Why cutting the hand of the thief???

[Scimitar]

I'm satisfied in knowing that this really is Islamic law, or that it was at least. It's pretty much just the Salafists and the terrorists at this point. What I'm not satisfied with is the idea that this is, or ever was, a moral, just, or remotely acceptable penalty for this crime or for any other crime.

Cooterhein,

you're the type of person who feeds his bias. There is no getting through to you. You will ignore context and cotext as well as the actual anthropological and social factors of the period in question, which I find wholly dishonest of you and thus, conversing with you on this topic while knowing full well your ears are deaf, is not something which I think is a good use of my time.

So, I'll just humour you with the above instead.

Scimi

 

[Born_Believer]

Let me add that there's quite a bit of data to show that countries that have severe penalties, such as flogging, cutting of hands, death penalty, don't have lower crime rates. To the contrary, they often have ironically higher crime rates... food for thought.

which countries with these punishments (in a society where the police and teh criminal courts actually do their jobs to investigate and then apply such laws) actually have really high crime rates? Saudi Arabia and the UAE certainly don't have very high crime rates.

 

[cooterhein]

Cooterhein,

you're the type of person who feeds his bias. There is no getting through to you. You will ignore context and cotext as well as the actual anthropological and social factors of the period in question, which I find wholly dishonest of you and thus, conversing with you on this topic while knowing full well your ears are deaf, is not something which I think is a good use of my time.

So, I'll just humour you with the above instead.

Scimi

You may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of Natural Law. Here is a helpful link. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-theories/

If you are inclined to peruse some of this information, it should give you a general idea of where I'm coming from as I approach this sort of thing.

 

[fromelsewhere]

I agree with the other two people, I'd be interested in a link or two as well. I think I've vaguely heard this type of claim, in a general sense, but I can't recall ever having seen any data driven links to this point.

I decided to look at murder rate per capita and countries with death penalty. It turns out that there isn't a clear correlation either way between death penalty and murder rates. So I humbly concede that I talked a bit through my hat.

Some links:
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violent-crime/Murder-rate-per-million-people
https://fullfact.org/news/do-countries-death-penalty-have-higher-homicide-rates/

This one compares states in the U.S. with death penalty vs states in the U.S. without:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/det...alty-have-had-consistently-lower-murder-rates

In terms of murder per capita, Latin America and parts of Africa are the worst. Sudan is unsurprisingly very high up at 294.59 per 100,000. Pakistan is relatively high up with a murder rate of ~78.68 per 100,000 (death penalty country). Not too far off is the US with 42.01 per 100,000 (relatively high murder rate for a 'developed' country). Iran is midway with 30.12. Saudi Arabia does quite well actually at 10.23.

All in all, to be objective, the death penalty does not seem to reduce murder rates, but it does not make the murder rates go up neither. There seems to be a slight correlation between higher murder rates per capita and then death penalty, especially when we compare murder rates within the Unites States between states that have the death penalty vs states that don't.

As fullfact.org concludes:

"So it seems that those using global homicide rates to support either side of the death penalty debate need to justify why their findings are statistically significant. Our calculations suggest there isn't enough proof that capital punishment is or isn't an effective deterrent to murder."