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Man raises demon in church. Is this a crime?
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We better bomb their asses.
Please stop.
And obviously demons have all been smoking a wicked bong since like, the 1600s and so can't be expected to desecrate a damn thing these days. So, this guys claim of summoning is about as valid as me claiming Brittney Spears is going to put out a good album.
White FC: 0819 3350 1787
If I don't shoot them now they'll try again and again until I die from magic.
And man every time some girl who hates some other girl from stealing her boyfriend says "I hope you die!" or "Drop dead!" we'll have to get the police.
No you don't. Earthly authority cannot protect one from the Almighty. If you are, say, a heretic or blasphemer to the church, your only recourse is to strike back against those who are immediately and constantly imperiling your existence both in the here and now and in the hereafter via a power that you can't hope to match.
You make an excellent argument for my serial self-defense against local priests.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
But they don't. Saying a thing is attempted murder doesn't make it attempted murder.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Well, it doesn't exist. So this isn't so much hiring a hitman as it is hiring a unicorn. A mean, armed-to-the-teeth unicorn, but a unicorn nonetheless.
I once dreamed that a dozen clones of my dad invaded the house and I had to kill them with a sword.
Clearly I'm guilty of mass attempted murder of a single person. It being my fevered and absurd imagination changes nothing.
Presumably killing the demon-summoner would make his chaotic overlord madder as well, if he existed, which he doesn't. But if you're invoking the law to punish these people there is presumably some social harm that you are preventing or punishing, right?
A hope is different from an actual attempt. Saying that you are going to kill a person isn't enough to count as an actual attempt. Most of this witchcraft bullshit involves a pointless amount of effort. Preachers also put in a lot of effort in wishing a person to deaf.
If someone expressed an open and honest desire to kill people I would be all for them being forced to go through a mental evaluation.
But if you say it, and do something totally random, that act becomes attempted murder?
That is what you're arguing for, here.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
But this just goes back to what I was saying earlier about intent vs. method. There's very little legal precedent for attempted murder by thought-conjuring, much in the same way there's very little precedent for attempted murder by marshmallows. The law doesn't waste too much time legislating contingencies for impossibilities.
Someone should be committed if they pose an immediate threat to themselves or others. Since God and the demon do not exist, such people do not satisfy this criteria. They're scary, but living with scary people is better than living in a society that punishes thoughtcrime and incarcerates a large percentage of its population (America already does this bad enough).
What about love charms? Do we have laws against mind control?
What recourse do I have but to eliminate the people holding the weapons? If not to protect me, then certainly to protect all the other friends of mine whom priests may one day target. My only hope to protect myself is to eliminate all Christians with access to high enough levels of influence with God that they can call for my death.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
I'm sorry, you seem to have confused mental evaluation with incarceration.
The social harm doesn't necessarily need to be actual deaths. There removal of people willing to attempt murder from society which suggests they may easily go on to use more useful methods and that they have a willingness to commit serious crimes, and various other social harms.
I don't think you could prove most preachers' actions are anything more than the usual idle threats unless there is good evidence that they took it seriously and considered it an act that would likely cause deaths instead of simply suggestions to God.
Obviously, me being Qingu, I would agree that every religious person ought to get themselves mentally evaluated, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the opinion that we ought to force people to get mentally evaluated based on nothing but their beliefs and ritual actions.
Outside of some crazy third-world hellhole, no one is in any danger of being charged with a crime for attempted summoning of a demon or any other such horseshit.
The free speech discussion was cooler, IMO.
Rigorous Scholarship
Show me what criteria you would use to distinguish between idle threats and serious business.
If you think you can summon a demon you should get your head checked. If you think that somebody else can hurt you by sicking a demon/god/the tooth fairy on you, then you should get your head checked.
More relevantly, there is no legal difference between your character trying to summon a demon to kill people and an evangelical Christian trying to pray to God to hasten the end times, which will kill people. You cannot have the first person forcibly taken and mentally examined while leaving the second person alone. That would be a double standard. And it would also be a pretty creepy extension of government authority into the realm of private belief.
Ohshit I just attempted murdered somebody
Rigorous Scholarship
And that's the crux of the argument right there. Why are we giving the parishioners a pass on their stupidity if we aren't doing the same for demon-boy?
Ultimately, it's a logistics thing.
Huge portions of the religious community are guilty of this same thing.
Even if we released all current inmates, we would not have enough jails to house them all.
Democracy.
And why would that matter to begin with? What if I believed I was capable of summoning a demonic killer by instant nonverbal incantation?
What you are doing is suggesting guidelines that are just completely untenable from a legal standpoint. There would be absolutely no way to enforce these guidelines in any consistent way.
That's not an answer.
Don't courts do this based on probability of actually succeeding?