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Talon, @
Zarvan: most people here understand that society deals with crimes against its members by punishing the perpetrator and aims for deterrence as well as reform of the criminal (although revenge used to be a factor, much less so now)
Most of us are arguing how such harsh punishment for such crime as 'theft', sits with the generally accepted opinion : 'punishment should be proportional to crime' .
If you want to achieve such proportion(but still want to chop off hands for theft), you will need to give death penalty for awful lot of crimes (which used to be the case quite long a go). How is it going to be fair?(that murder gets same punishment as other criminals with less sever crime).
We are asking for balance between safety and wellbeing of law abiding citizen and rights of criminals, sharia goes to the other extreme. I personally wont want somebody's hand chopped off just for stealing something from me.