Man have some of us (me included) have gone way off topic.
But as said before the topic was not intended to discuss 'if those are now proper ways to kill people' - because the Trump administration proposed it.
The topic was created to find out how far some of the people in here would go to defend amoral actions, just because they believe that Trump has put them into action for a 'higher' reason.
And why.
With the same certainty, that gasing people is right, it was pronounced, that half of the senate is occupied by unethical (because not following the correct religion) people ("Just as Satan wants").
And what followed then was an exploration of the contemporary 'image of satan' in the catholic church.
We also explored, how 'religious law' would look like - because as contemplated, its the only 'moral one' ("Its those progressives, that prevent it from becoming state law."). And looked at a history of how certain religious dogmas came to be.
And we looked at the history of civil and criminal law in the US.
Entirely on topic as far as I'm concerned.
I dont need a discussion about your opinion on "if gassing people is now ok", because the Trump administration made it so. That would be useless..
(We also had a few people trying to flog conspiracy theories in here - if the current administration needs to kill a few people on death row sooner (because they know too much), so they 'just made a new law' - because everyone knows, that people on death row talk to the media on a regular basis, and often change the entire course society is taking just announcing their truths. (About why they killed or raped a person, I presume?) But that was just picking up the mood in here, and running with it - I guess...
)
edit:
Dante Alighieri wrote this, his most famous work, in Italian. More specifically, he wrote it in what was then a Tuscan dialect of Italian.
This is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, most serious writing in Dante's days was done in Latin. For someone to write a piece of real literature in a vernacular language was a big step.
Secondly, Italian had not yet been standardized into one language at that point. By writing this book, Dante helped make his dialect into the basis of what became a national Italian language.
https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-language-did-dante-write-thedivine-comedy-135455
Isnt that sweet? Dante wrote Inferno - for the people!
In fact "Inferno" was the first catholic text of importance accessible to everyday people:
Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first in
Roman Catholic Western Europe (among others such as
Geoffrey Chaucer and
Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of
liturgy, history and scholarship in general, but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience, setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. However, unlike Boccaccio,
Milton or
Ariosto, Dante did not really become an author read across Europe until the Romantic era. To the Romantics, Dante, like
Homer and
Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who set his own rules, created persons of overpowering stature and depth, and went far beyond any imitation of the patterns of earlier masters; and who, in turn, could not truly be imitated.[
citation needed] Throughout the 19th century, Dante's reputation grew and solidified; and by 1865, the 600th anniversary of his birth, he had become established as one of the greatest literary icons of the Western world..
src:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri
And 100 years after that the encyclical was produced by the vatican.
What a deeply, deeply moral person! A divine poet! (As the encyclical says.) Because people took what he wrote literally. For centuries.
When you think of Hell, what images fill your imagination? Your mind might first conjure up a monstrous satanic figure, and then you may further fill in the picture with other beastly devils that roam around torturing damned sinners, who in turn cry out with pain and regret.
And how about the better parts of the Christian afterlife; how do you imagine them? Perhaps the saved are singing songs of joy, angels are fluttering about, and throngs of holy men and women converse and worship God. To some degree, such imaginings have their origins in the Bible. However, in the Christian West, conceptions of the afterlife evolved quite a bit over the centuries. One important late medieval figure who played a key role in shaping the cultural concepts of life after death—even to the present day—is Dante Alighieri, the Florentine poet who was born in the 1260s and died in 1321.
In his epic poem known as the Divine Comedy, Dante creates a fictional version of himself who travels through the farthest reaches of hell (Inferno), purgatory (Purgatorio) and paradise (Paradiso). Many details that he describes along this journey have left a lasting impression on the Western imagination for more than half a millennium. In fact, the rather stereotypical images of the afterlife I described earlier are all represented in his work. But Dante also found novel ways to portray already well-formed concepts, thus further solidifying them while also reshaping them into new guises that would become familiar to countless generations that followed.
Because of Dante's image-driven descriptions, many artists have sought to illustrate his text through a wide variety of media. Almost immediately after his work was completed, illuminators created images to accompany manuscripts of his masterpiece. More than forty illuminated manuscripts of the Divine Comedy were created before the advent of the printing press (in the late 15th century).
src:
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanit...dy-in-late-medieval-and-early-renaissance-art
edit: Dantes enduring influence on christianity:
https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/dantes-enduring-influence
And thats Dante and the origin of popular catholic moral theory and law, explained using mostly christian sources.
If you want a moral philosophy interpretation - start here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dante/
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Dante's+Deadly+Sins:+Moral+Philosophy+In+Hell-p-9780470671054
If you want to get a notion how "universal morals" are used in political organizing, read this:
Now, of course, Dante’s take on things isn’t the only game in town. A paper which I have repeatedly discussed (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2013) has a different take on the issue of
morality. That take is that morality serves, more or less, a coordination function for punishers: the goal is to get most people in agreement about who should be punished in order to avoid the fighting costs that are associated with disagreement in that realm. In order for this coordination function to work, however, the pair suggest that morality needs to function on the basis of acts; not the
identity of the actors. As DeScioli & Kurzban (2013) put it:
“The dynamic coordination theory of morality holds that evolution favored individuals equipped with moral intuitions who choose sides in conflicts based, in part, on “morality” rather than relationship or status”
Identity shouldn’t come into play when it comes to moral condemnation, then; it is “[crucial that the signal] must not be tied to individual identity”. As Monty Python put it, “
let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who“, and let’s not do that because killing should be equally as wrong no matter who does it and who ends up on the receiving end.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pop-psych/201403/dante-s-inferno
So "morality needs to function on the basis of acts; not the
identity of the actors." blending together social classes, and people regardless of motives.
Which is in direct conflict, with people wanting to find 'gasing others' moral, just because 'Trump said it was OK'. What follows is, that those people are inherently immoral.
Thats the conflict I'm interested in.
