The reason we are stunned to hear about people like him (and Josef Stalin, responsible for an estimated 40 million deaths; Mao Zedong, who caused the deaths of some 45 million in China; Goering, Goebbels and Hitler, who are collectively responsible for an estimated 46 million Europeans deaths; Japanese treatment of allied troops in World War II, which was called “uncivilized” and “barbaric”) is because their actions all violate our sense of rightness, decency and order. “That is not how civilized people are supposed to act!”
Unbeknownst to many,
our modern sensibilities, views and concepts of “inhumane,” “uncivilized” and “barbaric” are all based on a set of values inherent in
Western civilization, which, of course, is based on, you guessed it: the
Bible.
They have James Holmes in custody; so what should they do with him? What is wrong with what he did in Colorado? After all, isn’t it just a matter of opinion?
Suppose, because he doesn’t act
normal at his trial, it becomes “the opinion of this court that the defendant is insane or incompetent to stand trial.” Do we then furnish, at taxpayers’ expense, psychiatric care in an effort to rehabilitate him and provide him with first-class facilities at a modern (albeit overcrowded) prison for the rest of his life? (Charles Manson has thus far cost taxpayers an estimated $1.8 million and counting.) Why
shouldn’t Holmes’ prison expenses be covered by the taxes of the families of the people he killed? After all, if he is
insane, it’s not really his
fault is it?
The question that should be rightly debated by the courts and a jury of his peers is: “
Did he do it?” and not “
Why did he do it?” The
why is irrelevant!
Morality is relative? A philosophized notion that right and wrong are not absolute values, but are personalized according to the individual and his or her circumstances or cultural orientation? The opposite of
moral relativism is
moral absolutism: A fundamental, natural law of constant values and rules, and which judges all persons equally, irrespective of individual circumstances or cultural differences
.
If there are no absolutes, if everything is relative, if nothing is
absolutely right or wrong, if nothing is
intrinsically good or evil, why then do we even
have laws, courts, trials, jails and prisons?
What has been ignored in the mad dash to eliminate the Bible and “liberate” Americans from religion (via a bogus “church versus state” controversy) is this: You can sum up the entire message of the Bible thusly,
“Don’t do to anyone what you don’t want done to you.” Thus, the original concept of “an eye for an eye” would be fulfilled with an equality of justice. Don’t want to be killed? Don’t kill. It’s simple.
If people examine the Bible rationally, dispassionately and contextually, they can understand the origin and purpose of the “Old” Testament and the merging of, and supplanting (fulfilling) of, some elements by the “New” Testament. Cognizant that human behavior must also be taken into consideration, it can be clearly seen that Western civilization is essentially the creation of, or result of, merging Old and New Testament principles.
As sovereigns (free moral agents), only humans have free will and can, therefore, choose which covenant to abide by, Old or New. And in the West, society rewards or judges accordingly. Love your neighbor, all is cool; loot your neighbor, you get the slammer. Kiss your neighbor, you get kissed back; kill him and it was the noose, the chair or the gas chamber. But then,
progressives decided that was inhumane. So today, after months or even years of taxpayer-funded appeals, and if some liberal judge doesn’t commute their sentence on a technicality, murderers, even mass murderers (if they even get the death penalty to begin with) after a last meal of their choosing, are given a sedative to calm them, and finally a painless injection by a competent, trained specialist in a sterile hospital type environment.
Ignorance, deliberate or inadvertent, has obscured the fact that prior to the introduction of what eventually was codified as the Judeo-Christian Bible, the only laws were those instituted and enforced by a reigning monarch. There was, generally speaking, no prevailing, all-encompassing morality. Morality was what any individual or governing entity was strong enough to impose on his fellowman at any given time. It was all a matter of opinion. “Do your own thing.” Every
man essentially
“did what was right in his own eyes.” Yet a cursory glance at man in his natural state is revelatory. Absent the Bible, consider a few examples of behavior in certain “civilizations” (some practices extant today): e.g., slavery, cannibalism, scalping, beheading, Suttee, (immolation of widows), burying servants and wives alive with rulers, human (especially child) sacrifice, genital mutilation of females and in the
Muslim faith a man can marry a child as young as one year old and have sexual intimacy with this child.
Progressives (new title for liberals) clamor: “Barriers are coming down, people are being
liberated as we
progress toward a new, enlightened society!” Based on taxpayer-funded “studies,”
experts have determined that youth should no longer be subjected to the restrictive, limiting, religiously oriented restraints of the past.
“There is now no doubt that we need sex education in schools and that it [should] include information on heterosexual and homosexual relationships ...” (U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop -1986). Children, as young as third graders, are being taught the principles of homosexual relationships? Seriously?
Guess what! If one takes an unbiased and historically accurate view of this march to progressivism,
one would discover this new
sexual liberation (so called) is merely the reintroduction of the sexual mores of
1490 B.C. Sex with your own father, mother, sister, brother, children, animals, whoever, whatever? Have at it! (For more examples of
an enlightened society, see Leviticus, Chapters 18 and 20)
Religion, in the commonly understood and accepted sense of the word, is, in actuality, man’s attempt to create the concept of a God small enough to comprehend with the natural mind, itself incomprehensible.
The Bible is not a religious book, nor is
religion its primary focus. The Bible is about relationships – the relationship of man with his Creator, man with himself and man with his fellow man.
Therefore, if you simply kept the following, and disregarded all the
religious aspects of the Bible, you would still have a solid foundation for a very dynamic and thriving culture:
- Don’t have a bunch of substitutes for ultimate truth (false gods)
- Don’t steal
- Don’t kill
- Don’t disrespect your parents
- Honor marriage
- Don’t lie about one another
- Don’t lust or hanker after others’ stuff
(These are some of the Ten Commandments paraphrased.)
No God, no Bible, no problem?
I have a couple of questions for the atheists, agnostics, evolutionists and secular humanists: Since there are more “religious” people than you and you want to eliminate us, why can’t we just eliminate you first? Isn’t that what Hitler did to some 10 million people he felt did not contribute to the plan
he deemed best for society? (Let the record show, I am not advocating, merely asking.) Is what Hitler, Mao, Stalin did “wrong?” Why?
Isn’t the law against murder based on the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill?”
If we remove the Judeo-Christian God from Western civilization, then there are no Ten Commandments and, consequently, no prohibition against murder, or any other crimes for that matter, right?
No God, no Bible,
big problem.
Why are we so shocked and dismayed when we read or hear of a crime like the Colorado theater massacre, or the 27-29 other mass murders that have occurred in America? In a couple of cultures that immediately come to mind, the Colorado shooter could have been deemed a hero!
