That line of argument is the 'ticking time bomb scenario,' as in, "Would you torture if you knew that you could get information that would prevent countless deaths?" I even read recently of some "Christians" claiming that Jesus Christ himself would torture if it meant that it would spare his own mother.
This argument may be attacked on two fronts.
It is true that a person will say anything to make the pain stop. He is not limited to saying true things in his efforts. The interrogator can't know whether what he is told is true. Therefore, the interrogator cannot know whether the information can be used for useful action. Therefore, it is not actionable intelligence.
It has no informational value. This would seem to be obvious.
And worse than having no informational value --that is, as being recognized as not being worthy of prompting action on the part of the rational person who understands the zero value of nothing-- these extracted utterances will prompt to action the person who does not understand the zero value of nothing.
There is only one thing worse than having no information, and that is in converting non-actionable intelligence into an ersatz actionable intelligence. One is thus deluded about the nature of reality. At one time he knew that he knew nothing. Now he believes he knows something. He's worse off than when he started.
And since a sovereign has finite investigative and reactive forces --that is, guys with guns and analysts and the like-- the sovereign will fritter away his finite resources in taking ersatz actionable intelligence for action.
The sovereign is now further away from his (at least stated) objective in preventing the detonation of that ticking time bomb.
The argument is pure sophistry.
But back to those fools who defile the churches they ostentatiously and unrighteously inhabit, they who would defame their own Christ by ascribing to Him an inclination to such vileness. When a man cannot achieve righteousness, he will accuse his own Christ of dissolution. In that way, he is able to become Christ-like while sitting on the couch.
And the King shall answer and say unto them,
Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the
least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
People's New Testament
25:40 Inasmuch as ye have done it, etc.
The righteous understood well that they had often, in the name and from
the love of Christ, ministered to his brethren, the poor and suffering
saints, but they had never understood that their Lord accepted this as
a personal service to himself. It should be distinctly noted, (1) that
the saved are the righteous, or those whose sins have been washed away
by Christ; (2) they are those who have lived and acted in the name of
Christ, or have been obedient to his will; (3) they have been full of
the love of Christ and have faithfully ministered to the distressed,
especially to those of the household of faith. The love of Christ
implies love of the brethren, and of all mankind.
http://bible.cc/matthew/25-40.htm
Religion is both the salvation and the undoing of mankind. I am not a big fan of organized religion for this reason: Most people are unable to wield it safely. No one is chosen. No one is better than another. No one is to conquer or kill another. Because if we all adopted any particular exhortation to conquer or kill, then we'd all eventually be dead, wouldn't we? Or the earth would be poisoned, wouldn't it?
I am not a theologian. I have little interest in the Bible, except that I have an interest in the teachings of Christ. So I like the Jefferson Bible, more properly titled, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English. It is Thomas Jefferson's distillation of Christianity proper, minus all the bone waving. You may read it for free here. I highly recommend it.
I recognize the value in all religions. I believe them to be inspired. But I believe the recordings of them to be comprised chiefly of conceptual models, methods of explaining principles, methods which are appropriate to man's ability to understand a concept during any particular historical era. "Heaven is up there. You can't see it. But God can see you." "The Christ Entity resides inside the time domain. Due to information propagation within the vacuum, additional information is available to those beings who reside in higher dimensions."
The earth is not six thousand years old. This is an asinine belief. And it does not matter whether one stores his wine in the same room that a Gentile may store his wine, except if one may see that Gentile through a window. This is an asinine belief.
We all need to put down the bones around here. Step awayyyyy from the bone.
I have been attempting, over the past few years, to update the conceptual models that I see in the Bible. Our advanced knowledge of the various sciences permits us to reconcile the essence of the various religions to observable reality. Contained within the religions are prescriptions for human behavior. These are gaming strategies. A gaming strategy is a code of behavior for one actor in a game. Ideally, a gaming strategy provides for both the material and the spiritual needs of the actor. And the grand-slam, holy grail of gaming strategies is one which provides for the material and spiritual needs of all of humanity, not just those who would claim as their personal property the blessings of providence.
If this species does not update its conceptual models, it will extinguish itself. Because, obviously, in an age of advanced and ever more poisonous weaponry, gaming groups cannot covet another's property for long before we all defend ourselves right into oblivion. If we are forever pursuing one another, and if we all have the right to self-defense, then the mere act of using the latest weaponry in defending ourselves results in ruin for all.
Do you see? Should we not consider adopting a new gaming strategy?
We go down the rabbit hole a little bit here: I am going to hypothesize the existence of a few things, including higher realms and beings who inhabit them. I am going to model these places on higher dimensions.
