re cruel was re political atheists livesey solntze wpd sgi com jon livesey writes this whole thread started because of a discussion about whether or not the death penalty constituted cruel punishment which is forbidden by the us constitution yes but they didn t say what they meant by cruel which is why a you have the supreme court and b it makes no sense to refer to the constitution which is quite silent on the meaning of the word cruel they spent quite a bit of time on the wording of the constitution they picked words whose meanings implied the intent we have already looked in the dictionary to define the word isn t this sufficient oh but we were discussing the death penalty and that discussion resulted from the one about murder which resulted from an intial discussion about objective morality so this is already three times removed from the morality discussion actually we were discussing the mening of the word cruel and the us constitution says nothing about that but we were discussing it in relation to the death penalty and the constitution need not define each of the words within anyone who doesn t know what cruel is can look in the dictionary and we did keith
