A Skewed View of Justice

One of my biggest problems, personally, with Christianity per se is that of the injustice of it. There is the great injustice of belief=saved and unbelief=damned; no other qualifier other than belief. There is no basis on goodness or kindness or anything else. Any good teaching that Christianity has is overshadowed by the fact that you don't have to abide by those good teachings, just as long as you believe those teachings are written by God. If a Christian murders an atheist, the Christian goes to Heaven and the atheist is damned to Hell.

I think this has warped Ray's sense of justice, as revealed in his latest post:

If a criminal is shown mercy by a good judge and his case is dismissed, it wasn’t dismissed on the basis of the criminal’s goodness or his standard of ethics. It was entirely on the basis of the goodness of the judge.

I can't follow every case every where, but I did take law classes in college and read a bit on justice and can't say there is any provision for dismissing some case because the judge is merciful. Once the criminal is found guilty, the judge imposes sentence. A good judge chooses an appropriate sentence and punishment -- term and conditions of incarceration and/or service/fine. A bad judge chooses an inappropriate sentence and punishment. An exceptionally bad judge "dismisses" the case. I am sure in the final category the judge would not sit as judge for long. By any standard of law, God fails as a good judge.

When it comes to sentencing, a judge can show mercy and a good judge shows mercy where warranted. The criminal's goodness and standard of ethics most certainly come in to play here. The judge must consider the type of crime, the behavior and attitude of the defendant, the character of the defendant, the history of the defendant, etc. If the defendant is young, has no history, and seems to have made simply a stupid judgment call, a good judge indeed shows mercy. If the defendant is a career criminal, with a lengthy history, and the perpetrator of yet another violent crime, a good judge does not show mercy.

Any judge who would "dismiss" the case of a convicted murderer by showing mercy is a bad judge, not a good judge. The criminal has committed a crime and been convicted of it; a dismissal by the judge would be a crime against the victim.

If God were a good judge (which he may be, as the Christian representation of him may be wrong), he would judge based on the content of their life and composition of their heart. He would not say "you believed I existed, despite no evidence for it, therefore anything bad you did is irrelevant and you get rewarded" and "you did not believe I existed therefore, even though there was no evidence for it, anything good you did is irrelevant and you get punished." That would make him a bad judge.

The whole sum of Christian justice is that you are judged on a criterion completely immaterial and irrelevant to your crimes, that another can redeem you by taking on the punishment themselves, and that you are responsible for the crimes of those who have come before you. Those are the ethics of the average Christian.

Ray concludes his post appropriately by referring to it as "terrible justice." With that, I could not agree more.

An Unjust Lawgiver

I was asked once in a comment to my blog why, if I somehow came to know that the Christian God exists, do I qualify that I would believe in him, but not worship him. Ray's most recent post Heaven or Hell? sheds some light on it (along with his previous God is not All-Loving).

I remember being a freshman or sophomore in high school and was taking World History. I am not sure where the subject of American Law came up, but it was in juxtaposition to other countries where laws are arbitrary, unwritten, or undisclosed. She commented that, in America, not knowing the law is not an excuse for violating it; in America, we have a justice system wherein all the laws are written down and available to the public (voluminous though they may be).

God has fashioned himself after America by also writing all his laws down in a book -- very just, right? Some of them, like slavery, subjugation of women, etc, have been repealed (due to secular modernity) but the law has not been updated to reflect this nor does it have an amendment process. But I digress.

He has written them down, being the just god that God is. He has, however, failed to make them available to all those who are subject to the laws (every person who has and ever will live). And if you fail to receive a copy of these laws, through no fault of your own, you are to be tortured for all eternity, regardless of whether or not you lived your life better than those who are getting into Heaven?

Some child in a miserable third world country and who never even heard the name Jesus Christ and never even knew that such a book of laws existed, starves to death -- literally starves to death -- then gets tortured for all eternity?

This... this is justice? This is how a just God behaves? Either we are to believe that a perfect being, who is perfectly just, would commit to his creations such atrocities, or we are to believe that the book has been corrupted and perverted over the MILLENIA (regardless of whether it was divinely inspired or not in the first place). What greater injustice could there be than to infinitely punish someone for a finite violation of a law that a Lawgiver never gave them?

I thought, for sure, all of the Christian commenters would attack Ray on his post. Some did, but some took a more peculiar approach:

Some have said, "Um, okay, no one's ever told me that before and I've been fine so far, so..."

I don't think any of us can say that we have absolute knowledge that anyone who has died and gone to Hell never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel.

Let's just avoid the hard questions altogether by pulling out the gem of absolute knowledge? Someone has listened to a bit too many Ray-tracts. There are several things wrong with this, but I will point out two problems with this statement:

Absolute knowledge of the antithesis

Your claim is that you know that no one has died without hearing the Gospel. Such a claim requires absolute knowledge. How dare you make such a claim! You are not omniscient jesusrulzme, only God is. Therefore, you don't really know... you are agnostic (ignorant).

Hypothetical question

This doesn't even require any evidence that there has ever been a case where no one has heard the Gospel (though I could make irrefutable arguments to such an end). It, like my third world country child, is taken as a purely hypothetical question:

A hypothetical question is one that is answered only in terms of validity, not soundness. Thus the question is designed to make a number of assumptions, and be answered as if those assumptions are true.

Based on the hypothetical question that a person died without ever hearing the Gospel, Ray (speaking for God) casts them into the fiery bowels of Hell.


Others on this topic
The Raytractors (Clostridiophile)
Flinging Dust