nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

But apparently it’s fondly remembered in some quarters.

A survey by the Pew Research Center in October showed that 15 percent of Americans believe torture is “often” justified, and another 31 percent believe it is “sometimes” justified. Add to that another 17 percent who said it is “rarely” justified, and you have two out of three Americans justifying torture under certain circumstances. Only 32 percent said it is “never” justified, while another 5 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.

But the portion of Catholics who justify torture is even higher, according to the survey. Twenty-one percent of Catholics surveyed said it is “often” justified and 35 percent said it is “sometimes” justified. Another 16 percent said it is “rarely” justified, meaning that nearly three of four Catholics justify it under some circumstances. Four percent of Catholics “didn’t know” or refused to answer and only 26 percent said it is “never” justified, which is the official teaching of the church.

via.I tend to take the view that toleration of torture is a pathological expression of trust in authority, so it's not altogether surprising that it should be greater amongst adherents of authoritarian and/or hierarchical belief systems. I'd expect support for torture to be generally greater amongst the religious than the non-religious, irrespective of formal doctrines.

Still, it’s pretty chilling how many people apparently feel that torture is “often” justified.

Comments

[rollo]

Unsupported, unresearched, not even anecdotal really, but I think there's a direct correlation between corporal punishment and the death penalty. The whole concept of traumatic punishment - where the punished child is driven into an altered state by authoritarian violence - produces minds that "know" that's what's suppposed to happen when someone does something bad. They should get hurt.
This often happens early enough that the children are conditioned before their conscious of what took place. And the tones of voice that led to the conditioning moments then become enough to reaffirm the behavioral mod. People don't know why they know that punishment is important and right, they just know it.
It's tangential but on the same grid - the acceptance of someone else's suffering, even advocacy for it, when they might possibly be guilty or connected to someone guilty or have some aspect of being tarnished somehow by "wrong" or "evil" or "darkness". Pavlovian colors in the mind's instructed pathways.
These things seem to be the way the world is, to those damaged by them and then healed, partially, into functionality. Because that is the way the world is, for them.