If God made me this way, how can it be a sin? If I was born this way, how can I be punished for it? What kind of “justice” punishes me for something I have no control over?
Freedom of choice is often illusory. Modern science has collected reams of evidence showing that we’re often unaware of our own limited free will. Shysters and seductresses have known this for thousands of years, but empirical experiments in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology are finally getting thick-headed scientists to admit the fact. The “choices” we make are influenced by genetics, upbringing, and the opportunities available to us — and all sorts of environmental and biological factors that we’re completely unaware of.
Strict materialism argues that everything is predetermined. Does that mean that nobody is culpable, or that we need to stop punishing people? Let’s look at what Christianity says, and let’s look at how things might play out in secular jurisprudence.
Christianity
The Bible says that all humans are born under the curse of sin, and deserve death. You’re condemned from birth for something you didn’t do. Furthermore, nothing you can do can redeem yourself. No good deeds can save you. Clearly, the God of Christianity has no problem declaring people culpable for things that they have no choice over.
Likewise, pre-Christian Judaism declared the Jewish people to be “chosen” of God, and most other races condemned, despite Israel’s repeated history of chasing after false Gods. Being born a Hittite was a death sentence, even if you were a model of virtue and never participated in your countrymen’s sins.
Secular Justice
Modern secular justice focuses primarily on deterrence, rehabilitation, or restitution; and almost never on retribution. And in all cases, much lip service is payed to culpability. But in practice, nobody really cares. Take the case of two young British children who savagely tortured and murdered another. All evidence suggests that these young murderers were irreparably damaged by their upbringing, and were almost guaranteed to murder. But nobody is saying that they should be given the same freedoms or rights as the rest of us.
Given enough details about someone, we can often predict the odds of them committing certain crimes with great accuracy. In fact, for some scenarios, brain scans can predict how a person will behave in the future even better than the person himself can predict. Does that mean that we’ll let people off the hook for crimes since, “We knew you were going to do it anyway”? Hardly! It’s just as likely that we’ll start imprisoning people preemptively for crimes they haven’t committed yet.
The Outer Darkness, With Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth
Christians are commanded to love the last, the lost, and the least. We are to visit the sick and the prisoners. But most people want to exclude themselves from anyone who isn’t healthy, young, sexy, or powerful. We avoid sick or diseased people. We don’t care if it’s their fault; we just don’t want it to rub off on us. We paid a lot of lip service to “desegregation” back in the 60s, but this seems to have been a completely losing battle. Read this story about the East St. Louis school districts:
Anyone who visits in the schools of East St. Louis, even for a short time, comes away profoundly shaken. These are innocent children, after all. They have done nothing wrong. They have committed no crime. They are too young to have offended us in any way at all. One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long — and with so little public indignation. Is this just a strange mistake of history? Is it unusual? Is it an American anomaly?
This same story plays out all around America, and around the world, every day. Tell me that these children deserve it, or tell me how you’re going to stop parents in “The Bluffs” from excluding the kids from the bottoms and banishing them to the outer darkness. If neurobiology proves anything about the human brain, it will be that our tendency to exclude or punish the weakest and most diseased is an unalterable part of human nature. Sure, there will be lots of lip service paid to the ideas of equal justice, but until you can enforce desegregated schooling anywhere in the world, it’s all posturing.
No Comments