults we currently wage. I don't really have time to get into it as much as I could here (hey, I gotta work sometimes) but basically, war is a part of our cycle, war culls the weak, the unfit, the parasites of a society. It introduces new blood into the gene pool (before our open borders of today captured prisoners were one of the only ways for new blood to come into a tribe). Animals war with each other for territory or mating rights or both. And we're just another set of animals doing our thing.

Animals do not murder though. Humans murder for sport, profit or religious reasons. Murder is the willful and unjustifiable killing of another human being. Justifiable in the larger sense of the word and not a personal justification otherwise anyone could kill anyone at any time for any reason (Thomas Hobbes' State of Warre). Justification in the societal sense, i.e. this person's continued existence poses a serious and lasting threat to society by virtue of his or her actions. Is war murder? I can't even begin to tap that barrel right now. Maybe in a future post.