The Religion of Justice

Despite numerous studies and official investigations there is no evidence that capital punishment deters crime. This, by definition, makes "belief" in the death penalty an article of faith, not reason. It is just one part of the complex belief system we call criminal justice, which itself is a part of the more general religion of Justice.

Because the major religions of the past have fallen out of power, due primarily to their frankly antiquated belief systems, it is a common error today for people to fail to recognize the modern religious constructs that have stepped in in their place as political powerhouses.

Religion has always been first and foremost a means of political control over a large population. Today, as throughout history, wars are fought over resources, but justified through religious doctrine. Only today we don't recognize these doctrines for what they are: fabricated belief systems that are defended by legal decree (i.e. law); a.k.a. religion.

There are many (far too many to deny, through many people still deny it in attempts to defend their outdated beliefs) examples throughout history of religious authorities, (a.k.a. lawmakers, or "pharisees" as they were once called) attempting to defend their belief systems, which they saw as critical to the functioning of society itself, by outlawing and punishing anyone who offered evidence against or otherwise contradicted their articles of faith. It is easy to recognize these travesties of deceit against the truth that were propagated by the very people that society looked to in general to defend the truth. The same practice not only continues today, but does so rampantly under the same guise it has long used... "the best interest of the people."

There are too many examples of this to even begin to tell. The real problem is that, like all religions, the "belief system" that is being so defended by contemporary politics is based upon a complex of erroneous fundamental beliefs that are consistent with the "best evidence" available. That doesn't make them reasonable though. The "best evidence" one thousand years ago supported the fundamental belief that the earth was the center of the universe. And thus, the modern continued belief that humans are the "dominant" species on this planet is equally and erroneously believed by those who would defend the system of beliefs that extend outward from such a premise, such as the belief that humans must invoke order and justice through law.

But, there are some blaring examples of this practice of defending religious beliefs against new evidence that even the lawmakers themselves must admit (to themselves at least, or so one would hope) is done contrary to the truth in defense of the so-called "common good" (a justification for deception that Jesus himself warned against when he confronted the pharisees of his day). One such example is the Rind, et al. study.

Professor Rind, and a collection of highly reputed and respected colleagues, did a meta analysis of a dozen or so official studies on the long term effects of "adult-child sexual relations". The collection of studies they choose all met the most rigorous of academic and scientific standards (they were later criticized for not adhering to strict scientific standards, but these critics were later proven to be the ones in error, not the studies). Rind and his colleagues checked and double checked, even quadruple checked their sources and their results before they published the results of their analysis in a highly reputed scientific journal. They knew that their results were highly controversial, but they were scientists, and evidence was evidence as far as they were concerned.

The study showed with a high degree of statistical significance (i.e. "proved" in layman's terms) that there were no long term harmful effects of adult-child sexual relations on the child involved in the relationship. And by "no harmful effects" they were talking about negative psychological impact, i.e. emotional, intellectual, etc... And, as I've already suggested, they did not come to this conclusion based on circumstantial or incomplete evidence. The study accounted for numerous factors, using the best known control group and statistical techniques. (In other words, they did not base their conclusion on just one study or even one type of study. The Rind et al. study was a "meta study", which means it compiled and confirmed it's observations over several overlapping studies that could account for almost any anomalous findings.)

The result of their published study was predictable. It raised a maelstrom of heated controversy. The Rind study was attacked from all possible directions and for all possible reasons. It directly threatened one of the cornerstones of our criminal justice beliefs; that children are emotionally and psychologically vulnerable to sexual predators and must be protected at all cost (even if that means taking a man - or woman - away from their family and locking him in prison for 20 or more years, just because he uploaded pictures of naked children on the Internet). But the evidence that the study presented was solid and conclusive; children are not as vulnerable as we thought, and "sexual abuse" does not cause the harm we believe it does. And that's where the lawmakers stepped in.

Several states passed legislation, as a direct response to the Rind study, that decreed by law that adult-child sexual relations are abusive and harmful to the child. Then the Federal government jumped in and passed similar laws, and furthermore restricted any Federal funding of future research into such matters (i.e. the National Science Foundation funds and others, which pretty much shut down any further research by anyone on adult-child sexual relations).

And there you have it. Our so-called "Justice System" is no more than a system of beliefs that are defended by law, not available evidence. The Rind study and the death penalty studies are just two explicit and prominent examples of this fact. We live in a society that still centers around systems of legally defended false beliefs... a society of Baal-worshipers , in every sense. How tragic is that?

(J.D. 11-13-2014)