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May 24, 2019 - January 24, 2021
Crime and Punishment: Biblical Vengeance or American Justice?
Stephen Fry made this point nicely: “What is the point of the Catholic church if it says ‘oh, well we couldn’t know better because nobody else did.’ Then what are you for?”
By building a standard that can mature, the founders recognized that morality and society inevitably progress.
So promiscuous women, sabbath-breakers, idol-worshippers, Jews, and non-Christians should be gathered and burned. Those who do not willingly kill and steal at their god’s command should be stoned, burned, and stoned again.
Worshipping another god, suggesting that someone worship another god, and even proselytizing are protected by the Constitution. But they are capital crimes under biblical principles—as are the other so-called crimes for which the bible commands death: breaking the sabbath, blasphemy, promiscuity, obstinacy, being raped, and witchcraft—a crime with a unique history on the North American continent.
While almost every culture and religion has an afterlife, Jesus was the first to preach about it as a place of eternal punishment. The place of torment is mentioned 162 times in the New Testament and not once in the Old Testament.
While revising this chapter, I received a voicemail at the Freedom From Religion Foundation office, laced with this selfsame joy: “You all are gonna burn in Hell—goody, goody, goody…. I’m a Christian…I hope y’all burn in Hell. You deserve it!”
In Christianity, the punishment does not fit the crime. Every crime rates the same, eternal punishment.
The eternal torture created by Jesus, and its unmitigated application for any and every crime, is cruel and unusual.
10
Redemption and Original Sin or Personal Responsibility and the Presumption of Innocence?
Religion tends to lessen one’s sense of personal responsibility and, in some instances, can even be an indicator that a person intends to avoid all such responsibility.
The entire Christian religion is based on a singular claim that violates the principle of personal responsibility so critical to our systems: that Jesus died for your sins. Christianity’s rejection of personal responsibility is actually twofold. First, a person is guilty of original sin simply because they were born.
Original sin confers guilt without regard for personal actions, while vicarious redemption absolves that guilt through the torture and murder of another human.
The American justice system rejects a presumption of guilt in favor of its opposite, the presumption of innocence. Unlike the biblical god’s law, our laws protect the innocent.
“The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law,” said the Supreme Court more than one hundred years ago.
America’s justice system demands proof of guilt to avoid punishing innocents; the Judeo-Christian god intentionally harms innocents to punish the guilty.
The children killed for and by god—Egypt’s firstborn, Jephthah’s unnamed daughter, Eli’s descendants, Achon’s family, the thousands of babies and children who died in Noah’s flood—were all innocent; they did “not yet know right from wrong,” as the bible says.
Biblical justice is so severe and vicious that it would, if implemented, violate the Constitution. Hell, a central tenet of Christianity, conflicts with the Constitution on at least two major counts: both as a place of torture and as an eternal punishment. Original sin, another essential Christian principle, transgresses the core presumption of American justice. And vicarious redemption, the defining Christian principle, repudiates personal responsibility, upon which all American law, society, and government rest.
11
The American Experiment: Religious Faith or Reason?
Faith enough to fill a mountain would not move a mustard seed.
We don’t have religious faith that the light will turn on—we have a reasonable expectation based on evidence, a mouthful that often gets shortened to “having faith.”
Religious faith is, as Professor Peter Boghossian observes, “pretending to know things you don’t know.”
Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, called reason “the Devil’s greatest whore.”
American law and our Constitution were not passed down from on high. Some of the greatest minds of the day reasoned, debated, and compromised for months, years even, to agree on the laws that would guide the new nation. Our Constitution is the product of human thought and perseverance, not faith.
Reason and experiment dispel error; faith propagates it.
The founders were not supplicants seeking to interpret divine revelation; they were political scientists, using reason, experience, and history to build a nation.
Faith did not have a seat at the birth of our Constitution. Reason reigned.
12
A Monarchy and “the morrow” or a Republic and “our posterity”
The Constitution is meant to build a better country for the future, ensuring prosperity and freedom for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren down through the generations.
Jesus’s biblical message is not about building a future in this world, and certainly not for future generations. Christianity is about ensuring one’s own place for eternity, others be damned—literally.
For him, tomorrow was not important because the end of the world was supposedly imminent.
Early Christians believed Jesus’s promise,10 and preachers have been terrifying their congregations with predictions of impending Armageddon for 2,000 years. To this day, 41 percent of Americans think Jesus is returning to earth sometime in the next forty years—presumably bringing Armageddon with him.11 That is a remarkably stubborn belief, given that every Christian who has ever held this belief has been wrong.
Had the framers taken Jesus at his word, they never would have built a country for the future.
It’s difficult to see how, or even why, Christianity would contribute to a government founded to secure a future for “ourselves and our posterity” when Christian dogma specifically declares that there is no such future.
The governments the bible espouses and those it has bred are theocratic monarchies.
A republic—res publica—is literally “a public thing,” a thing of the people. Not something divine, not something handed down from on high, and not something that could be maintained without effort—but a thing “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln so beautifully phrased it.
The founders studied the classics extensively, and they were familiar with Judeo-Christian principles, but they relied on the former and shunned the latter at the Constitutional Convention.
Perhaps this was because, as atheist author Ruth Hurmence Green put it, “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”
PART III
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS V. THE CONSTITUTION
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 16703
13
Which Ten?
Yahweh did not see fit to give out the laws, his most moral laws if Christian nationalists are to be believed, until much further along the biblical storyline. The first set—there are four—doesn’t appear until halfway through the second book of the bible, Exodus.
There are not Ten Commandments, but four different sets of Ten Commandments (see comparison tables of four sets on pages 164–65).
The first set was given to Moses on Mount Sinai in chapter 20 of Exodus and later written on stone tablets.
This set is probably what most people think of as the ten.
