You are justifying the punishment, you are not talking about justice, here.

Well yeah, that's what I thought the discussion was about. As I've said, justice is vague, subjective, and relative.

the point of a program like AA is to make people accept their failures and move on: religions tend to have a monopoly on that and group mentality helps to drive it home. Unconstitutional, perhaps; useful, occasionally; but if you don't get your mind away from addiction, then you will likely go back.

So it's acceptable to force people to convert to a religion, even though that goes against the core tenet of the U.S.'s law and moral framework? You know that A.A. is extremely ineffective to the tune of only 5% of people who are forced in actually stop drinking, right? Why is it acceptable to destroy someone's mind utterly, to empty it out and replace its contents with what you want inside, but it's not OK for a country like Iran to do that to someone's body? Your mind is the most important organ you have, it literally is you yet you think it's OK to mutilate it? How is that not an example of the "eye for an eye" mentality you are so vehemently opposed to, or arguably worse?

If Iran wants to consider itself a modern society with the ability to be civilized, they need to figure out non-barbaristic punishments to deter crime, otherwise, they are just proving that their government can't enforce societal order - instead, society is behaving like animals.

Well, that's accepting the premise that such punishments are quote-unquote "uncivilized", or that there is an objective definition as to what makes a society civilized or not. If we accept that the word means "having an advanced or humane culture, society, etc.", then Iran most certainly would be "civilized" for doing this as opposed to having the guy raped, tortured, beaten and slowly killed over years in a dark dank third-world prison on account of the punishment being inherently more merciful than that. What is calling a country uncivilized for not following your moral standards, then, except a meaningless insult that doesn't help the discussion?