Let’s start with you. If you twist your arm slowly, soon it will begin to hurt, and the pain will keep increasing until it becomes SEVERE. If you enjoy the pain, you’re a masochist. If you so twist the arm of someone else, you’re a sadist. And if your job is to inflict such pain, you’re a torturer (the root meaning of the word torture is “twisting”).
Let’s apply this to our question: “Can the use of torture ever be justified?” Not in international law, which defines torture as “any act by which SEVERE pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as” (and here I expand the list) information, punishment, sadistic satisfaction, intimidation, coercion to acquiescence, political re-education, discrimination, humiliation, repression, & deprivation. So defined, torture can never be justified.
Implicitly, international law says that pain-infliction is permissible as long as the pain is not SEVERE. I agree here with international law, and reject the arguments of those who say that no inflicting of pain can be justified.
1.....For the maintenance of the body personal and the body social, God has given the gift of pain. Leprosy steals that gift, and many lepers have lost their fingers and toes while asleep: rats ate them off. When the body social becomes insensitive to pain, human rats feed on it. Leprosy? Cure it, and kill the rats. Society threatened with anarchy, even death? On the human rats, inflict sufficient, non-severe pain. And if society decides to kill a human rat, the execution should inflict minimal pain.
2.....But inflicting pain and death is evil if the human rats are seen individually as gods. The Enlightenment, by replacing God with autonomous human “individual" deities, disrupted the biblical understanding of humanity as inherently (1) both good and evil and (2) persons-in-community. Humanism has too high a view of humanity. All inflicting of pain is torture, and capital punishment is the ultimate blasphemy.
3....The Bible has a realistic, lower, “under God” view of our species. God’s intention was only “good” (seven times in the Bible’s first chapter). But something went wrong, and we have an inclination toward evil (including individualism) as well as a leaning toward good. With the Bible and the Enlightenment (which grew out of the Bible’s vision of freedom), I believe human beings need, and have a right to, FREEDOM. But with the Bible, I believe that, in the interest of human ORDER, human beings must be both confined by social constraints and inflicted with pains appropriate to their rebellious-sinful violations of the humanum, life as it furthers truly human values.
4.....Human beings have a God-given DIGNITY (as made “in the image of God,” Genesis 1:27), and killers of this high creature should be executed—for “in his own image God made humankind” (Genesis 9:6). The Bible’s first book combines a high view of humanity with the most severe punishment.
5.....Implicit in our God-given human dignity is treating oneself and others with RESPECT. The vertical aspect of this respect is that in honoring the creature, we are honoring the Creator. Self-abuse and societal abuse are crimes against God.
The horizontal aspect is human rights. Soon after World War II, some American Christians generated a list of these. In 1948, after lengthy discussions at the world level, it was published as the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was followed, in 1987, by the U.N. Covenant Against Torture, later by the Geneva Conventions.
6.....Despite these global efforts to restrain torture, it is now practiced by two-thirds of nations as well as by terrorists and criminals. Torture is a natural ally and instrument of the human tendency to evil; and the alliance is so demonically successful that I am revulsed almost to the point of renouncing all inflicting of pain to restrain evil. Fear is an additional ally of the human tendency to evil.
We are now facing the incumbus of an ominous triangle--the fear of terrorism, the temptation to torture, and the human tendency to evil. Under this cloud, the burdens of legislation and regulation are heavy to bear; and we are all “standin’ in the need of prayer.”
7.....How about a guideline for restraining the temptation to inflict pain beyond social necessity? I suggest this: No unnecessary violation of any human being’s inherent, God-given DIGNITY of body and mind with the exception of “a life for a life.” No infliction of “severe" pain.
8.....In light of this guideline, Abu Ghraib was a blasphemous obscenity committed by American animals in the early stages of becoming human. America’s societal womb is sick, failing its formative task of producing truly human beings who live by faith rather than fear, love rather than hate, hope rather than self-centered cynicism, thick rather than thin values, and muscular character rather than flabby morals. As we face the agonies, dilemmas, and prospects of our time, the good news is that awareness of the sickness is spreading.
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