Via Chris, Andrew Sullivan has a link to an alarming Pew poll indicating that American Christians (well Catholics and white Protestants anyway) are actually more likely to approve of torture than their secular (atheist or agnostic) fellow citizens. Way to go, team.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there a well-known story about Roman soldiers torturing a suspected “insurgent” in an occupied Middle Eastern country about 2,000 years ago? I’m just sayin’.
What strikes me as also very tragic is that we seem (in any religious tradition) to distinguish between war and torture. The truth is that war IS torture. To ask young people to be a part of unrelenting carnage, to go kill people and to fear for their own lives every second is to put them through torture. Witness the number of PTSD cases among returning military. The torture done by soldiers is an extension of the torture that we put them through by sending them into the insanity that is war. War itself is torture. Torture will not end until we end war. Lord, let us wake up to what we are doing!
A Thinking Reed 
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