Poll: Most Evangelicals and Catholics Condone Torture in Some Instances
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Check out this fascinating new graphic analysis from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
It shows that most white evangelicals and Roman Catholics, along with most frequent churchgoers, say it's OK to "sometimes" or "often" use torture on suspected terrorists. A slight majority of mainline Christians and religiously unaffiliated Americans, meanwhile, say torturing suspected terrorists could "rarely" or "never" be justified:
Tags: religion | Catholicism | Pew Research Center | torture | evangelicals
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A Christian that condones any torture?
First off, if you condone any type of torture--your not a Christian. Your cancelled out. According to this poll, most white Americans are not Christians. They do not folow the words of Christ and are in fact heritics of some sort. I assume that these pro-torture folks would be more appropriately termed "state worshippers" than anything else.
What Torture Is
According to NPR's Ombudsman:
“I believe that it is not the role of journalists to take sides or to characterize things.
So again, instead of using loaded language -- and the word "torture" is loaded -- I advocate that NPR describe interrogation techniques in detail. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com said that by describing waterboarding as I did, I made it "pleasant-sounding" and "clinical," which baffles me."
"To me, the word "waterboarding" alone sounds like what you might do at an amusement park. But if you describe it as tying someone to a board, pouring water down his mouth and nose to create a sense of drowning-- anyone would understand how terrifying that can be."
"But no matter how many distinguished groups -- the International Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioners -- say waterboarding is torture, there are responsible people who say it is not. Former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, their staff and their supporters obviously believed that waterboarding terrorism suspects was necessary to protect the nation's security.”
NPR continues to softcoat its reporting of torture as directed by the highest officials of the U.S. government, refusing to use the word TORTURE to describe what clearly WAS torture. And the Ombdudsman at NPR absolutely refuses to confront NPR on this issue.
Torture and organized religion have a long shared history, but I'm more disgusted by the behavior of secular institutions in this country in their failure to directly confront this issue now. I mention NPR as one easy example of this.
The larger question is, why aren't those guilty of these crimes even now being tried for them? Why is even the suggestion that this should be happening treated as absurd?
God and Country is certainly a factor. Blind faith, yes...but there is also the question of how far the highest authority in this country has moved beyond the rule of law.
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