N. T. Wright on the Death Penalty

I've heard an interview in Issues Etc. Tim Goeglein, author of the book, “The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era”.

From the interview, I gather that the man wants to sell his book, which is ok. But while listening to him, I kept asking myself, how can he say he has been the most pro-life president if he started two wars, approved of rendition kidnappings, bombed thousands upon thousands of civilians in Afghanistan while searching for Osama Bin Laden, and left more dead in Irak than when Saddam Hussein was there. Either he was a very stupid person, along with his other White House staffers, who believed Malaki and all the others Iraki opposition members, or his god doesn't guide him, period.

I don't think Bush he was a pro-life president. How inconsistent, you defend life before you get out of womb, while you don't have any qualms with killing innocent people just to get one man. And like I said before, not killing 1 or 5 personas, but thousands. Americans have to go out of their national news to find out what really is happening, since the news networks, not only FOX, are so patriotic as to be objective in their news coverage.

But regarding the death penalty. I guess N. T. Wright is not well liked, because he tells it like it is. Americans have shown that they don't like to be lectured by anybody, even when they are totally wrong. The issue becomes worst when you see that even American Christians don't like to be told another view that does not go along with their view of American exceptionalism, which means that Americans along have the right to say what's good and right for the rest of humanity, due to their closeness to God. Although the USA is a very religious country, that doesn't make it faithfully christian. But when Americans hear such a thing, from an outsider like me, or an insider, they totally lose control, and tagged such people as "haters", and say that everybody else is just jealous of them. Well, I live in a country that has been voted as #1 so many times, that when they tell me that, it sounds totally senseless.

Here it's a short entry by N.T. Wright regarding the death penalty in the USA, and how people see that from the outside.

American Christians and the death penalty

You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty. Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world. As far as they were concerned, their stance went along with the traditional ancient Jewish and Christian belief in life as a gift from God, which is why (for instance) they refused to follow the ubiquitous pagan practice of ‘exposing’ baby girls (i.e. leaving them out for the wolves or for slave-traders to pick up).

Mind you, there is in my view just as illogical a position on the part of those who solidly oppose the death penalty but are very keen on the ‘right’ of a woman (or couple) to kill their conceived but not yet born child...

From where many of us in the UK sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn’t see things in this horribly oversimplified way...

While we’re about it, how many folk out there were deeply moved both by the reading of the 9/11 victim names and by the thought that if they’d read the names of Iraqi civilians killed by your country and mine over the last ten years we’d have been there for several days?

N.T. WRIGHT | SEP 15, 2011 10:29 AM

Luis A. Jovel