Righteous Stone-throwing

When you write things like: If my enemy breaks into my house and threatens the people I love, I will kill him. I will not lose one second of sleep over the decision. I will not be sorry I did it, some people walk away thinking you relish the opportunity to blow other people away. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that I have never had to hurt anyone. Nobody has threatened me or my family. I don’t even own a weapon.

My point is simply that I have a right to self-defense, and given certain circumstances, I may have a moral obligation to kill. Contrast this understanding of justice and the legal, lethal use of force, with Old Testament mob justice and New Testament unconditional forgiveness, and know this: Most Americans with at least a middle school education are much wiser than Moses, Solomon, and Jesus.

Most Americans are decent people who mind their own business until some predator “gets all up in theirs.”

Everybody knows the famous New Testament story [John 8:3-11] when Jesus disarms a mob of stone-throwers who are about to carry out Old Testament justice on a woman accused of adultery. Jesus saved the woman by addressing the mob with the following conundrum: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Putting aside for now the fact that this story was not written by John and was in fact invented by men and added to the gospel centuries later [See Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, pp.120-22.]…

Jesus saved the woman, and that is a good thing. The problem with his approach, however, is that it sets a very bad precedent. That is: A man has no right to judge anyone unless he is perfect. If our justice system were based on Jesus’ teaching, the United States would crumble into anarchy. There would be no one qualified to be a prosecutor, judge, or jury. We would have no means to punish predators, no means to remove them from our neighborhoods, schools, or play grounds.

Jesus had a real opportunity to teach here…but failed utterly. I forgive his failure in this instance because disarming mobs of stone-throwers is at least a step in the right direction.

All stone-throwers are religionists. These are the only people on Earth who recognize the existence of “victimless crimes.” They call them sins. The religionists out there trying to create a perfect world where everybody meets their old book’s standard of morality are always the ones stoning people, flying planes into buildings, bombing abortion clinics, legislating to deny individual rights to people who happen to be gay. If you can’t convert the evil-doers, kill them or shackle them, but silence them. Righteous brutality?

The only people I throw stones at are the mob trying to stone me to death. I will not initiate the use of force against anybody, for any reason. The only justifiable use of force is retaliatory. I will use force only to defend my top shelf.