“Although they know God’s righteous decree and His judgment, that those who do such things deserve death, yet they not only do them, but they even [enthusiastically] approve and tolerate others who practice them.”
Romans 1:32
Do you wonder why leftists seem to have an odd love affair with criminals? The root of the issue is theological, not political because one’s basic operating premise colors everything about how they see and act in the world.
Why can’t a man or group of men have their way with your body, labor, and property? Where’s the hard reality that backs up the prohibition against murder, rape, and slavery? Surely, we must admit that complaining, “everyone knows…” or “it’s just not right” falls quite a bit short of logical philosophy. And while we’re at it, so does the argument from expediency. Saying that cooperation is better than domination is a peculiar bag of nonsense. Tell that to Genghis Khan or Mao or Castro. Tell that to Ted Bundy or Jack the Ripper. Tell that to the marauder that’s broken into your house in the dead of night. Besides the vacuousness of the contention, it’s important to note that it’s not a moral law they posit. It’s an argument, that even if true, is merely a case for practicality. The murderer is thus flummoxed, so it goes, not because it’s morally wrong to murder but because cooperation is better than stabbing someone. Modern humanism doesn’t quite know what to do with crime and criminals because it rejects the plain teaching of Scripture about man’s sin. To escape the reality of God’s word that all have fallen short of the standards to which they’re called and, therefore, need to repent and turn to Christ, fallen man insists that his “problem” is the world, not himself. The problem is the system…it’s capitalism or the patriarchy or some other thing. This is why the most fervent atheists among us are so dedicated to so-called social change. God calls us to change our hearts by repentance; humanism calls us to change our neighbor and not ourselves. God’s revolution happened already at the cross and there was no collateral damage. Man’s revolution is incessant and his battles catch fire continually, burning and burning always.
Humanistic systems are systems of power over others in order to avoid the necessity of repentance, which is the acceptance of our responsibility to God. All false worldviews lead away from the cross and crucify either our neighbor through crime, socialism or slavery or ourselves through some form of asceticism. In both cases the bottom line is that we spit in God’s face, calling the most High a liar on the subjects of His righteousness and our sin. Man isn’t the problem, we cry…God and His cracked-up world are. If only, we declare in our hearts, the world was more amenable to me I will be happy.
But this is the problem when faced with the criminal and tyrant. It shatters the crazy flim-flam. If man’s central problem isn’t sin but something out in the world itself, which is to say, reality, then how do we make sense of a dude who rapes and murders? How do we make sense of a mob destroying a city? On the one hand the humanist says that violence is impractical because cooperation is better, and then says that some violence is okay if in service of social justice. All the criminal says is that social justice starts with them. The difference between a man breaking into a house and ransacking it and a mob ransacking a city in the name of justice is math. The impulse is the same.
The Christian philosophy teaches that life and property are sacred because all things ultimately belong to God, not man. Man has limits and spheres to his sovereignty and God does not. This is the only rational basis for human interaction. All other premises lead to conflict and war. The humanist who rejects the premises of Christ and man’s need to repent, tries to build a sandcastle of utopia as a hurricane of sin and evil churns offshore. He builds in the sunshine of God’s common grace, obtusely assuming it shall always be so. This is why the more power a humanist has in government the more and more they side with criminals. Their premises lead them to the conclusion that the criminal is misunderstood. The reality is that they don’t understand the nature of man.
To punish criminals as they should be punished is also to champion self-defense. Humanists end up despising both because their fundamental beliefs can’t account for the logical implications of either. Humanists love bail reform and not prosecuting actual criminals but despise the 2nd Amendment because freedom, self-defense and moral law are inextricably linked. The humanist pretends to be righteous by showing compassion to the criminal and punishing the police and the self-defender. Why do leftists lean into tyranny? They reject God’s definition of man and sin and hate His authority over them. Thus, they seek to build a heaven without Christ and end up on a crazed course where they get rid of sin, not through God’s grace, but through the eradication of freedom. Why do humanist/leftists regulate the law-abiding to death but throw open the doors to criminals? Because they’ve embraced the lie of sin and rejected God and where God is there is liberty. The city man tries to build to keep God out, his utopia, is always a tyrannical place. Babylon the Great is a city of man’s tyrannical rule because they reject God’s sovereignty. But, like a shoddily constructed floor bound to collapse under the weight is the humanist philosophy when confronted with violence and crime.
