You sound like one of those people who'd rather never understand the motivations of someone like this, just kill 'em. (That is, unless it was your son, or daughter, or someone you love dearly committing these heinous crimes. Suuure, you could tell me you would show them no mercy. But who is worse? The monster that has little-to-no control over his mind and urges, or the man who refuses to treat the "monster" as a fellow human being. In need of love, care, understanding, treatment, food, and shelter?) I won't accuse you of being Christian. Just ignorant. But I find, anecdotally as well as soem interesting non-biased studies released recently--Religious people, especially dogmatic evangilcal Christians in the U.S (Don't detract, Orthodox Jews and Muslims are just as bad, they just aren't the majority so they don't wield the same weight), are as unforgiving as it comes. They are "pro-life" yet the majority are pro-execution. They don't see how that is contradictory.
They absolutely cannot and will not try to understand a man like Albert Fish, let alone forgive him. This isn't a Christian problem, it is a people problem. Christianity and other religions just act as a catalyst of justification for disguting displays of judgment.
Albert Fish should have been studied. Studied, and had his brain kept and preserved to be studied further as technology caught up. Today we'd be able to scan that brain and compare t with anomalies of both live and dead serial killers and murderers, soldiers with high kill-ratios (and combat addicts. There is little difference in the parts of the brain that are overworked and the parts that atrophy when it comes to this area, SO FAR. WITH CURRENT SCIENCE. Which, mostly, continues to point us into semi-predictable situations)
Anyway...I have a question for you: Would you kill Albert Fish when he was 5? How about 10? 15? 17 and a half? what about 6 months later, where, via a made-up, non-scientific policy deciding when you're "mostly" an adult (you can fight in a war, you can't drink a beer or rent a car in most circumstances, though. The reality is you do get to drink off-base as a military man in many places, but it's still on the books). At what point does it become okay to kill him to prevent his future murders? The day before? What if he had killed others we don't know about? Can we risk it? All the trauma and weird *beep* he went through, the resources he used up (another argument for using the death penalty). ...Wouldn't it be better to just slit the infant-Albert's throat? He'd die an innocent baby, to a horrific child-murder (you) who claims to only be protecting other children.
For the sake of argument, let's say that's all true and plausible. What if Albert had killed a child that would have killed 50-60 people, or maybe startedd WW3 within a year of ending WW2? You see what happens here when we run into this kind of logic?
We all know most, if not all, of us couldn't kill a child, no matter how horriblr it's crimes would be later. Maybe you'd kidnap the child and try to raise s/he differently, maybe that would be what makes 'em go bad.
We need to understand the human brain and the minds of killers so we may know how to prevent it. We need to accept that, perhaps, one day a man like Albert Fish could be rehabilitated. Maybe even be given a measure of controlled freedom.
After all, if one truly believes in seond chances, why not test that with one of the more extreme cases you could apply it to?
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