Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, must teach that up is down, black is white, slavery is freedom, and war is peace. One lesson in this dogma is that the state teaches us the sanctity and sacredness of human life by using the death penalty. I guess wars also teach the sacredness of human life, right?
"The death penalty is not about retribution," Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a podcast Sept. 22. "It is first of all about underlining the importance of every single human life." ...
"The death penalty is intended to affirm the value [and] sanctity of every single human life, and thus by the extremity of the penalty to make that visible and apparent to all," Mohler said. ...
Mohler predicted the death penalty will become more and more controversial in the years ahead because the "general trend of secularization and moral confusion has undermined the kind of moral and cultural consensus that makes the death penalty make sense."
Source: ABP (via: Think Progress)
In theory, there is something approaching a point in what Albert Mohler is saying: we do communicate to others how much we value something by how we treat those who damage what we say we value. However, you can't claim to value something which you yourself willingly destroy.
If Mohler can't see the contradiction there, and more importantly if he can't think of any better way to communicate how much he values human life except through the death penalty, then he's only admitting extreme poverty of moral imagination and basic reasoning ability.
Which, quite frankly, wouldn't surprise me at all given the sorts of things he's written over the years. When I think of Albert Mohler, "moral imagination" and "reasoning" are not the first words that come to mind -- not by a long shot.
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