12 February 2004 22:06
currently am reading The Brothers Karamazov by some russian guy. (okay, here's an attempt. Fyodor Doestovesky, i don't have the book with me). quote from:If it were not for the Church of Chirst there would be nothing to restrain the criminal from evil-doing, no real chastisement for it afterwards; none, that is, but the mechanical punishment [by the secular government] spoken of just now, which in the majority of cases only embitters the heart; and not the real punishment, the only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, which lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.
i'm still thinking on this one. the way i interpret the context is that this particular statement was made in satirical jest, albeit in an extrememly subtle manner. however, having thought upon it now for a couple minutes, i think i agree. let me rephrase the concept.
if it were not for christian morals (as presented by the "church of Christ" or simply by judeo-christian ethics), a criminal would not feel guilty when he commits evil, thus he would feel punishment unneccessary. uneccessary punishment would lead him to bitterness (and eventually more crime). put another way, without God, right and wrong cease to exist, or the scales shift drastically to something like humanitarianism, the concept of which can be expressed, "don't interfere with me (humanity) and i won't interfere with you." put yet another way, Paul says in romans 7.7, "Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law." no wonder doestovesky got in so much hot water in russia, if he's practically quoting scripture :).
unfortunately, i boiled it down too far too fast, so now i've left myself with nothing to talk about. i meant to have a conclusion about the whole issue, but since the quoted paragraph is quite similar to the concept Paul conveys... however, (couldn't resist) i like what doestovesky has presented. uhoh.
mentally i just got started on a tangent. it has to do with the US justice system (here's where the cia and nsa and dept of homesecurity computers perk up their ears). i'll try to keep it short.
the current setup (actually, the setup we've had for the last couple centuries) is based on fear. hm. that didn't come out quite like i want, but i'll leave it because you'll understand in a bit. why don't I want to kill the person studying next to me? Christian objections aside, I don't want to kill him because there are numerous witnesses and I would be certain to spend at least five months in jail before i was released for good behavior. personally, i dont' want to spend five months in jail. okay, take bitter guy number one, we'll call him John Doe (arn't i clever?). johnny boy is ticked off at the world, and at guy number two in particular. john doesn't have much to lose, and five months in jail doesn't bother him all that much, so he decides to go ahead and cap guy number two. wham bam, he's in jail and back out. but that same john doe wouldn't really be all that interested in making suggestive comments to some little girl in the street. why? because he knows he'll get life behind bars if he does. life is a lot longer than the paltry five months you get for 1st degree murder. he may have dropped out of school in ninth grade, but he can handle the math on that one.
switch course slightly. why are there so many repeat offenders in our criminal justice system. (let me toss in a disclaimer here. most of what i say is uneducated, unresearched, hearsay, speculation, biased, or whatever sounds good. don't rake me over the coals for stating an unfounded opinion, because you are hearby warned that this is simply a "this is the way it seems to me" tirade. this is my webpage, so i can say what i want, it's a right garunteed to me by the declaration of independence. [5]). again, why are there so many repeat offenders? if jail is "sooo terrible," why arn't more criminals "sooo terribly" afraid of going back? back to my opener: the justice system is based on fear. that is our particular method of prevention (i hope we all agree that crime is best prevented and punished, not merely punished). a potential criminal refrains from stealing cookies from the cookie jar because he is afriad of the retribution to follow if he does. but if mom is not swift to punish, hey, free cookies. therein lies a crucial point. in order to maintain a degree of prevention, the justice system must be severe enough to produce fear of punishment. see, i'm throwing this before and after, cause and effect thing at you. right now we have this effect: lots of crime. what is the cause? not enough fear.
here's one of my griefs with the justice system. in the interests of avoiding "cruel and unusual" punishment, they are erring on the side of no punishment at all. webster on punishment, "a penalty inflicted for an offense or fault." on punish, "to subject to pain, loss, confinement, or death as a penalty for some offense or fault; to inflict such a penalty." (tangent: what mental image does the word "inflict" portray to you?). punishment is cruel and unusual. i agree that punishment should not be excessive, but watch shawshenk redemption. what was so rough about living in jail? after 20 years some of those guys were getting to the point where they couldn't live outside of jail.
