Bridge of Reason

  And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.      LUKE 22:44   “GREATEST SUFFERING WAS IN GETHSEMANE. We speak of the passion of Jesus Christ. A great many people have an idea that when he was on the cross, and nails were driven into his hands and feet, that was his great suffering.  His great suffering was before he ever was placed upon the cross.  It was in the Garden of Gethsemane that the blood oozed from the pores of his body: ‘Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit-and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink.’ That was not when he was on the cross; that was in the garden. That is where he bled from every pore in his body” [1]   Peculiar to Mormonism is the idea that Jesus atoned for the sins of the world in the Garden of Get...

  Utah has become the first state in the USA to reinstate the firing squad to administer the death penalty. This is sometimes called fusillading, from the French fusil , rifle. This story has several layers, from the shortage of drugs for lethal injections, to the question of which method of killing a human being is most humane, to that of whether, as European society believes, execution is simply a barbaric throwback we don’t want in the 21st century. It is this last view in Europe that has created the shortage of drugs that European countries refuse to export to America. Fusillading as a form of execution has usually been practiced in a war setting, guns being the most easily available weapon for the job, and being the quickest and most humane method available in the circumstances. In America, apart from the Civil War, for which figures are unavailable, it is estimated that 142 men have been executed by this method since 1608. Utah’s record is most striking. Forty-four exec...