It seems to me that the newspaper should relocate the prison pastor’s testimonials to the weekly religion page, where they’d be more at home. After all, in the past, Johnson has explicitly rejected church-state separation when it comes to issues of crime and punishment.
Moreover, not since the mercifully concluded heyday of bizarrely outdated Tribune syndicated columnist Dr. George Crane, he of the relentlessly right-wing Worry Clinic and unintentionally hilarious frequent references to “boudoir cheesecake,” has there been anything on the Tribune’s editorial page to compare to Johnson’s oft-repeated “heart condition” analogy, which effectively mocks any contemporary explanation of criminal behavior that does not spring from the pages of an ancient scroll.
JOHNSON: The truth is out there, by RICHARD JOHNSON, Local Columnist (October 19, 2008)
If you have been reading my column for a while, you may remember that not long ago, I wrote about the root cause of crime. As a follower of Christ and a minister of the gospel, I believe that the cause of crime is a universal heart condition that the Bible calls sin.
From my perspective, the inner process that leads someone to break the law looks something like this; first, if our hearts are wrong, we will harbor evil. Next, the presence of evil in our hearts will affect our thinking; we will rehearse, or plan evil. Finally, because our hearts are wrong, and our thinking is wrong, our behavior will be influenced; we will commit a crime.
I'm a longtime proponent of fair and balanced, even before the television network started abusing the phrase, so just for the fun of it I searched for a non-Biblical explanation for crime.
Throughout history people have tried to explain what causes abnormal social behavior, including crime. Efforts to control "bad" behavior go back to ancient Babylon's Code of Hammurabi some 3,700 years ago. Later in the seventeenth century European colonists in North America considered crime and sin the same thing. They believed evil spirits possessed those who did not conform to social norms or follow rules. To maintain social order in the settlements, persons who exhibited antisocial behavior had to be dealt with swiftly and often harshly."Sin" isn't required to make sense of this explanation. As I've noted previously, the concept of sin is undoubtedly a religious construct. Without sin’s purely conditional aspect of disobedience to God’s “word” – according to whatever “God” means within the framework of a specific religious worldview – the concept of sin is just about meaningless. Johnson assumes the truth of the religious construct, subtly linking it to social science as though the latter must spring from the former. Shine a spotlight on the veracity of the religious construct, and the argument crumbles.
By the twenty-first century criminologists looked to a wide range of factors to explain why a person would commit crimes. These included biological, psychological, social, and economic factors. Usually a combination of these factors is behind a person who commits a crime.
In fairness, Johnson’s column today makes more sense, but only barely.
Crime is a family affair, and the business is being handed down from one generation to the next.
In my opinion, the redefinition of marriage, and the breakdown of the traditional family unit, are making our crime problem worse.
Alas, Johnson can’t get through 900 words without including a plug for the handbook of his particular religious perspective.
“We took the Bible out of our schools, and now our prisons are full!”
I’d like to see him prove this assertion … on the religion page, where his thinly veiled evangelical tracts truly belong.
2 comments:
>In my opinion, the redefinition of marriage, and the breakdown of the traditional family unit, are making our crime problem worse.
Religious conservatives have yet to explain why same-sex marriage makes crime worse, or threatens anyone's marriage. But the religious right can't come up with arguments against human rights for gay people that are not based in religion because the major medical and scientific professional organizations have long since determined that homosexuality is neither a mental illness or a character disorder.
This is the the same phenomenon I recently pointed here in a thread on evolution— evangelicals have no problem with science until it happens to contradict their rigid belief that the Bible is without error. But this is so unnecessary. Decades ago, Protestant and Evangelical churches came to the understanding that divorce (remarriage after divorce) is often the most compassionate option for people. This is in spite of the fact that Jesus specifically prohibited such marriages. Perhaps Evangelicals can arrive at a similar understanding for same-sex relationships: Jesus taught love and compassion, and that can justify acceptance of gay people and their relationships now that the science is no longer a barrier.
Since the dawn of Australopithecus afarensis, which predates the English language Bible written by John Wycliffe by a measly 3.5 to 4.5 million years, homonids and human kind have been engaging in "crime".
From murder to theft, lying, cheating it has happened from the dawn of time, sometimes as a means of survival, sometimes as a means of revenge.
Criminal behavior is part of human nature, it is simply not socially acceptable.
Homosexulality, has been evident in as well, and is readily observable in the higher order of primates as well.
Our understanding of the the biblical rights and wrongs in the "modern bible" are in line with the societal emotions of the 1300's when Wycliffe was first translating the Bible from latin and Greek to the common english, which was not looked upon kindly by the crown, as people were allowed to interprit the Bible in their own context based on their own experiences caused both the Church and the Crown to not have totalitarian control over the masses, which in my humble opinion is a ideology that has regained favor in the ultra-conservative Christian movement is trying to do to our society now.
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