If man doesn’t have a sin problem then criminals are, in point of fact, victims themselves. Of what? Of systems of oppression…racism, patriarchy…of whatever else catches the insane fancy of the world’s wisdom. Such is surely why humanist liberals always end up swooning in the arms of murderous dictators like Stalin, Mao, and Castro. Humanism is always about power…man’s power and man’s glory. Humanism is always about, at rock bottom, man’s war against God and His reality. Thus, sinful man tells himself that the criminal is just choosing wrong. He’s not evil, he’s mistaken. He doesn’t need punishment, he needs correction. Hence why we don’t call them prisons anymore but correctional facilities as though a rapist is nothing more than a toddler who wrote on the wall with a crayon. A self-defender with a gun – the free man – is a threat, not the criminal. The police officer who is God’s avenger must have his sword dulled lest he scare the sinful masses despite God’s clear commandment that the one who does wrong should absolutely be afraid of him (Romans 13:3-4). Liberty means responsibility and work. It means serving our neighbor, not ruling him. Self-defense and its logical offshoot, the police, mean that all men are equal as image-bearers of God, and no man may play god over another. Self-defense implies a moral law governing the world given by the holy God. Humanism declares that man isn’t the problem, reality and God are. Humanism leads to the hatred of freedom and the embrace of law-breaking because it starts from the premise that man is a victim, not a rebel. Man is pure hearted, not in open war against his Creator. Man just wants peace…if only everyone would get in line.
Oh, right. Sure.
Only the modern man, safe in air-conditioned offices, and sipping lattes can be so delightfully vapid. The brutal reality is that slavery is always better for the enslaver. That’s the whole point of violence. The great efficiency of totalitarianism, theft, and oppression is precisely the benefit it brings the one with power, not the one who suffers. It’s far easier to take than to make. Violence and coercion are the easiest means of survival and are thus right in a world of no rights – that is, a material world of mere physical laws and no moral God. Pragmatism is to moral law what radar detectors are to speed limits; it hates any limit placed on personal autonomy. Practicality begs the question of context. Moral law, by virtue of being God’s commandment, is its own context. Mankind’s hubris is that he reverses the logical poles when discussing morality. He insists that moral law is flexible, but his rights are not.
To understand this point, look again at the modern abortion debate. A “pro-choice” advocate demands that everyone worship a woman’s sacred right to terminate the consequence of her sexual choices. She reverses the order on purpose.
The sex was the choice! The pregnancy was the consequence. No one is disputing the woman’s right to both choose her sexual partner and freely engage in sex so long, as the issue goes, all parties are of legal age and consent. In that light your author and other pro-life folks are pro-choice too. The issue is over what choice we’re talking about. Pregnancy is a consequence of that freedom of choice. The pro-choice advocate is, therefore, using a most underhanded intellectual tactic first introduced by the serpent in the garden…it’s a sleight of hand…a fine ruse. Watch for it in every sinister line of argumentation.
There’s certainly more involved with an abortion than merely throwing away a taco. Another life is involved…not to mention a father too. But the confusion is part and parcel of modern humanism’s cancerous impact on the mind. Left to fester, to run its course, it leads to such barbarism as that. In the modern mind – that is, the depraved mind – rights mean the alleviation of consequence rather than the freedom to accept the responsibility of one’s choices (Romans 1:32; 1 Peter 2:16). But a right that violates the same thing in another human being is a contradiction in terms. Only a morally insane person could come to such a bald contradiction. Ah, and yet here we are again! Moral insanity is all around us because it’s within us. It’s exactly as the Bible says it is. No other philosophy/religion explains this self-evident fact of reality. They all beg the question and, therefore, either lead logically to violence and/or have no answer for it.
Thus, it all comes to a head. If rape or murder or slavery are wrong – and we mean truly immoral (and we all know they are), then Jesus Christ must be Lord. Any attempt to disconnect one from the other is like pulling the wings off a bird and wondering why it can’t fly. God’s righteous nature is reflected throughout the created order and man’s strife is because he’s always trying, rebelliously and insanely, to escape this knowledge. Man wants to be free not in the sense of freedom from sin but immunity from responsibility. That’s why violence and oppression are always with us and always will be unless and until we turn to Christ at the cross. The Christian philosophy/story explains the plain fact of why there’s violence and, importantly, why it’s immoral. To reject this leads invariably to crime and slavery.
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