I was shocked to see that religious christians support torture in greater numbers than others. It got me thinking. Why would christians, especially the fundamentalists, support torture? It goes against everything that Jesus would say. WWJD? Not torture!
Unfortunately, it turns out that the Bible itself contains numerous passages encouraging the faithful to torture their enemies.
Torture expunges evil:
The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly.
Torture is only a crime if death occurs:
And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished.
David's actions brought the approval of god:
And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon.
What do you think is going on in all of those despicable Left Behind books?
And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
But finally, there is the ultimate torture perpetrated by God, and described in great detail by the Bible. Anyone who does not believe in God will receive this punishment. Anyone who goes against God's will, will receive this torment. I refer, to Hell.
For this I can only refer to James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, which has the scariest description of hell I've ever read.
Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.
A punishment which makes you feel like you're dying but can be repeated forever and ever... Waterboarding.
Bush prayed to God every day for guidance. This is the guidance that he got.
UPDATE: A few points that I'm finding a lot in the comments.
(1) Fundamentalist and evangelical christians believe in Biblical Literalism, which means that everything in the Bible must be taken at face value, no matter how fucked up it is.
(2) The modern notion of Christian Hell is primarily a New Testament teaching.
[Hell] is most frequently described as a place of fiery torment (eg. Matthew 5:22, 18:8-9; Mark 9:43-49)
The idea of hell (as understood in Christianity) is virtually absent from the Old Testament, which has very little to say about the afterlife at all.
(3) Finally, I assert that Hell is torture.