Because of the short week due to the holiday, I spent the past few days revisiting much of what I'd written about last week. I also sat down with Alan Bancroft, the Vanderbilt campus Presbyterian minister to discuss some of what I had written about last week.
Generally, it's difficult to assume certain things about the religious viewpoint, as religious viewpoints even within certain religions are varied and nuanced. As Bancroft pointed out, it's possible to read biblical scripture in a way that doesn't attribute the three O's (Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence) to God, even though that's one of conceptions of God that is maybe most widely agreed upon. So while one person in one faith might say that God grants all of humanity grace and thus criminal justice on earth is solely what is necessary for society to function, another reading the same scripture might determine that we have a duty to dole out God's justice because it is the morally correct thing to do. In so far as religion relates to punishment in this way, it's hard to reconcile 'God's justice' with human justice if we can't agree on exactly what God's justice is. For example, one opinion I read was that God's justice was bringing the widow, the orphan, and the poor into society and recognizing them as one of our own. St. Anselm, on the other hand, believed Jesus essentially served a tool for satisfying God's honor and retributive nature. In any case, it's difficult to exactly say how any conception of a heavenly law and earthly law are really intertwined. This is why we see bible verses held up on both sides of the street when people gather outside a prison for an execution.
Ultimately, my feeling is that people like to think of God as both a harsh judge and a forgiving grace-giver simultaneously because it guarantees a certain outcome: that the people who have done wrong by us, no matter how fruitful and prosperous their present life, will eventually get what's coming to them while God will recognize that any bad actions that we have personally done are forgivable and not done out of malice. In a sense, it's the religious version of the Fundamental Attribution Error.
The link between organized religion and prison populations is also interesting. When imprisonment began to be viewed as a rehabilitative process, rather than just punishment for crime, the conception of rehabilitation was to essentially lock the prisoner in a cell with a bible and tell him to find God. He would be considered rehabilitated once he had taken up religious convictions. Even today, there is a huge amount of outreach by religious groups into prison life, even to the point of investment into private prisons. The cynic might view this an easy way to reach new converts (a captive audience, so to speak), while others can validly point to social support and community assistance that many of these religious groups provide. In any case, it seems like there is something about imprisonment that often leads to religiosity. My own feeling is that this is because of two different aspects of religion. The first is that many religions preach messages of forgiveness for those who have sinned or done wrong if they provide some sort of atonement; that there is nothing that is unforgivable so long as they open themselves to God. For a prisoner who feels guilty about his actions, this may be a very attractive message. The second is that it guarantees that the prisoner's suffering will end eventually and that he can reach a heavenly afterlife. This is the same line of reasoning that was promoted to keep slaves from rebelling: that life on earth might be horrible now, but what is that compared to an eternity of salvation? So while religion can be an avenue to reform and a source of support for reintegrating into society, it also seems like it can be a force for keeping an entire underclass of society in their place.
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