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44 comments
Prison is meant as a temporary arrangement, with the time spent in it being proportional to whatever crime was committed.
Hell , according to you, is an eternal and infinite horror inflicted because someone picked the wrong god to believe in, or didn't pick a god at all.
These two situations are not at all comparable, and trying to equate them is beyond stupid.
That would be a good analogy if we were talking about the punishment fitting the crime. The problem with hell is its an infinite punishment for a finite crime and that is unjust. Also there is that corrupt loophole. The one akin to pledging eternal loyality to a judge to get your sentence commuted. If any mortal judge tried that he would be arrested.
Also is Eric making a jab at his father? I doubt he's doing it intentually but if so wow.
Except the rules are different, aren't they? People go to prison because they are convicted of a crime, they did something bad, and the ultimate goal is usually rehabilitation.
On the other hand, by fundie logic the worst scumbag who ever walked the face of the Earth, any cruel or violent criminal, can buy a free pass to eternal bliss just by believing in the right god.
It's apples and oranges.
I have a slightly different perspective on prisons, so I thought I'd give my two cents.
I'd say Eric Hovind is wrong, but not for the reason other users have stated. In my ideal world the primary purpose of prison is neither punishment (which is not the place of the government) nor rehabilitation (which can be handled outside of prison).
To clarify this a bit further: If your crime was violent, you belong in prison. If your crime was to property, under most circumstances you should just be required to pay the victim back, possibly with a fine slapped on top. Property crimes should only be punished with prison if the person is a career criminal, committing them so often that the damage to society is more expensive than the cost of imprisoning them (and even then they should be kept separate from violent criminals).
The primary purpose of a prison should be containing people who are too dangerous or destructive to deal with outside of prison.
Based on my understanding of heaven, once you go there you no longer feel any desire to sin. Therefore, sinners who went to heaven would no longer be a threat to anyone. So imprisoning them is pointless.
It would be something close to the same if:
- Anyone sent to the prison suddenly becomes immortal, able to live for billions and billions and billions and billions and billions (and so on forever) of years, spending all that time in the prison being tortured in the most horrific ways non-stop.
- If you by the time you're X years old still don't believe the judge exists, having never seen the judge or *any* evidence that the judge is real, you're sent there.
- You have situations like a notorious criminal and bad person professing belief in the judge the day before their Xth birthday avoiding the prison while a law-abiding citizen and good person reaches their Xth birthday still not believing in the judge and gets sent there.
Punishment for a life of hedonistic debauchery: eternal, unbearable torture.
This system of belief is really atheism plus a lottery ticket: it is virtually impossible to get to heaven, even if you are what I would consider a pretty decent person. So good and bad people alike have nothing to look forward to after death. And a small number of people, for no particular reason, get eternal life. The Calvinists are probably the most honest Christians: soon as there are two or more mutually exclusive doctrines, you can only know the correct one by knowing the mind of God, which everybody agrees is impossible (after all, this is a god that allows fatal congenital diseases galore for some reason).
So you are fucked: the odds of guessing right are just like the odds of winning the lottery. You would not live your life according to the assumption that you will win the lottery, so why waste time with all this crap? If God is as you say he is, because this is it.
If a hypothetical ruler made thoughtcrime a capital offense and deflected accusations of hatred by smirking and saying "I'm just enforcing the law!", I would laugh at the sheer concentrated stupidity, even though I'd be standing next to a dangerous psycho.
Laws against thought are for the good of the rulers, never the ruled.
Prison is meant to be (usually) temporary and rehabilitative, it's kind of hard to rehabilitate someone burning in Hell for eternity. And seeing as how you will be sent to Hell for the tiniest transgression of God's law, it doesn't seem a bit fair.
This does not look like a prison maintained by a Rechtsstaat . It looks like one maintained by a crooked regime staffed with sadistic guards that regularly beat human rights into a pulp - literally...
Oh, is that a photo of Daddy's new room?
PS: A loving judge would not sentence everyone who ever committed a minor infraction to the most severe penalty avaible to his nation (for which the transgression would not be eligible, anyways). Indeed, he would dismiss trivial cases.
Why is the idea of paying it back or working it back more palatable? Some people simply can't pay the money back and the work it back option sounds weirdly like debt bondage. You know, that internationally illegal modern form of slavery?
