Explain why there are different attitudes to capital punishment among the followers of a religion?
Religion and politics have always been very tightly wound together. All through history it’s been hard to separate them completely, to tell which is which. That is, some of the best religious ideas are really political, and vice versa. In the US, capital punishment is a political idea but it’s sold as a religious idea. Capital punishment doesn’t work, in the sense that government crime policy should be practical and pragmatic, that it should concentrate on the most effective and efficient means of protecting society from crime. Capital punishment doesn’t do that. It has never been shown to be a deterrent to crime (in fact statistics show just the opposite!) and it is much more expensive than the alternative, life in prison without chance of parole. (And there are several more excellent arguments against it which I will spare you for the moment). Why we still have capital punishment is that any politician who admits it doesn’t work is immediately jumped on by his competition as being ‘s
