Re: the part I put in bold. SO TRUE, man. I've alluded to how fraggin crazy my family is... I've got 5 siblings-in-law, 3 are felons (1 for ACCOMPLICE TO MURDER), and one is currently awaiting trial for beating someone up with a tire iron while he was high. Obviously, the parents are not thrilled about that... but the amount of crap we took for not having a wedding, the shaming we get for not attending church weekly, that we don't participate in grace at family dinners when we go down south for visits is insane. I love them... they grew up dirt poor with no prospects... how my fiance was able to get out of that Appalachian s-hole and get a law degree and PhD is beyond me (there's the compassion!

).... but the last people who should be judging our actions are them.
The show "Midnight Mass" made me think about this a lot. Religious people who use religion as a crutch or a way to try to demonstrate their own morality are some of the most annoying kinds of people. You either do or don't do good things. Research pretty much unequivocally shows that religion doesn't affect morality in a positive way and if anything might have a
slightly negative effect depending on how you measure it.
I think a lot of this argument comes down to semantics. We haven't really established a working definition of what we're referring to with compassion. There is definitely a lot of tough guys in the world that say "throw the book at 'em!" that would never follow through if it was someone in their family being treated that way. I'm pretty strongly in favor of fairly long sentences and a well-funded restorative justice program.