Work with me here: the secularist mindset
prizes this life — and this life only — since it cannot reasonably
contemplate any other.
Further, having dismissed notions of God,
sin, righteousness and judgment, the worldview that begins from an evolutionary
viewpoint is unconcerned with the moral quality of the lives it seeks to
preserve. It only matters that life exists, and therefore the taking of it is always
“wrong”. This despite a couple of glaring logical inconsistencies: (1) in
a random universe with no Creator, nothing can be objectively immoral, only
inconvenient or undesirable; and (2) many of the same folks who deplore
capital punishment are perfectly fine with the taking of innocent life in and
outside the womb.
Cognitive dissonance like this explains why
Corcoran State Prison is still feeding, clothing and housing Charles Manson at
age 81, though there is no question of his murderous guilt. By the same
logic, I suppose, Manson’s victims ceased to be worthy of society’s concern the
moment they stopped breathing. After all, dead is dead. Nothing can bring a
victim back or make whole the loss to families and friends.
In a universe without God, the concept of
collective guilt cannot possibly have any coherent meaning. When we start from evolutionary assumptions, the idea that society
can somehow “do wrong” by a random collection of atoms (or group thereof) should make no sense at all to us. And yet Progressives rage about the unfair treatment of the
various victim classes within society and tell us that reparations and
apologies are owed generations after such wrongs are committed, and that to
fail to acknowledge such violations is an immense injustice.
A Brief and Bloody Transaction
Injustice. Hmm. That’s a very biblical concept:
“But if anyone hates his neighbor and lies in wait for him and attacks him and strikes him fatally so that he dies, and he flees into one of these cities, then the elders of his city shall send and take him from there, and hand him over to the avenger of blood, so that he may die. Your eye shall not pity him, but you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, so that it may be well with you.”
The guilt of innocent blood. Viewed from a biblical
perspective, murder is not merely a brief and bloody transaction between violator
and victim. It involves everyone around them. Justice must be served because
the community at large is affected by the acts of individuals, and the moral
character of a community is exposed by the way it responds to such incidents.
Collective Guilt
Old Testament laws like this one from Deuteronomy
assume the ability to distinguish murder from manslaughter and to distinguish both
from capital punishment, something of which the evolutionary mindset is largely
incapable. Further, God’s laws assign the responsibility for carrying out
justice to the community. When the community abdicates its responsibility, God
fails to bless. “You shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, so
that it may be well with you.”
It’s idle to argue that Israel was a
theocracy (which Western nations manifestly are not), or that we are not under
Law but under Grace. Innocent blood cried out for justice long before the existence of the Law of Moses and makes its claim on the basis
that mankind was created in the image of God:
“Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.”
Accept it or not, at least God’s rule comes
with a coherent rationale, a view of the value of life that depends on morality
rather than mere biology.
Hand-Wringing For Almost Everybody
Modern society acknowledges the idea of collective
guilt, only provided it is of a very restricted sort: guilt over the oppression
of women, minorities, homosexuals, transsexuals, the poor, citizens of third
world countries and even the steaks simmering on our barbeques. Again, only
certain sorts of collective guilt may be acknowledged: meat is murder but dead
babies are medical research subject matter, ingredients in cosmetics and an
industry worth an estimated $350 million annually to those who profit from it in the U.S. alone.
There’s enough hand-wringing for everybody,
but only if you’re the right sex and skin tone, and only over certain
sorts of injustices. Society’s acknowledgement of collective guilt has very specific
parameters, and our failure to avenge innocent blood lies well outside them. That,
my friends, is blissfully incoherent.
For all that moderns deplore the Old
Testament law as patriarchal, primitive, violent and unenlightened, it remains
an absolute bastion of sanity, logic and rationality compared to current
efforts to construct a just society in the absence of God.
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