hahah, well following that line of thought on Jesus's teaching there will be about 15 people left alive in the US, assuming the adultery is grounds for the death penalty as that proposes.

me, I'll stick with the ten commandments. Thou Shalt Not Kill. if god had meant Thou Shalt Not Murder he would have said so.

That's assuming the translation to kill is the correct translation, as murder is a close relative in meaning. In context with all the God sanctioned killing in the bible, I think (And many religious scholars do as well) that the correct translation is "Though shalt not commit murder."

one looney web page is not "many religious scholars" and interpreting what god "really" meant is more than tad presumptuous.

I'll stick with the ten commandments. Thou Shalt Not Kill. if god had meant Thou Shalt Not Murder he would have said so.

How do you feel about the many innocent people that have been put to death via mistakes even in the days of genetic evidence.

People are not sentenced to death for jay walking and i personally feel is should only be used when it is a clear case. I don't know if we have the technology for that yet but i think we are heading in the right direction. ....

I don't give a rat's arse what the bible says about anything
I live in secular- America
that means that the laws here have nothing to do with religious doctrine

funny-
when I was growing up
and forced to attend church
the scriptures and commandments used the wording "thou shall't not kill"
but today,
to justify eating meat, war, the death penalty- etc
the wording has changed to "thou shall't not murcer"
so christians can rationalize
death, death and more death
how...............
uh, convenient

The maximum allowable punishment should be life in prison,

have absolutely no problem with the wholesale slaughter of 100% innocent children through abortion.

I've always found it odd that many people, who do not condone the putting to death of convicted murderers (Yes, I understand that sometimes someone is wrongly convicted.), have absolutely no problem with the wholesale slaughter of 100% innocent children through abortion.

First using the term wholesale slaughter, at least in this country is a bit overboard. Despite the fact that abortion is technically legal in this country, there are large areas, especially the mid-west and south where anti-abortionists have shut down the clinics that provide, among other health services, abortions. For a large number of poor people who don't have the means to travel to another state, abortion is not available. I don't think there is a wholesale number of abortions going on.

Secnodly, in my view, abortion in the early stages, first few weeks , is not slaughtering an innocent child , but terminating a potential human. There isn't anywhere near a fully developed brain so there is no personality, no individuality, no consciousness. Many pregnancies terminate naturally at this point due to some problem, does that mean god/nature is guilty of murder? I think it's a woman's choice whether to deliver or not. If there is a god, it's her decision to deal with the consequences, not ours.

As far as later term abortions go, these are only done when it's a choice between the mother's life and the child's life. I don't think any woman carries a child for 6, 7 or 8 months and then decides to abort it. And if were my choice between the life that was already in the world (my wife) and the life that is not yet in the world (the child she's carrying) I would choose my wife.

the number of children aborted every year is on the level of Holocaust numbers. Even late term abortions are ridiculously higher than the number of innocent people convicted of the death penalty... Hell. Every murderer that's been executed over the last decade (Whether guilty or not.) doesn't hold a candle to the number of children thrown away in one year in just the city of Washington, DC. Only 1,171 executions have been carried out in the USA since 1976.

It doesn't make me feel better or worse, it just my belief, and not my decision. And again, embryos and fetuses, not babies. What people consider to be a human being varies usually with religion. Now I'm an atheist, but most Christians consider it human at the moment of conception, in the Jewish religion I was taught it's not human until the crown of the head passes out of the mother. This was probably to allow the mother's life to take precedence over the babies. So who's religion do we go with if that's the approach you want to take?

Personally I believe it is human when the brain the baby is sufficiently developed for thought processes to go on. But even this cannot be determined from a time standpoint as we have no way to read a mind. I'm reluctant to define it further than that. Each fetus differs in development. I just hold to my belief that it's the woman's choice, with some input from me if she were my wife, but still ultimately her body, her choice.

try to find ways to make the prisons abuse and crime-free as much as humanly possible.

If the measure of a human's viability is it's level of mental development, how do we measure that? As far as I know, babies do not go from non-thinking blobs of flesh to sentient beings in the space of time it takes to pass through the birth canal. Most of us do not have conscious memories of our lives before the age of 3-4 years old. Is that when life actually starts.

One could take it all the way back to sperm. One could say that all sperm are viable human life and you shouldn't be wanking off as it is murder. Some religions actually take this position.

There is a gap in the time when scientists say a fetus can feel pain. (Between 10 and 28 weeks, depending on the study and the politics of those doing the study.) Should this be a consideration when taking into account the viability of an unborn child? For all we know it could be even earlier.