ive noticed that a lot of pro-life people are also pro war

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I did NOT know that...very interesting. This is roughly my own feeling on the subject.

"But I just find it ridiculous that people find it hypocritical to be pro-life and for the death penalty."

It depends on one's reason for being pro-life.
If you feel that life is a sacred gift from God, and His to give and take, then a criminal's life is also sacred.
So, some people who are pro-life and in favor of the death penalty ARE hypocrites.
Not all of them, but some.

That depends on a proper understanding of scripture and what God demands.

Yes, all human life is sacred.

Yes, sacred, human life is a gift from God.

Yes, life is His to give and take. Note that Sodom and Gomorrah were punished directly by God's vengeance, not through a human show of force. Vengeance belongs to the Lord.

Yes, a criminal's life is also sacred.

HOWEVER, you have to understand all this in the context of God's sense of justice (and vice versa, that is, God's justice in the context of the sanctity of life).

Justice demands fairness. Criminals must be held accountable for their actions and charged for their crimes, incurring a debt against those they harm and/or society as a whole. Biblical justice was based on what we call lex talionis. For the most part, this is the same standard of justice in the present-day western world. In the Bible, it's "eye for an eye" and so on. Those who administered law according to Torah recognized that an EXACT measure-for-measure payment for debts incurred by committing crimes was destructive. For example, if you injure someone's hand and cost them their own productivity, losing your own hand as punishment costs you a degree of personal usefulness. The Israelites didn't think of a person's usefulness in terms limited to only himself or his family, but rather to the entire community. Having one person missing a hand was bad enough, so it made little sense to return the same injury. It made MORE sense to attach a cost to the hand and have the person either pay the debt if he had the means to or to work off the debt. It worked in principle the same way personal injury lawsuits work today, and note that incarceration is unnecessary in repayment of the debt and is actually a hindrance to it.

That raises the question of repayment for loss of life. In the case of murder, there is no monetary price one can possibly place on an innocent person's life. Only life can be returned for life. And so while life is sacred, even the life of a murderer, justice still demands the murderer's life.

In the Bible, murder is not the only crime that demands the death of the criminal. The other crimes mentioned demanding life have to do with threats on a person's life, including sexual crimes in that there exists the possibility that a woman's children do not belong to her husband. Ancient Israelites did not have a concept of an afterlife in which the human soul continued to exist, so as long as a man had a line of sons who still bear his name he was still considered to be alive even after he "rested with his fathers." For them, sexual impurity and promiscuous behavior was just as bad as attempted murder for that reason, hence the rationale for requiring the life of an adulterer and any women complicit in sexual behavior with anyone but her husband. What's interesting here is if a woman's husband died childless, she was to have children for him by his nearest relative--the child for all practical purposes was assumed to be the child of her former, deceased husband.

Going on Biblical principle, people have the right to seek relief from those who threaten their existence, and I can't find anywhere in the Bible that distinguishes between an intentional threat and an unintentional threat. An unborn child obviously cannot make an intentional threat against the mother's life and is therefore technically innocent. In the Bible, you could be put to death for murder. Manslaughter is not murder, though. Someone who has committed involuntary manslaughter, once it has been determined, can seek relief by going into the Biblical equivalent of "house arrest." But set so much as a foot outside a city of refuge before the death of the high priest at the time of the ruling and any avenger of blood has the right, free and clear, to take your life. In our case there is little realistic recourse for the unborn. I think parents have the responsibility to protect life as much as reasonably possible and avoid abortion even in difficult pregnancies. I just fail to see how one can morally fault a woman for going through with abortion if there is no alternative that would save both her life AND the life of the baby.

As I recall, in the New Testament, Christ was more eager to turn the other cheek than the Old Testament writers. I don't know what he would have thought about capital punishment, because I don't recall him ever commenting on it, but I don't see him as advocating slicing off hands and gouging out eyes.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Baiting much are you? You know very well the exact verse you allude to in Matthew 5, and you want to have someone contradict you with it, don't you? Why?

So you are saying that God did not order death for adulterers and homosexuals, but it was a thing from the israelites instead? well, that is written in the Bible, and the Bible is taken as God's inspirational work, unless you are not a biblical literalist or have any different interpretation for that. Heck, changing interpretations of scripture to save religion from being falsified isn't a new thing.

I presume you're referring to Mathew 5, verses 21 and 22. I read how Jesus says anyone who commits murder has to be judged for his crime. But he also says that anyone who is angry with his brother is guilty of murder in his heart.
Yeah, okay.
And in the same chapter, while he says he had not come to abolish the law, he also said he had come to fulfill it. The understanding of that is we all live under grace now.
I still don't get where he's advocating the slicing off of hands and gouging out of eyes. And from the picture drawn of Jesus in all the Gospels, I can't imagine him as advocating such a thing. Otherwise, he'd have let that adulteress get stoned to death.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Those throwing the stones would have been judged according to their own measure, and yet to the merciful they will be shown mercy.

And THAT is my point!

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Wow, you sound really surprised. Would you like me to disagree with you instead?

In all honesty, I had thought you were heading in a different direction.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Quite simply by looking at life from a completely self centred perspective which they justify through simplistic sloganeering and the great fallback of ignorant hypocrisy. The logic seems to be 'if I reduce the debate to only crediting my own selective arguments I win' ... and this is what we call our muppet show.....

peace j

Which direction was that?

It seemed to me you were trying to espouse the notion of an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth mentality, with none of the grace and forgiveness of the New Testament. If I was mistaken, I apologize.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

There were some hints of forgiveness in the Old Testament, really the Old Testament is not truely contradicted in the New Testament. The Old Testament in a way is like setting up rules and that breaking laws have consequences, the New Testament shows people that yeah there are laws and laws should be followed, but people should also be willing to show mercy.

Yes, so it is.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer