Crime and punishment...

This topic of conversation came up last night amongst friends. I attend a small bible study and as a group, we've been going through the Book of Galatians. In his letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul was posing in Chapter 6 that we "reap what we sow". We discussed this as a group and some interesting ideas came up:

The quick and easy answer (of which I immediately spat out) - was yes - we (humanity to a person) reaps what we sow - meaning - we get what we put into it. It's an easy judgement to pass on others in that if a person is doing evil, he will be punished accordingly to the severity of his/her actions. Any one of us can conjure up thoughts of "evil" people getting their just desserts who either were met with a horrible death or prison or possibly both.

The greedy CEO who stole from his company via fraud who kills himself when his world came crashing down. Or the dictator who was overthrown in a disastrous coup and hung mercilessly in the prison square. As an outside observer, it's an easy connection - of course they deserved it! They were evil.

Or what about the mean gal at school or the jerk in the office who torments you needlessly? And when that person meets justice at the hands of the authorities (hopefully) that they are carted off and you are left as the "victor" - albeit somewhat battered and bruised for the experience.

All of these thoughts are easy to connect with one another but they still all revolve around it happening to someone else. What about when tragedy befalls you directly? What about the unexpected death of a loved one or chronic illness. What about a toddler who has to deal with an acute sickness? Did any of you or, in this example, the toddler deserve this? If we truly do "reap what we sow" then we must have, right?

A friend of mine in that small group discussion brought that point up. She and her husband had been dealing with chronic illness, injury and general strain and she brought up that she didn't believe that she had done anything to deserve these plights. How could she? How could anyone? If it were a tit-for-tat bargain with God for our here-and-now well being, then what type of life is that? We would all live in a prison of constant fear of making a "mistake" and angering God to receive our own swift and commensurate punishment.

It just doesn't make sense. I don't believe that the Bible is actually making this argument in this sense. Which also means that those "evil doers" who were punished by history received their fates not entirely upon their actions (I guess the argument would go further to see how many evil dictators or generally bad people who lived out their entire lives). That God did not bring those "judgements" upon them and that the real culprit was mankind and our own version of justice (typically in the name of God).

How many wars have been fought where both side claimed God as their spiritual leader and where one side inevitably loses, then which side really did have God? Who got to make that call in the first place? I doubt God was consulted.

In my opinion, to reap what you sow is to imply judgements cast on others who may or may not have deserved any retribution and/or punishment. And to think that we have the right to case moral judgements on others is entirely wrong. Some of you may argue differently on this - especially those backed by religious convictions - but to cast a moral judgement on someone is to lay claim that there is only one morality. And morality is based upon the observer in a particular place and time (see yesterday's post on Conservatives). To pass judgement is to make law from a snapshot of history that is constantly moving.

Now passing judgement based upon crimes against one another - such as theft, murder, etc. is a different cause altogether. Those are crimes against humanity since they are at the expense of others for profit or gain of another individual. I've always had problems with vice crimes - because they are morality laws and should not be indicative of how a person chooses to live their lives. But once those actions cross over into crimes of humanity, then its a whole other story.

Maybe this is a fine line between some key argument points. It's easy to see the split on murder and theft - but what about drug use? It gets very blurry because people unwittingly start using usually at the profit of another (dealers/cartels) but that person still made an individual choice to start using.

Vice sex crimes are maybe a little more clear cut (in my opinion) in that they are actions between two consenting adults. Prostitution or "crimes" in the bedroom aren't crimes in my book and we waste precious resources "fighting" these types of crimes based on morality alone. Rape, on the other hand, is a crime against another human so yes, it must be dealt with swiftly and commensurately.

I believe the only way to even use the analogy of "reap what you sow" is to look at it through a lense of the very large/big picture. Maybe there is something to be said about patterns in a person's life where the overall quality of their lives are diminished because they chose to focus on selfishness instead of their fellow humanbeings. And maybe that will just have been enough for us to feel that any sort of "justice" was served on those individuals.