As a result, justice is poorly defined as the backward-looking business of making sure that people get what they “deserve.” Justice isn’t a form of religiously sanctioned vengeance. It isn’t a form of revenge dressed up as a divinely endorsed system of prizes and punishments that carves the world up into winners and losers. Certainly, this way of thinking about justice comes naturally to us—we want gain and we want revenge. And certainly, forbidden to exercise vengeance on our own behalf, we naturally gravitate toward the fantasy that, ultimately, an all-powerful God will inflict an
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