Secondly, there is no moral justification to criticize any group who captures and tortures American soldiers or civilians. Thousands of innocent civilians have been captured and tortured by the US government, making all Americans a target for retaliation.

Violent torture has never been proven to produce any useful information. What it is very good at producing is false confessions and inaccurate information as the torture victim attempts to tell their torturer whatever they want to hear to end their agony. Besides, the experiences of POWs will tell you that some people cannot be broken by torture, if they have a strong enough will then you can torture them to death and not get a scrap of useful information.

As for the Rev. Sheldon? The religious right disgusts me and has turned me quite strongly against religion in general. Considering the amount of blood that has been shed in whatever god's name and the surprising amounts of justification for holy war and attacking unbelievers in whatever holy book you want to read, organized religion lost any claim to speak on behalf of peace a long time ago. Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus, it's an imperial religion explicitly modeled on Roman government and designed to keep people dominated by a small group of ecclesiatical elites. I'm surprised that anyone is still surprised when Christian leaders support war, torture, violence, etc, given the long history of holy wars, crusades against foreign non-believers and heretical Christians, burning of witches, etc. The only way to be a Christian or Jew or Muslim against war, violence, torture, etc, is to accept that large parts of your holy book are complete and utter bullshit. You can cherry-pick out the pacifist parts, but there are even more parts advocating violence in the name of God.

I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own. ----- George Carlin