Justice for Teroroists?

I’m sure the events in Boston this week are the basis for blogs and commentary worldwide. What can one lonely blog like this add? Probably nothing new. Yet from a Christian perspective there is always something fresh to consider.

Justin Trudeau’s remarks this week have stirred up controversy. His reasoning for the bombers’ actions was based on them feeling excluded from Canadian community. Subsequent facts indicate they were well established within their societal framework after all.

Never-the-less, the liberal idea that perpetrators of this sort are victims is a common reason given for their actions, usually leaving the real victims of the attack sidelined. In fact, I’m sure we’ll hear much less about those bereaved or injured in Monday’s blast than about the bombers themselves.

Of course, we are all victims of some sort, but few of us resort to life destroying acts. Our awareness of our vulnerability should, and does, lead to empathy for others, not violence against them. The Bible exhorts us to love those we may consider our enemies.

So how do we figure justice for the remaining bomber? He, like his victims, was created in the image of God, and as such should be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. I’m glad that western courts, imperfect though they are, seek to ensure guilt before judgment—a legacy of Christian influence.

But justice also requires that the penalty fits the crime, inherent in the idea of an eye for an eye, and life for life. That regulation required just punishment but also denied escalation of revenge as well as. If someone knocked one of my teeth out, I could not knock out two in response!

I can’t help musing on where we have come in regard to the death penalty. In many western nations it has been removed completely, capital crimes now often penalized by some years in prison. This devalues the life of the victim to just the length of the violator’s sentence.

By contrast, we terminate the life of the person in the womb for any and every reason, euthanize those near death despite their innocence, and increasingly kill infants who survive the torture of forced abortion—capital “punishment” for the innocent is alive and well in Canada.

We also need to separate forgiveness from consequences. It may well be that one of the bombers’ maimed victims is a Christian, willing to forgive his assailant and cancel the debt to himself, reflecting God’s cancelled debt against us. But the bombers’ debt to society remains.

God demands, “from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man,” and the Bible forecasts that “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:5–6). Human courts derive their authority from God (Romans 13:2).

The first bomber met his death while continuing the rampage he began. The second was hunted down to face the consequences of his crime. Will the punishment fit the crime? I doubt it. From past experience, sympathy for the perpetrator will outweigh justice for the victims.

Why the Commandments?

In our secular society, the guiding rule for moral behaviour used by communities and courts is avoiding harm to another. Similarly, some of the Ten Commandments provide this protection: do not murder, steal or falsely testify; these protect others from harm.

Yet several commandments are not defined by the harm principle. For instance, no human, not even God, is particularly harmed in daily life by not revering Him. Nor is adultery, used as an umbrella term for all prohibited sexual activities, so easily defined this way.

In fact, any and every sexual practice is permissible in our present culture except for pedophilia and rape, because only the latter are reckoned to harm another. Thus, if any type of sexual union does not harm another, why should it be forbidden?

Gay rights are in the forefront of the crusade against Christianity for exactly this reason. For while the Bible prohibits homosexuality, it does not state why. I have no immediate answer why homosexuality should be considered wrong. If two men or women get together, no harm is done to anyone else.

So why is the Bible adamant against homosexuality? Perhaps the answer will emerge in the long term, although I do not have a historical precedent to guide me. So here is a long shot! As a society moves away from Christianity, it tends to become a culture of death instead of life.

The original command in Genesis to “be fruitful and increase in number,” has never been rescinded or even abridged. But the beginning of a determined effort to defy that direction was introduced by the condom.

This separated procreation from recreation—the ability to have sexual pleasure without the attendant risk of conception. Over time, if contraception failed, legally sanctioned abortion ensured child free sex. Now, Canada kills off, in the womb, a city the size of Lethbridge every year.

What has this to do with homosexuality? Simply this: gays cannot produce offspring. Of course, many heterosexual couples are unable to have children, but gay coupling denies the chance of procreation, and increases a dying culture by reducing the birthrate.

Coupled with abortion, euthanasia and growing infanticide, these result in a birthrate woefully inadequate to maintain Canada’s population. Attendant losses are insufficient skilled workers, an aging population, and a declining tax base; in sum a fading culture.

That joins the female sterilization camps in India, sex selective abortions in India and China, huge moves by western powers to establish abortion in developing countries; all part of a modern eugenics program to control the world’s population, a profound, massive move against human life.

