Sometimes it’s Hard to Hold Your Ground

I’m opposed to the death penalty. I don’t believe that as a species we’re smart enough to administer something that requires perfection. It requires perfection because when a man’s life is at stake any error rate, be it as small as 1 in a million, is too great when it can so easily be avoided by the substitution of Life without Parole.

That’s an intellectual position and a position held in the abstract. Unfortunately life isn’t an abstraction. I will be the first to admit that when I read about the specifics of many capital cases emotionally I’m ready to chuck my so-called intellectual position out the window and advocate the application of extremely cruel and unusual punishments.

Last night Ohio executed one Jeffrey Lundgren. Lundgren was convicted in 1990 of murdering, execution style, an entire family of five including three young girls aged 15, 13 and 7. Apparently, after dinner one night, he took them one by one to a barn and shot them using the noise of a power saw to cover the sound of the shots from other folks in the house cleaning up after dinner. His motive was what he considered to be their lack of faith in the teachings of the religious cult that he founded.

You see Lundgren thought that God talked to him. At his trial Lundgren argued that he didn’t deserve the death penalty because “I am a prophet of God. I am even more than a prophet.”

According to Lundgren God commanded him to kill the family, including the 7 year old, through the interpretation of scripture. The words were plainly there in the bible for all to see, but only Lundgren could interpret the meaning of the words.

This is an extreme case of the delusion held by some (many? most?) religious people that somehow, somewhere, in “the book,” is the answer to all life’s questions and that God’s direction on literally anything can be discovered by the proper interpretation of the scriptures. Of course the identity of “the book” changes from religion to religion so either God produced redundant but different sets of instructions (why?) or, since the books contradict each other, it is mathematically provable that all but at most one religion must be false. To paraphrase a very smart man, when you truly understand why you reject all religions but your own, you will understand why I must reject yours as well.

Even if it were true that “the book” held all the answers, and it’s clearly not, the degree of arrogance required to believe that you, and you alone, are capable of interpreting the words properly and discovering the instructions from God is beyond imagination.

The death penalty, intellectually, in the abstract, is a bad deal and should be abolished, but I’m not going to shed any tears for Lundgren. I might shed some tears for the three young girls that were betrayed by their parents and sacrificed that night to a religious delusion. I’ll also hope that these will be the last although I know they won’t. I thought about praying but, if Sky Daddy exists, he didn’t lift a finger to save those three young girls and I’m sure they were praying that night for all they were worth. If he didn’t listen to them, why should he listen to me?

It has been proposed, as a matter of moral rectitude (is that redundant?), that those that have the capacity to act also have the obligation to act. If there is a final judgment then it is upon this principle, and our myriad failures to stand by it, that we will most likely be judged. But doesn’t this same principle apply to God? Given his infinite capacity to act how is his failure to act in cases like this one justified?

At this point I usually get a horrified reaction to the effect of “how dare you question God?” I dare because God, if he exists, appears to have given me the capacity to frame the question, and if I have the capacity to frame the question, then I have the obligation to ask the question.