The Death Penalty
Buddhism has no central scrutinizer whose job is to tell all Buddhists what to believe. It is possible that some Buddhists support the death penalty, but killing anyone does look like a violation of the first precept, to avoid harming anyone.
There are various points at which Buddhism and Christianity teach the same principles. That I know, one of the “Ten Commandments” that many Christians are very fond of is “Thou shalt not kill.” To my eye, that allows for no exceptions. Want to kill someone? The supposedly omnipotent deity of Christianity told you not to, so you should not. It doesn’t say, that I know, “Thou shalt not kill, unless the person you wanted to kill committed a heinous crime, or unless good Christian legislators in your state enacted the death penalty.” It just says, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Yet, Christians in the United States support the death penalty at a higher rate than non Christians.
The real dividing line, as is often the case in the United States, is race. Black people and Hispanic people support the death penalty at the lowest rates of any group in the United States. It should not surprise anyone that the application of the death penalty shows clear bias against Black people.
So, it’s immoral in general and it’s racist, but good, white Christians still support it. This is a microcosm of what is wrong in our hegemonically Christian nation. The United States is not officially a Christian nation, but it is functionally a Christian nation.
What Trump supporters are terrified of is that they know, whether consciously or not, that good, white Christians used to run the country without let or hindrance, but their control has been slipping since the end of slavery and they are not happy about it.
Fifty years after major African American civil rights legislation and immediately after our first Black president, they seized on Donald Trump as their great, white hope, which speaks volumes about “white supremacy” by itself. Trump was the best they could do.
And, in good Christian fashion, Trump, with his devout Catholic Attorney General, Bill Barr, rushed through…
