In December 2014, over 2,800 atheists responded to a challenge to rewrite the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with modern, humanist alternatives. After collating and condensing the submissions, thirteen judges voted on the top ten atheist Ten Commandments – or perhaps to avoid the hierarchical implications of the word, we ought to call them Suggestments. I would like to offer a few, brief observations to this list, which aren’t so much chiseled into immutable stone as they are finger-sketched into the sand at low tide. The original CNN article can be found here.
Be mindful of the consequences of all your actions and recognize that you must take responsibility for them
Now here is a morsel of sound advice on which we may collectively nibble. All actions have consequences, good and bad (the bad kind are the ones assumed here), and social solidarity depends on the bricks of responsible citizens governing themselves honorably. We will not bother rehashing the presumption baked into this morsel of what constitutes “the good” or by what standard responsibility-taking falls into that category. There are only so many times you can kick the horse’s corpse. I will concede that it is good so we can identify other axioms in the suggestion’s chocolatey center.
What we are really talking about with owning one’s actions is the idea of justice. Justice is a primordial desire in the heart of all mankind when transgressed, and all laws ever made were written to establish the bounds of justice (as defined by the lawmakers) or defend its transgression. Sometimes we do things on purpose, sometimes by accident, that cause physical and psychological harm to others, and it is important for the offenders to make amends. When persons do not take responsibility voluntarily, law enforcement and civil courts pour molten responsibility onto the heads of the guilty who have abdicated their social and moral duty. From Lex Talionis to Lex Rex, justice calls to account the Lex Luther in all of us.
This justice is limited, however, in that it can be slipped by trickery or avoided by death. Adolf Hitler did not face justice for his atrocities, letting himself off with an easy bullet. Stalin died peacefully on his deathbed from a stroke, well-fed and wealthy, while millions of others were starved and slaughtered to feed his communist machine. Not only did these men not face justice, but there exists no means devised by mankind to approximate the justice necessary to pay for their heinous crimes. Hitler could not hang six million times. Many perps are never brought to justice to pay for the death they have dealt, and the families live without closure, with nothing but a gaping wound in their chest as a reminder. They got off scot-free, all of them, and justice was left blind and unfulfilled.
But even on the small scale, personal level, there are times when it feels like justice, as ardent as she may be to do right, is limited. Say the perpetrator is caught and strapped to the chair and the switch pulled. What mother feels like this would be just recompense for the rape and murder of a daughter? What form would actual justice even take? Even after the execution, the fathers of the slain would slip into daydreams of torture of the criminals to scratch the lust of unfulfilled justice. And so justice, beautiful and necessary, is sometimes limited in its quality and quantity.
Many times, justice is satisfied, and we can be thankful for these times. But in many other cases, it cannot. And in the atheist universe with the sky zipped up as it is presumed to be, the perps got away with it; the perps win.
Not so with God. We can exact justice from man’s temporal life, God from eternal death. God will not be mocked. A man will reap what he sows. Ultimate justice does exist, and in a way that can be meted out such that the father of the murdered child would look on and his aching heart would be satisfied that every gram of fear, terror, and pain perpetrated on the child will be squeezed out of the offender. Ultimately, satisfactory justice is only possible with an eternal God who can destroy the soul in Hell (Matthew 10:28).
Coins have two sides. The desire for ultimate justice, which we all have, means that the gavel of justice must fall on our own transgressions, petty or heinous, purposeful or accidental. Justice is easy to call for when our offender is in the dock, but things change when the prosecuting attorney submits evidence after incontrovertible evidence of our wrongdoing, not only against fellow Man, but against a much greater and more perfect Being with whom we have to do.
It is here, in this moment, where our God-given demand for justice falls back onto our own heads, and God is the one commanding we take responsibility for a life lived in emnity and indifference towards our Creator, and a terrifying realization that the atheist commandment suggested above will be submitted as evidence to the Judge of all the earth. “Did you not command that everyone must take responsibility for their own actions?”
Ultimate justice will be done. We can pay the infinite tax ourselves in the gloomy chains of outer darkness, or we can accept the substitution offered on our behalf – the Judge’s Son, on whom will fall all the just sentence for our crimes, and who has taken responsibility on behalf of all the crimes of humanity for those who will receive him through faith.
Thought Butter 