...lives after them, while the good is oft interred with their bones."

I want to continue the conversation....

My belief is that there are people who do evil things, but who are human and know the difference between right and wrong. They know what the right actions and words would be but choose, for whatever reasons--childhood history, mental illness, coercion, etc.--to do the harmful thing.

I also believe that there are a few--not many in our population of 6 billion and counting--who may have human form, but are not human. They do not have souls (maybe there aren't enough to go around for all the children who are born? Maybe the Spirit of Life just does not manifest in them?)--and they are truly deeply evil, doing horrible acts of unspeakable cruelty, unless they were conditioned young (think Pavlov) to behave as if they were human.

[I use "soul" loosely; that's another conversation.]

For some of these non-humans, the conditioning holds and they seem superficially ordinary; for others, they never were conditioned properly in the first place or the conditioning doesn't hold under stress and their actions blot the pages of history past (we seem to read more about evil persons than good ones) and the current headlines as well.

We don't have a right to make the decision who these non-humans are and whether they should be terminated (I oppose the death penalty)--who are we to judge--but we certainly do have the right, the obligation even, to incarcerate them or in some way make sure they are separated from the people they wish to harm.

This isn't Buddhism, by the way, just my own personal philosophy. Some human-shaped creatures aren't human and don't have souls: they are deeply evil, they must be restrained/incarcerated lest they do great harm.

What do you think?