It's a "sin" to drink Lite beer, but that's as far as it goes with me.

With the smoke finally clearing locally (ahem), I’m finally beginning to catch up. Scrum muddying really takes it out of a guy, and besides that, my knees are still toast after Friday’s thoroughly enjoyable Carnegie Center fundraiser.

Here’s one I missed from late August.

JOHNSON: Unite church and state, by Richard Johnson, (local Tribune columnist).

While there are many theories that try to explain what causes crime, only one of them in my opinion offers a complete explanation. The root cause of crime is a universal heart condition that the Bible calls sin.

As a longtime follower of Christ and an ordained minister of the gospel, I have served the Lord for many years, 15 of them in America’s prisons and jails …

I’ll cut to the chase. Johnson’s argument goes something like this:

Sin, not “fancy theories” (i.e., poverty, poor education, bad childhoods) leads to a chosen “lifestyle of crime”, which is a spiritual condition.

As such, “Government cannot do anything about sin; show me any government, anywhere, that can. Dealing with sin is the church’s job,” and the government’s job is preserving order, nothing more.

Therefore, the separation of church and state is an inefficient way of tackling crime because the state, which exists to preserve order, must have “allies” in the church who can deal with sin on spiritual terms.

Assertions of this nature never cease to amaze me. One wonders why the Founding Fathers even bothered with civil law if all they needed to do was mimeograph the teachings of one or the other Christian denominations and join certain areas of the Muslim world in shackling the legal system to one specific interpretation within a multiplicity of religious perspectives.

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 asserts that sin is the only “universal” explanation for crime, but that’s a fairly obvious over-simplification. When it comes to the behavior of a schizophrenic, there’s a better answer over at Wikipedia:

Increased dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic pathway of the brain is consistently found in schizophrenic individuals.

If an undiagnosed (and untreated) schizophrenic commits a crime, was it the result of sin or bad brain chemistry? The schizophrenic made a choice, and “chose” sin, but how did he know what he was doing if the wiring in his brain is faulty?

And, what are we to make of God’s role in the creation of schizophrenia? If a supreme being created the brain and the brain is faulty, and if the schizophrenic commits a sinful crime as a result of what amounts to pilot error, then the crime and the sin were pre-determined. Free will, anyone? Making mistakes is one thing. Suffering from an illness that precludes the rationality necessary to make a sensible choice is something else entirely.

Johnson’s argument isn’t without an element of cleverness, though it’s an epistemological shell game. To make sense of sin, one must accept the existence of God. To accept the existence of both sin and God in this context implies plausibility of Johnson’s central point, that church and state should be anything but separate when it comes to crime.

Sorry. These are theistic back doors best left closed and locked. Johnson and his brethren are perfectly free to dispense spiritualistic solutions to personal problems, though not to graft them onto the secular law that governs the nation.

All these religious columnists lately! I may become a professional atheist yet.

See also: Making your own dirt: Why not evangelical atheism?