Torture? Moi?

Bad news: Bush claims waterboarding isn't torture.
Good news: But it probably saved lives.

I already discussed this issue, at BNN, from two points of view: What would you do if it saved your child's life, and what would you do if you were a true Christian who seeks to obey God's law.

This question is easy for those who never were in such a situation, and there is simply no easy answer. However there is a right answer: Follow God's law.

and as I wrote earlier:

The naive say: no torture, because we can get confessions without it. Alas, often this is not so.

The pragmatic will say: No, we need to save innocent lives. Alas, often the innocent are tortured, and the police end up corrupted.

But the Christian says: we are only responsible for our own deeds, not the deeds of others. We may not do a bad deed even if we are fairly sure that good will come of it. So we cannot abort a child whose mother is in distress, nor can we steal because we are hungry, nor can we harm a prisoners who is helpless.

We will act ethically, knowing that even if short term harm comes from someone else’s deeds, because the first rule is to obey God. God is the one in charge, not us.

So if the Filipino police had acted as better Christians, and not used torture, perhaps the suspect would have confessed.

But what if he hadn’t, and the Pope was wounded and killed, along with dozens of pilgrims?

Yet even here, a Christian would trust that God would make good come out of this evil in the long run.

Perhaps the world would have destroyed a budding Al qaeda years before the larger number deaths of September 11, and all the terror attacks in London, Madrid, Mumbai would not have occured.

But there is another problem with using torture: people lie. They will confess to anything, and victims are known to make up wild stories to stop the pain. The US security system, knowing the Filipino police used torture, did not take the evidence seriously. The plot uncovered was so grandiose that the US security establishment assumed that the suspect had made it up under torture…

So although the information which was shared with the American government, it was ignored…until the second plane hit the World Trade Towers…

The ultimate irony…

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Right now, I'm reading the part of Tom Shippey's book on Tolkien that discusses the way evil is portrayed in Lord of the Rings which often refers back to Boethius' book on the Consolation of Philosophy. The Tolkien professor's lectures and college course often brings up the same thing: the idea that nothing is evil in the long run, since God will arrange for good to come out of it.

In the west, folks think they have everything under control, but in the east, there is a deeper reality, and so we think "behala na" or "Inshalla".

But pre Enlightenment Christians understood this too.
Pope Leo the Great wrote:

Gratitude
is one of the great blessings of life. it enables us to look at
everything as a potential gift from God. When we realize that nothing in
... life is really bad for us, we have finally learned to be happy.

That thought could be written by Boethius, or Buddha.