OK, fair enough. Edit: Just to be clear, I wasn't being hyperbolic or sensational. Debt bondage is considered a contemporary form of slavery by the UN and anti-slavery organizations.
@1917942:
For one there is the gravity of the crime commited, as was already mentioned.
Second, how is being held in a tight cell any repayment for the crime itself? Why shoud people be held aainst their will if their crimes had nothing to do with being able to function in society?
Lastly, your argument from "this is slavery" is absurd idiocy on the level of comparing modern prisons to konzentrationlagers. You know, as in held against their will in extreme confinement sometimes till their death. See how stupid it sounds?
Being held in a room with food, water, somewhere to defecate, etc.. is not the same as being set on fire.
Sorry.
Eric, your daddy is a tax dodging criminal who deserved prison time. The sooner you acknowledge that, the better of you'll be. And on a shallow note, your daddy also dressed like a used car salesman from 1978. Every picture I've seen of Kent he's dressed like he's either a confused time traveler or literally blind.
Reality check; we don't throw gays in jail anymore, nor do we imprison people for heresy (in the West at least).
Jail is there to protect people from those who deliberately cause others harm. Hell is there to burn people who are not the fundie of the day.
Except that in your analogy the judge wrote the laws and made virtually everything not done without his explicit permission a crime (including complaining about the laws and the unfairness of the legal system), he created a panopticon so that everyone is being observed 24-7-365, then not only made it impossible for the people to follow the laws he had written, he made certain that most people would break them. Then he imposed death by torture as the one and only punishment for lawbreaking, carries out the sentence himself and randomly and arbitrarily gives a tiny handful of people a way out based entirely on a whim.
@freako104: anything involving eternal torture isn't even remotely just.
By our very nature humans are finite creatures, capable only of finite things. Humans aren't capable of infinite crimes that would warrant eternal punishment.
Nothing living is.
Anyone not capable of understanding that isn't truly capable of comprehending justice, or ANY human value system.
Does a loving judge sentence people to an eternity of torture for thought crimes?
Will that eternal punishment undo that person's crimes? Will it demonstrate to them why their actions were wrong? Will it help them to be better people? No? Then it's not justice. It's vengeance. A judge who sentenced people to that kind of punishment would be regarded as a monster by any sane person, and so we regard your god as a monster. Good thing he doesn't exist.
Oh, I dunno...
...just ask the Birmingham Six.
Question: Does even Saudi Arabia torture to death someone who goes over the speed limit? Or doesn't pay their taxes...?
That latter question is something you daren't answer, Eric. Just ask your dad.
Irony. She can be such a sadistic bitch, eh? Almost as much as your own 'God'. Romans 13:1-7 . Mark 12:17.
Your dad proves that the likes of Richard Dawkins is going to Heaven. He obeyed the Bible more than Kentypoos did, ergo...! >:D
Except no judge has ever said they love the accused, and prison is a finite penalty for a finite crime. The supposed loving god is supposedly sending people to infinite punishment for finite, not to say trifling, "crimes", like wearing clothes of mixed fabrics or eating cheeseburgers.
I can't help feeling a bit bad for poor Eric; he never had a chance, did he?, with that fraudster father of his.
As bad as his father was at logical scenarios or possibility ratios Eric is much worse. This is at the level of almost everything he spews, completely disjointed ideas presented as revelation. As I said, his father did it too but not so badly, I'm suspicious Eric pulled his fathers unused brainfart notes up when his dad was in jail.
And was that a loving Judge that sent your dad to jail? He had no choice really, you father broke laws and insisted he wasn't under them when he most certainly was. All you guys do is bitch about that just ruling.
The primary two reasons we send people to prison are
1) They represent a threat to the greater populace or the functions of society and must be sequestered from other citizens and certain social structures (such as finance and payrolls and Kent Hovind may have discovered)
2) The possibility of rehabilitation of criminal habits
In both cases the judge's sentence is a proxy for the state acting in its own sustainability.
Since nobody gets out of hell Hovind implies that God is threatened by the damned souls and is incapable of fixing them. What's more he's threatened by them, as if these souls have the capacity to destroy God or his system (heaven).
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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