With or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Stephen Weinberg
Welcome to part four of our consideration of the Christian idea that, according to the Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Emmett Carter, "God's punishments are just, medicinal, and restorative." (https://catholicexchange.com/gods-punishment-is-just-restorative-and-medicinal/)
But are they? And according to whom? Those doling out the punishments, or those upon whom such punishments are being inflicted?
This idea is ironic, considering that the "punishment" being referred to is either the eternal punishment of hell or some temporary punishment while here on earth. If it is the former, it can never be restorative to the one being punished, and its eternal duration suggests it never restores the punisher either.
If such punishment refers to temporary suffering while here on earth, then we are left to wonder what form of "punishment" we are referring to. Is it punishment doled out by God via floods, famine or disease, as we see in the OT, or punishment doled out by God's "believers" to those deemed (at least by those "believers" anyway) to have brought the judgment of God upon their own heads, even if an "all powerful" God needed his "believers" to inflict the punishment in his stead, also as seen in the OT?
Put another way, are tsunamis and disease Old Testament punishments from God, as Glen Beck argued after the tsunami devastated Japan back in 2011, or was the brutality visited upon Native Americans and Africans simply an OT punishment for their failure to be as Christian - clothed in the "white" robes" of white skin - as European WASPs?
When famine and disease befell Christians during the 16 to 18 centuries, rather than interpreting such misfortune as evidence of God's punishment upon Christians who had failed to please their own God, Christians decided to blame "witches" instead. How did they know that witches were real in the first place? Well, since they were required to believe their God was real (to save themselves from eternal fire), that meant so was their "devil." In truth, God and the devil are merely the personification of "good" and "evil," an extra "o" added to the one, and a "d" attached to the face of the other.
As such, those witches were punished by God, at least as far as Christians were concerned, even if it was Christians who had to do the actual punishing in God's absence (and mostly to prove to themselves he exists in the first place), and violating their own commandments by doing so.Why did God save Isaac from Abraham's knife but not those accused as "witches" from the fires of Christian love? Because those Christians simply had it all wrong, but not for lack of trying. Oh well.
Like the burning of witches and heretics, the violence engaged in by Christians, much like all acts of religious terrorism, is always morally justified by Christians as "punishment" for offending their brand of God. The question is how and why does this happen?
Well, it starts when Catholic priests make claims like "God's punishment is just, restorative, and medicinal." Why? Because if God is no longer using tsunamis to telegram humans about how displeased he is with us, as Glen Beck argued he was, then who is it that then feels the need to avenge their God, always justifying their actions as "God's punishment, which is always just, restorative, and medicinal"? Who's God, you ask? Well, their own of course, even if its no one else's.
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