The harm principle is an insufficient defender of human security. Western culture has caught the disease infecting the rest of the world: declining value of human life. God’s signature—His image stamped upon each individual—is the only distinction that can restore permanent value to human dignity.

Easter Sunday

Is there something that can make Easter Sunday different from all the others? Doesn’t seem like it. Get up at the same time, get dressed, look for some clothes appropriate for church. At church it’s still a Sunday service, although the emphasis may be different.

After service, go home, have lunch, have a rest, What now? Usual day of rest. Potter in the yard, have supper, Go to bed. Has anything changed? Back to the same routine tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, and then church again next Sunday.

It’s a bit like Mother’s day. Is it only one day of the year we get to appreciate our mom? If we don’t appreciate her every day, our actions are a bit hollow, to say the least. And even if life tends to be a bit humdrum, every day aren’t we still living in the light of the resurrection?

For Christ is risen every Sunday, The Crucifixion and resurrection are not new today, just because it’s Easter Sunday. It is and should be just like any other Sunday. Every Sunday would be a sham without it. Imagine life on earth If Christ had not come?

Not just for Sunday either. Life everyday is not just existence for a further week, but joyful, because He came. Easter Sunday shouldn’t be different from other Sundays, or any other day of the week for that matter: His resurrection is evidence that we live in His grace towards us every day.

Resurrection

There are many animals I would rather not be, and the caterpillar is top of the list. It’s a decidedly grubby life, and a place of distinct vulnerability. But on consideration, it seems not much different than our life on earth.

What the caterpillar does have over and above the other creepers and crawlers of the earth is the change that is genetically built in: the metamorphosis into the butterfly. Both states, in ability and beauty can hardly be reconciled in one creature.

The caterpillar is a non-biblical example of the life, death and resurrection each new spring brings us. But Jesus specifically portrays the death of a seed that brings new life (John 12:24), and Paul the bulb that provides the flower (1 Corinthians 15:37–38).

What I find interesting are the ideas of beauty and recognition that run through these examples. The few of us who exhibit earthly beauty will be transformed into immensely greater beauty measured by the difference of the caterpillar and bulb with butterfly and the flower.

Even those of us of lesser beauty will all be an accurate reflection of the beauty of God. But as the gardener knows the flower that will come from the seed, and the naturalist knows the butterfly that comes from the caterpillar, we will be recognisable within the new beauty.

But in all these things, Jesus Christ is the centre, and is always the centre. His resurrection is essential to the Christian faith, for it confirms Gods acceptance of the redemption gained for us at the cross. Thus His resurrection ensures ours.

So every fresh bud, each new butterfly, all signs of new life, point to the reality of resurrection. they reinforce our belief that resurrection is God’s design, not only for the earth He has given us, but also, and especially, in the promise of our resurrection to glory with Him.

The Athiest's Creed

It is an established fact, according to leading philosophers, that Darwin’s theory of natural selection also applies to development of psychology—non-material emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. This theory is called “naturalism” or “materialism,”—not bird-watching or mall-hopping, but that all affections are simply the result of physical brain activity

The Geneticist, Frances Crick explained it this way: “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Leading atheists Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennet agreeing, contend that this reduces all of life—our reasoning, morals, and love—to pure physics. Every human phenomenon is the result of actions and reactions starting at the big bang. This means there is no reason for the way we behave or the way the world is; it is all the result of blind chance of brain activity, and in that sense it is all pre-determined: essentially, we are just moist robots!

Dennet realizes the danger inherent in this idea: that if people come to believe their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, it has the potential to undermine order the civilisation requires. It’s essential to leave them in the belief that these affections are real.

Unfortunately, A leading philosopher, Tom Nagel—himself an avowed atheist, has contended that the affections are real, and cannot be accounted for by any evolutionary process. This has been roundly condemned by his associates as a retrograde step in their “progress” of understanding humanity.

Nagel contends that there are parts of the human psyche that cannot be accounted for by natural processes, and which run counter to common sense. Anything that is a retreat from “science”—especially common sense—is heresy to his associates.

But no-one thinks of his daughter, for instance, as just “molecules in motion”! If materialists really lived what they believed, they wouldn’t just be materialists, they’d be psychopaths. Orwell hit the nail on the head: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Nagel himself gives the motive for such obstinacy: fear of religion. “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

Adapted from an article in The Weekly Standard by Andrew Ferguson