The Death Penalty Analysis

Imagine you are walking through a park by yourself and you stumble upon a wallet. There is no one else in the park and no surveillance cameras to capture your every move. Upon further investigation, you open the wallet to find a relatively hefty sum of cash, along with identification of the wallet’s owner. With no one around, you could easily put the wallet in your pocket and continue on your way. You would have all of that money to yourself and no one would ever know that you kept it. On the flip side, you could just as easily take the wallet back to its rightful owner since the address is provided on the ID. You wouldn’t end up with the cash, but you would receive the satisfaction of doing the right thing. That is the central theme of this chapter: what motivates us as humans to act …show more content…
Those who follow a religion are often moral because of said religion. For Christians, they act morally because of the promise of Heaven, and they refrain from acting immorally because of the threat of Hell. More specifically, I was attracted to the relationship between religion and capital punishment. Despite most major Christian denominations actively opposing the death penalty, approximately 80% of Christians support it. This seems conflicting to me. Why do some, if not most, Christians arguably follow their churches blindly and go along with the values of their churches, yet at the same time oppose a major moral stance of the church? I have seen many times where followers of the Catholic Church, and other denominations for that matter, base their values off the values of the Church, and nothing more. They put no independent thought or reasoning into their values. If the church says it’s right, then it’s right. And if the church says it’s wrong, then it’s wrong. I suppose what is so interesting to me about all this is, why choose capital punishment to disagree with the church