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I guess God is not obligated to be the most humane.
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Morning from the foggy Central Coast.
After sleeping on it (and wishing I were waking up in an area with new species to be discovered every day) it occurs to me that with the different views of continuity that come with the territory of people who range from Baptist to Theonomist and various shades in between, it seems deja vu all over again to spend too much time wrangling about which laws to keep. And now we are peeling away another layer down to what the proper modern criminal penalty is for those laws.
So, I will just ask you if it is at all possible for your view of "humane" to be less humane than God's, even though it goes against the grain you've grown up with.
And to Chris, do you really think that here in modern America whipping as a penalty for stealing is a better punishment than paying restitution, or was this perhaps an area that certain Puritans were culturally myopic?
In Africa I had a klepto in my crew. We finally caught him when he stole a beer from a woman, and as was the practice, I asked him if he wanted me to judge the case or the police. As was the practice, he chose me, and I took three times the value of the beer from his pay, and gave it to the woman in front of the whole farm, while quoting the relevant Scripture. And he went six months before he stole again, and that's a long time for a klepto in Africa.