No, that's not what I said. And that's not "exactly" what you said, either. (Though it's hard to be sure, your sentence was a bit broken.) I merely pointed out the exact same form could be pointed the other way.

And for the record: Science tries to ascertain truth by narrowing in on it through hypothesis and testing... it does not, indeed cannot, establish "facts". If the scientific facts of years-gone-by contradict the scientific facts of today, were they really facts at all? No. As some philosophers have put it, science can only disprove things. (Which doesn't make it invalid, or useless.)

People of faith (the rational ones, at least) tend to take the long view. If something is true, then it is true. Otherwise, the fad will wear off eventually. There's no need to categorically reject everything that superficially appears to contradict what you already accept. It's ok to say "I don't know, but it will make sense eventually." (This happens in science all the time, by the way.)

Your anger has blinded you. You're lashing out. Something happened to you, and you seem bent on taking it out on religion as a whole. I've seen it before, typically when parents are too strict, or are hypocrites.

It's ok for people to be different from you. (Some religionist need to learn this too, granted.) It's going to be a rough road because you've engineered a philosophy around religious belief, but you can come to accept that religion doesn't need to be demolished for the world to be a great place.

No, it's not. Thankfully I haven't had anybody in my family go through Alzheimer yet, or slip gradually into severe dementia. There are many people out there who would find that statement offensive.

Hmm, looking up the medical definition of "insane":

So... It's not a medical term, but a legal one. We seem to have found another tautology.

We're talking about whether the practice of capital punishment can dissuade someone who does not have a sound grasp of reality from killing. It won't dissuade all of them; it won't dissuade all sane people either. But will it dissuade some of them? I contend that it can.

I picked your argument apart piece by piece. I may have missed things (it's likely, in fact), but I didn't skip anything intentionally. And I didn't skip the core arguments by going for individual ideas. That's not how arguments work. You had premises; you connected them; you tried to show how this lead to conclusions. Fine. I showed which premises I thought were faulty, and why others didn't lead to the conclusions you thought they did. I didn't just stand up and declare you wrong, but I showed you why. Piece by piece.

What did I cherry pick?

Faulty logic.

One could just as easily argue that every time a scientific advance happened, there were religious people who embraced it whole-heartedly. The same argument structure; the opposite conclusion.

Some people reject change. Religion is irrelevant to that behavior.

Hmm. Let's have a recap, shall we?

Oh, but I do know where you're coming from. You're so eager to make your point that you didn't read carefully what was being written. That's not what I said at all. Read it again. Better yet, read what I was responding to. Parse it carefully. Don't read what you thought that it said, or want it to say; read what it actually does say.

Some people are considerably more squeamish about killing "tissue" after it is born than before it can survive ex utero. Others find the whole idea abhorrent. Prove me wrong.

Not in California. I was recently in court (jury duty), and they went out of their way to avoid it.

I don't know about specific law, but I thought that there needed to be a benefit to the liar for it to be fraud. If I started spouting lies in favor of company XYZ, but I have no stake in the company, know no employees, owners, stake holders, clients, suppliers, etc, etc, then how is it fraud?

Posting falsehoods about investments typically have some financial motive. The typical pump-and-dump scheme, for instance. Now that is fraud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud (Yes, I know, a very weak source. But it shows that I'm not the only one who sees it this way.)

I'm going to quibble over this point. It is not a tenet of most religions. It is a tenet of a few religions, and some of them have been very loud.

(They've also made good villains with which to smear other religionists. You've been suckered.)

(Forewarning, posting while tired. I'm likely overlooking something, and may not be as coherent as I'd like.)

Oversimplified, but I see no need to debate the point.

Those are excessively large and diverse groups. Considering how "criminal" tends to be defined, it may be a tautology to split them this way, but I'll accept it for the time being.

For those who kill only because they are mentally deranged. The distinction is a hard one to make, and I don't think it can be made in most cases. Let's say the severely mentally ill don't qualify, and move on.

Insanity isn't boolean. It isn't all or nothing. It is a continuum (in the very least). It depends on the degree of insanity. Some of them will, yes. Even if mental illness is off the table, the knowledge that death penalty is practiced on murderers will deter some of the insane. Remember, they've got a screw loose. Most of them don't want to admit that they're crazy, and the insanity defense won't always occur to them during pre-meditation. To premeditate the insanity defense, you would need to admit to yourself that you're cuckoo.

Drugs are not a good excuse. I'd need more information before I'm willing to decide if they are an excuse at all.

Snapping under stress? "Jim made me stressful, but I killed him. Now that he's gone, I'm all better. Honest!" Right... Now, there are cases of longstanding, undiagnosed mental illness. Add an unreasonable stressor, and things sometimes go from potentially dangerous, to deadly. These are two very different things. We need to be really careful about anybody we permit to take the insanity defense. It should be quite hard to get out of the psych ward after killing someone.

But again, remember, crazy isn't an absolute. We need to make an honest assessment of potential for premeditation and potential for self-restraint. Only when one of those is at an exceptionally low level (extreme clinical) should we just accept that they couldn't help themselves.

That group is exceptionally scary. They will either attempt suicide, or they will be especially motivated to try to seem cured, to get back outside and kill again.

A wide and varied group.

For some of them, it's a job. For most of them, it's a hobby, or a lifestyle. Most criminals aren't "career" criminals in the sense that they make their living that way. Most criminals don't spend 8 hours a day in illicit activity, or fear that a cop/rival is going to make a move on them at any time. Many of them do, sure, but not most.

Even most of those who do make it their occupation don't live their lives in constant fear of being gunned down. They wouldn't chose that kind of life unless it was relatively safe, and made good money.

Some gangs fall into your description, sure, but even most gangs don't. Most gang members know somebody who went through the court system and was eventually released. Most gang members don't know someone who was gunned down by cops. (just for instance)

Those who actually fall into this category? They won't be as deterred as other criminals, true.

Criminals who'd rather "do a nickle" than get the needle. Even those who enjoy murder are likely to think twice... and occasionally chose a different option.

Let's not forget one group that we've overlooked so far: crimes of passion. In other words, people who have anger problems. I'm not talking about acts "in the moment", but where someone leaves angry, and comes back with a gun (etc). Some of those can be deterred by the thought of capitol punishment.

People who leave prison frequently, emphatically declare that they're not coming back. They'll say it to everyone and anyone. They mean it. This is insufficient, as many of them do come back, but they have a desire to stay on the straight and narrow. That is a starting point.

Uh, I'm not sure you really read what I wrote. The average prison experience is the wrong experience. The ideal prison experience would still be unpleasant, but it wouldn't be dangerous, and it wouldn't be designed to ingrain machismo and other "hardened" behavior.

One thing that we have learned about reform, it must be the prisoner's choice. Some parrallels can be drawn to drug addiction. If they don't want to change, no amount of "reform" is going to take. Reform should be offered to them. It should be made abundantly available, but we can't coerce reform. We can only encourage them to take it.

I don't believe that punishment is the rightful place of government, strictly speaking. Anything the government does (including "punishment") should be to prevent future crime in some way. Vengeance has no place in the courtroom. (theoretically)

Easy enough. Once they're dead, and have been for some time, you cut the spinal cord. Blowfish toxin won't help you recover from that. Besides, it will be pretty obvious when most prisoners are trying something like this.

"Unusual" is easy. That just requires an even application of legal principles. One starts with stare decisis, and moves from there to even-handedness between different laws.

"Cruel", on the other hand, is open for debate. I'll point out that fines are one degree of cruelty. House arrest and Incarceration are higher degrees. Capitol punishment is an even higher degree. It would be more accurate to ask if it is a disproportionate degree of cruelty.

That's lazy thinking. I'm sorry, but it is. Those aren't "underlying problems" in the way you imply them to be. They are causal factors, sure. Those are things that make it much easier for an individual to justify making bad choices. Peer pressure, especially, makes it very, very easy to make bad choices.

Those are all things that we must address as a society to deal with crime. (You left out toxic culture from your screed. That also belongs in this list.)

But those aren't the factors that motivate most criminals. Those are all clinical excuses that they'll use (because they know part of society is sympathetic to that type of argument, and they want sympathy). Ultimately, they are motivated by greed. They want to do something that somehow hurts someone else, and they just don't care. They place their own wealth, or status, or ego above the needs of others. Criminals care about themselves. That is why deterrents work. (That our prisons don't work is a whole topic until itself.)

Yes, fear of the death penalty can deter criminals. Every rare once in a while, it does. (Even rarer is when a criminal will admit that it has.) It is still an open question just how much a deterrent it would be if used more often.

Oh, please.

We can build oxygen sensors that raise an alarm in dangerous situations. We understand how to build ventilation systems. Emergency backup tanks are common enough with scuba and spelunking (etc). None of this is hard, nor terribly uncommon.

It's just as likely for a current worker to accidentally jab themselves with poison, and more likely in your senario that somebody else gets shot.

That's ONE of the things that it is about.

If we're going to have a death penalty, we've really got to get away from vengeance masquerading as "justice". It's just not acceptable.