Yeah, so THIS is disturbing.

Americans Learn To Stop Worrying And Love Torture « The Dish.

Apparently no one actually READ the report, and saw how completely ineffective torture was. And even if they did (which… no, no they didn’t), a vast majority can somehow reconcile their religious beliefs with the torture of other human beings, including acts that resulted in the deaths of innocent people.

Let me repeat that: innocent people were tortured TO DEATH. And for nothing: no credible, actionable facts ever came from that torture. It was useless. No one being tortured has any incentive to tell the truth: their only incentive is to try to figure out what the person torturing them wants to hear, what they already believe, and tell them that as quickly as possible before they DIE.

This isn’t even a debate on whether what the CIA did should be considered “torture” or not: apparently we (for the most part) agree that it was. But by a WIDE margin, those with religious beliefs taken from a peacenik retro-hippie (whose own torture and death led to centuries of hatred, oppression and atrocities committed against Jews) seem to agree that torture is just okee dokee and a fine core value for Americans to support.

Torture destroys the humanity of two people: the person being tortured, and the person doing the torturing. How so many can reconcile that with their religion is just another example of how the “moral absolute truth” that religion claims as its own private domain is nothing more than the world’s most flexible form of self-serving justification for whatever you already want to believe.

And yet those of us on the right side of that chart are the ones with no moral compass.