Another take away from the recent Special Day Assembly was how the speakers kept demeaning the whole concept of prisons as institutions for criminals. According to the speaker, the justice system was a TOTAL failure, and prisons are an EPIC failure, because ALL they do is teach criminals even more about crime, and they ALL come out of prison worse than before. (J-dubs love speaking in absolutes)
"How superior Jehovah's law given to the nation of Israel was! There was no such thing as prisons!"
Oh, yes..how superior..they had no need for prisons because they simply KILLED everyone for even minor infractions of the law..If someone so much as picked up sticks on a particular day of the week, they were brutally stoned to death by a mob! How superior!
Now, I am not an opponent of capital punishment. I think in some limited circumstances, capital punishment is justified - for instance, when a shockingly heinous act is commited, or if a serial killer has slaughtered multiple victims...etc..The evidence should be overwhelming before such a decision is made, and I feel both a jury, and a subsequent panel of judges should determine if the death penalty is merited, only after the person has been convicted of the crime in a court of law.
Yet, witnesses love to belittle our justice system, and the concept of incarceration all together. They are so fanatical, that they are actually in favor of the death penalty for even the most minor crimes! At least that's they way their argument pans out.
When confronted with this savage brutality depicted by Levitical law, most witnesses and other apologists resort to the following argument:
"Well, the punishments may have been harsh (boy is that an understatement!), but they worked extremely well as a deterrent, and these punishments seldom ever had to be enforced. Bet ya no girls had sex before marriage, and no one did this or no one did that, etc..."
Yet, humans have not changed. Human nature remains the same today. If something that is forbidden or prohibited that happens to be very desired (such as drugs, alcohol, sex, etc), people will continue to do it, only instead of practicing it openly, they're driven underground and practice in secrecy.
Humans have two overriding instinctive drives that cannont be supressed...Eating to keep one's self alive, and sex for the propogation of the species.
If you forbid sex, people will still have sex..they will only do so in secret..if the penalty for sex is death..people will STILL have sex..only live in morbid fear before, while, and after doing it...(very much like witnesses today)....
So, ancient Israel must have been a society of morbidly fearful, repressed individuals, with guilt-ridden consciences...Death awaited anybody who made the slighest mistake...What a wonderful society to live in!!
Not too different from the Orwellian world of JW land...if the fear of God striking you down for sin, or the threat of the sudden and imminent outbreak of Armageddon, complete with angels descending from heaven to slit your throat and hurl fire balls at you isn't enough to scare you straight...the very real threat of being discovered and shunned by all friends and family usually does the trick...