gibson wrote:lejend wrote:InsectPoison wrote:oats13 wrote:It's really amusing how you can often tell someone who has never read the Koran- they are too busy defending it
Tbh this argument does not make any sense because if you read the bible you can see it also says horrible things. Also different things can be interpreted different ways.
In Christianity and modern mainstream Judaism, the Bible's "horrible" passages are more often considered descriptions of historical events, figures of speech, etc., not commandments.
If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them, then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his home town. And they shall say to the elders of his city, āThis son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.ā Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death; so you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear of it and fear.
Deuteronomy 21:18ā21
Yea that was a nice historical event, when parents started stoning their children for being rebellious.
Well, this is the danger of people looking up verses on the Internet, while completely ignoring the mainstream interpretations of them in the religion.
Mainstream Judaism largely makes the death penalty impractical. Along with the Written Torah, which you quoted from, Jews have an Oral Tradition that discourages and effectively prohibits execution, by making it impossible to convict people.
For Christians and Jews, these are not commandments, but perhaps to someone from outside the religion, who reads the Bible from the perspective of an outsider, and has no regard for proper context and interpretation as provided by the mainstream religious authorities, I guess it can seem that all these verses apply tiday and should be read literally. But again, this is your perspective and opinion, and Christians and Jews disagree with it.
It is of extreme difficulty to determine whether the modes of capital punishment given above, and based on the detailed discussion, mainly in the tractate Sanhedrin, reflect actual practice, or whether they were academic discussions, as, for instance, are the detailed discussions on the sacrifices. Thus the law of the "stubborn and rebellious son" covers five mishnayot (Sanh. 8:1ā5) and four folios of the Babylonian Talmud (68bā72a), and it is laid down that he is put to death by stoning and then hanged (ibid., 46a). Yet it is stated that "It never happened and it never will happen" and that the law was given merely "that you may study it and receive reward" (for the pure study; Tosef., Sanh. 11:6; Sanh. 71a), though on the other hand in the talmudic passage R. Jonathan protests "I saw him and sat on his grave." The same statement is made in the case of the death penalty for communal apostasy (Tosef., Sanh. 14:1) and the same reason given for its study.
Much more pertinent, however, is a passage of the Talmud which explicitly compares the study of, and the discussion on the various death penalties with that on the sacrifices. The halakhah was established in the case of the death penalty for an adulterous woman. R. Joseph asked, "Is there need to establish a halakhah for the messianic age (the Sanhedrin no longer having jurisdiction in capital offenses)?" Abaye answered, "If so, we should not study the laws of sacrifices, as they also apply to the messianic age. But we say 'Study and receive reward'" (Sanh. 51b). Similarly, the passage in Mishnah Makkot 1:10: "A Sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years is called a murderous one. R. Eleazar ben Azariah says 'Or even once in 70 years.' R. Tarfon and R. Akiva said, 'If we had been in the Sanhedrin no death sentence would ever have been passed'; Rabban Simeon b. Gamaliel said: 'If so, they would have multiplied murderers in Israel.'" Instructive though this is, it is merely an academic discussion, the right of imposing capital punishment having been taken from the Sanhedrin by the Romans a century before, "40 years before the Destruction of the Temple" (Sanh. 41a; TJ, Sanh. 1:18a). The rabbis agreed that with the destruction of the Temple the Sanhedrin was precluded from inflicting capital punishment (see above).
The Talmud actually asks whether the statement of Eleazar b. Azariah was one of censure or reflected the fact of the rarity of death sentences, and leaves the question undecided, as it does for the question as to how R. Tarfon and R. Akiva would have prevented the death verdict being passed (but see Makk. 7a).
That the discussions are largely academic is reflected in the language of the Mishnah. Of capital punishment by the sword it is stated that "they used to decapitate him, as the [Roman] government does [at the present time]" (cf. Tosef., Sanh. 9:10) and R. Judah proposes another method. It goes on to state how "they used to" fulfill the method of death by strangulation (ibid., 7:3). No less significant is the fact that R. Akiva himself, who would have abolished capital punishment, enters into the halakhic discussion on it as fully as his colleagues (cf. ibid., 11:7, 12:2).
...
What is perhaps the most cogent evidence that the talmudic discussions on the death sentence did not reflect the actual practice is provided by a third instance. In Sanhedrin 7:2 R. Eleazar b. Zadok gave evidence of an actual case of death by burning which differed diametrically from that given by the Mishnah. The answer was given that "the Sanhedrin at that time was not competent." In the Tosefta (9:11) and the Jerusalem Talmud (7:2, 24b) Eleazar b. Zadok vividly describes the circumstances under which he witnessed it. "I was a child and was being carried on my father's shoulders and I saw it," to which his colleagues replied "You were then a child, and the evidence of a child is inadmissible." That the incident happened is therefore definite; the rabbis in the two replies were concerned with establishing their theoretical view of the law even when it conflicted with the actual practice of the past. There are no recorded cases of execution by strangulation or the sword. It would seem therefore that discussions on the various modes of execution and the details of their implementation were made to "study and receive the reward therefore," i.e., academic. As is evident from the above quoted mishnah in Makkot, the whole tendency of the rabbis was toward the complete abolition of the death penalty.
Orthodox Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan wrote:
"In practice, ... these punishments were almost never invoked, and existed mainly as a deterrent and to indicate the seriousness of the sins for which they were prescribed. The rules of evidence and other safeguards that the Torah provides to protect the accused made it all but impossible to actually invoke these penalties ... the system of judicial punishments could become brutal and barbaric unless administered in an atmosphere of the highest morality and piety. When these standards declined among the Jewish people, the Sanhedrin ... voluntarily abolished this system of penalties.[18]
The Talmud ruled out the admissibility of circumstantial evidence in cases which involved a capital crime. Two witnesses were required to testify that they saw the action with their own eyes. A man could not be found guilty of a capital crime through his own confession or through the testimony of immediate members of his family. The rabbis demanded a condition of cool premeditation in the act of crime before they would sanction the death penalty; the specific test on which they insisted was that the criminal be warned prior to the crime, and that the criminal indicate by responding to the warning, that he is fully aware of his deed, but that he is determined to go through with it. In effect this did away with the application of the death penalty. The rabbis were aware of this, and they declared openly that they found capital punishment repugnant to them.
Interesting story. A Jewish couple were being judged for illegal adultery in Arabia. Mohammad asked the Jews about what should be done about them according to Jewish law. A rbabi opened up the Torah and covered with his hand the verses about stoning, because Judaism was against the death penalty. Mohammad however saw this, he had them reveal the violent verses, and then he killed the couple. It's funny how he agreed with your interpretation and disagreed with that oc the Jews', of what the Bible says. I mean what do they know about their own religion...
The Jews came to Allah's Apostle and told him that a man and a woman from amongst them had committed illegal sexual intercourse. Allah's Apostle said to them, "What do you find in the Torah (old Testament) about the legal punishment of Ar-Rajm (stoning)?" They replied, (But) we announce their crime and lash them." Abdullah bin Salam said, "You are telling a lie; Torah contains the order of Rajm." They brought and opened the Torah and one of them solaced his hand on the Verse of Rajm and read the verses preceding and following it. Abdullah bin Salam said to him, "Lift your hand." When he lifted his hand, the Verse of Rajm was written there. They said, "Muhammad has told the truth; the Torah has the Verse of Rajm. The Prophet then gave the order that both of them should be stoned to death. ('Abdullah bin 'Umar said, "I saw the man leaning over the woman to shelter her from the stones.
-Bukhari