Explaining Opposing Opinions
Order Instructions:
Use as the background for your final essay in the course.
Torture: Torture is the intentional infliction of pain to kill, punish, intimidate, or gather information. It has ancient origins, and it continues today. The Greeks and Romans, practiced torture to gather information about crimes, and throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church tortured nonbelievers and heretics. In the early American colonies, accused witches, some of them harmless midwives, were tortured and killed. Not until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a time of aggressively secular thinking, did the widespread use of torture begin to be seriously challenged. Current United States and international laws forbid torture, but since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and subsequent revelations of abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military and others, torture has again become a subject of debate in the United States.