okay. let me organize here. i am in favor of harsher justice. put criminals to work, yes i agree wholeheartedly. sitting in a jail cell staring at the cieling is only beneficial if they're thinking about what they've done and how they're never goign to do it again. your guess is as good as mine as to how often they think about that.. any other time and they're just consuming taxpayer dollars by lying there. so put them to work. put them to death? i don't think so. the death penalty is a whole other issue, but i'm not in favor of. what's so terrible about death? personally, i would much much much rather be put to death than to spend life in prison. what's the point of spending life in prison? i could write, true :). but then i'm a christian, death is no terror. but still, lethal injection??? my biggest fear related to dying regards pain. i don't mind dying in a car wreck, but i do mind my bones being shattered and living through it, having to survive on morphine and spend months in grueling physical therapy. lethal injection is for euthanasia. if you're going to kill criminals, make it worthwhile. put some terror back in the system. for starters, make them more public. national prime time telivision. make it painful to watch. pow's who had commrades executed in front of their faces were certaintly inspired with fear. they may not have capitulated, but i can garuntee you the event sponsered fear. but on the death penalty, if you ignore the afterlife (ie hell is hell), there are things much worse than death.
you say, but wait! that's terrible, we don't want a society based on fear. well, i agree. living under a modern stalin or lenin would not be fun. let's look to the perfect model then. how does God have things set up? why am I a Christian? in all truth, i became a christian because i was afraid of hell. talk about terrible motives eh? why are you a christian? but do you know what my motivation is now? why i continue as a christian, why i reach out to others (little that i do)? it is not because of fear, but because of love. whoa.. try working the us justice system on love. yeah, it'd be a miserable failure. but.
while we must still use fear to prevent, what should we do to punish? despite my wild statements, as a christian i am not in favor of torture or the death penalty. there needs to be punishment yes, punishment strong enough to inspire fear that will prevent others from crime. on the other hand, that will not always work to prevent the current criminal being punished from returning to crime again. as a child i had a fondness for picking on my younger siblings. the first time it happened, i recieved a spanking. it wasn't a love tap either, it hurt. but you know, strangely enough, the next day i was back to picking on my siblings again. well whaddaya know, the punishment didn't inspire fear. rather, in the heat of the moment i didn't think about the fear too much. so the cycle repeated. eventually, i would have learned by repetition, just like a dog learns that it's not to chew on your favorite bunny slippers. once you've whacked it across the nose enough times, it will get the idea (keep the dog outside and you wouldn't have the trouble in the first place). but we don't have that kind of time in the larger world, we can't let rapist's learn to be have by repetition, there's too much at stake. but you know what else my parents did besides spank me? they taught me what is right. they shortened the process by teaching me to recognize right and wrong in general terms, so that i could apply it to individual situations. a smart dog, once it has learned to not chew on your bunny slippers, will not chew on your dress shoes either. a dumb dog, well you're probably still having to go buy a new pair of bunny slippers every week.
so here's my proposal (in an effort to bring this to a close). the "minority report" isn't reality yet, crime as a general rule cannot be prevented by physical force. so we continue to attempt and prevent it by fear. the church (by love) can then continue its current efforts to ________ criminals before they're released back into society (there's a word that starts with "re-" that goes there.. i've been unsuccessfully to think of it for the past half hour). on that same theme, the church can spread its efforts to prevention to people who have not yet committed crimes. unfortunately, the school system has ditched God, so our justice system is garunteed to be busy for a good while to come.
hm, i feel like i've let a lot of loose ends go, but i do dearly want to move on. back to doestovesky.
the only way crime will be truly minimized is by teaching our children early on the values God has given us. without those, the secular justice system will struggle on, hampered by it's humanistic viewpoint (anti punishment) until it foregoes that and simply becomes oppressive (eg communism (ussr), non-benevolent dictorships (saddam, castro), or simply orwellian (1984)). i want to take this moment to say "judeo-christian ethics" again, simply because i like saying that one. it's like saying "circumspectual". some words are just fun to say.
so what this whole conglomeration of a post boils down to is this: yet another example of america going to hell in a handbasket because it has abandoned God. ....what is with me ending on negative notes tonight? okay, a question:
i have issues with pronunciation some times. for instance, if i have a parenthetical statement in the midst of a sentence (like this one), i put the pronunciation outside of it. (but what if i start a parenthetical statement as a new sentence? especially if it's more than one sentence long (ie has periods in it). do i put the period inside or outside of the parenthesis?) technically i think inside, but see, doesn't that look dumb to start this sentence "technically" without having a period two spaces prior? personally i'm fond of doing this: (parenthetical statement sentence.). new sentence. although often i omit the period inside the parenthesis. (stand alone parenthetical statement sentence). like so. i dunno, like i said, my english is appalling on a few rare occasions [3].
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