The human brain is fascinating. It communicates among its various neurons electrochemically. It is essentially an electrical device. These neurons, in developing an electrochemical potential at their various ends, act as dipoles. A dipole is just like a refrigerator magnet; it has a positive and a negative. Or a north and a south.
Some would argue that memories and thoughts and personality are contained within the brain. I don't believe this. I tend to believe that the three-dimensional matrix of dipoles that is the brain is acting as a dynamic "tuner" for information contained elsewhere --inside the time domain, for example.
Mind dynamics are in fact totally electrodynamic in nature, but they are comprised of those strange nonobservable time-polarized photons and EM fields over on the time axis – and not even existing in the sad old CEM/EE model so ubiquitously used. All time (and time entities) are nonobservable since the observation process itself invokes a d/dt operator upon the 4-space dynamics, being d/dt(LLLT) = LLL. We (i.e., our physical senses as physical instruments) “see” things very much like a series of frozen 3-space snapshots LLL, and we infer the “passage of time” by comparing differences between the snapshots – just like for a motion picture film.
To couple a dynamic time-polarized photon entity on the time axis coherently to a dynamic entity (a physical body) in 3-space, one must use the coherent coupling of time-polarized photons (on the 4th axis) and longitudinally-polarized (in 3-space) photons.
Hence the real purpose of all the dendrite endings (with jillions of spikes and spikings continuously) in the brain and nervous system is to get at and produce such a coherent coupling. Many of those spikes do represent that exact coherent coupling. So long as all that coherent coupling is functional, the mind remains coupled to the body, and the two comprise a “living system”. If the coherence is lost, the coupling of mind to body is lost, and that is “death” where the “freed mind” now just occupies a part of the time domain, along with zillions and zillions of others.
http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/120305.htm
Bearden is a physicist and electrical engineer whom I highly respect. And his work just somehow seems to jibe with what I intuit to be true.
I suspect that one's consciousness resides inside the time domain. You are not you. You have no claim to you. Your ape species body is "channeling" a portion, a mind-slice, of some larger mind, the larger "human" mind, some larger consciousness. This mind may be called SUPERMIND. I do not know.
When you look at another person, you are looking at a portion of yourself. His consciousness is intertwined with your own. You are not distinct entities. You are expressions of the same entity.
"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the
least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." I believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been a very, very special person, one worth listening to. I suspect that he was acting as a repository for a being that I call the Christ Entity. I believe that he was being employed as a conduit of information between here and there. The human Jesus was not the same person as the Christ Entity. They were two distinct entities.
One of the more puzzling things for many
Christians is the question that Christ uttered on the cross "My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Here is the passage in context. "Now from the sixth
hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. And
about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli,
lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:45-46) It was at this time in which Paul
writes about in 2 Corinthians 5:21. "God made Him who had no sin to be
sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."
But the question that frequently arises to many a
sincere Bible Students is. "Why, at the climax of perfect obedience to
his Father's will, did Jesus utter such words?" Was it in the depths of
suffering and moments of final agony, the Lord experienced a moment of
doubt, and felt that his Father, his God had actually deserted him?
http://www.newjerusalemcommunity.net/?c=53&a=1448
The imperfect ape-species shell called Jesus had been vacated by the Christ Entity. He noticed his absence and cried out for that entity. He cried out for His one love.
The point is, the Christ Entity resides inside each of us to some extent. When we look at one another, we are looking at us, we are looking at ourselves, and we are looking at the Christ. There is only one. What you see as a separation consciousness is an illusion.
When you hurt another, you hurt yourself. Don't you see?
It's like when you take your little brother's hand and make him punch himself in the face and you say in mock astonishment, "Why are you hitting yourself? I don't understand. Stop it."
You are hitting yourselves. Stop it.
And thus when you bring pain to another, you bring pain to yourself. And you bring pain to Christ.
Torture is never okay. Torture is the purposeful causing of pain, whether physical or mental. When you delight in torture, you delight in harming Christ.
There is nothing more antithetical to Christ than the purposeful delivery of pain.
...And so maybe I should take my own advice. Touche. I am the target audience of my own material. Hmm. Learn something new every day.
But that is the torture argument in a nutshell: Don't do it. You are harming yourself in ways that you cannot see. It is better that you die than to cause unnecesary pain to another. It is better that your meat shell be harmed than your soul be harmed.
And that is why you must love one another. You are him. He is you. That he seems there and that you seem here is just an illusion. Cut him some slack; you're dealing with an imperfect human and a perfect, divine being buried somewhere deep inside. We are all imperfect, yet we all contain the seed of God. Cultivate that seed of the divine. Don't tamp it down.