Greetings to everyone,
I'm sorry I've been away for a while; I've been very busy with work and therefore unable to contribute as much as I would like.

Ansar, your defence of the Shariah law system is very strong and clear - I think the reasons for our disagreement stem from very different world-views. I'll try and explain what I mean by looking at the points you make.
I admit I was being glib. As it stands, the objection I gave needs several qualifications. Let's look at your examples:

In my view, if killing one person in such a situation can prevent the killing of many others, and if simply wounding or restraining the villain is not sufficient to stop him, then that killing is permissible as a last resort. Police officers killing suspects in the field of duty is clearly different to legally administered killing, which is where my main objection lies.

I think murderers and rapists should be locked up for the rest of their lives, with as much solitary confinement as is possible. That is the punishment I would want someone to face if they committed the crime you mentioned. I think death is quite an easy escape for a criminal, in some ways. It's inhumane to kill someone as a punishment (even if they are a horrendous criminal), but with death their suffering is over very quickly.

With questions like this, I don't think it is ever possible to bring justice to the victims. After someone like Hitler has committed their atrocities, I don't see what good killing them would do.

There's little protest from me on this point, since I see no reason to believe there is an afterlife. Britain is nominally a Christian country, but as you know, many people say they are Christians but do not actually know very much about their faith at all. Belief in the afterlife is in decline, but strangely there are many people who only believe in heaven, and not hell. I think the fact that many people, even many of those who call themselves Christians, do not believe in the afterlife in the same corporeal, physical way you do perhaps explains the anomaly you perceive here.

I've no doubt that the Shariah punishment for theft acts as an extremely powerful deterrent, I just think there have to be more humane ways of dealing with people. If you make a law saying everyone who uses chewing gum will be executed, then no-one will eat chewing gum. The punishment has to fit the crime - and I could not respect a system of law that entitled itself to mutilate people, no matter what they have done. Mutilation of another person is clearly a very unethical act, so even though you say it actually doesn't occur very often in Saudi Arabia, the point is it should not even be a legal option.

Yes, my views don't reflect the current laws in Britain, but they do reflect the opinion of a huge proportion of the British public. The 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act is famously Britain's most unpopular law, the most regularly broken law, and the law that is least enforced by the Police.

Yes, the prohibition of alcohol was a massive failure, and actually increased the consumption of alcohol, and also increased the danger involved because impurities were allowed to creep into the strong homemade brews that people resorted to. This is analogous to the current prohibition on drugs, which keeps the supply of drugs in the hands of criminals, many of whom are not averse to cutting rat-poison and other dangerous substances in with the drug to boost their profits. In an ideal world, if drugs were supplied by medical professionals working to fixed standards of dosage and quality, drug taking would be safer, and drug user numbers would decrease. (I should point out that by saying "drugs" here, I'm making a generalisation. There are many different types of drugs, as everybody knows, from aspirin to crack cocaine; I'm simply going over the basics of my position.)

Alcoholic people can ruin families, but the vast majority of people who drink alcohol do not become alcoholics. To ban all users because of the susceptibilities of a few seems unjust to me. Plus in Britain, alcohol is part of the nation's tradition. There are clearly good and bad aspects of this, and there are good and bad ways of dealing with drunken behaviour, but I don't see the need for an outright ban.

With regards to your points about music and artworks, a fundamental concept for Western artists is complete freedom of expression. This is the only way that art can progress and actually come to life. In states where the content of artworks is monitored and censored by the state, art as such can no longer exist. What remains is art as propaganda, which is very different from art indeed. This does not mean that Islamic art is not beautiful and intricate, or that it lacks value, but that its main function is to impress the Islamic tradition on the mind of the viewer. Great works of art in the Western world have been made under the direct control of powerful people, but after a while such an approach tends to make the art world stagnate and become repetitive.

Artworks in the Western world have frequently been both vicious or blasphemous. Satire has relied on both of these things, and they have produced some of the great works of Western literature (for example, the works of Juvenal, Martial, Jonathan Swift, Ezra Pound, William Burroughs). Whether somebody is offended or not has nothing to do with the quality of the artwork. Everyone has the right not to like a painting, book or piece of music, but that doesn't mean the artist should be restricted from producing such works.

It's clear we're not going to agree on this, I think because we have very different views about many things in the world. Thank you for giving your justifications for your views; I have now given mine.

Peace.