Why it might be OK to torture your neighbor

A live-streaming Facebook posting of four blacks torturing a special needs white man has gotten universal attention. The outcry of what happened was so visceral that liberals had to declare it a “hate crime,” a designation that heretofore mostly only applied to those from legislatively designated minority groups who had been assaulted in the commission of a crime that included racial and anti-“gay” motives:

“Chicago police earlier on Thursday said they don’t believe the attack was racially motivated despite the suspects yelling ‘F*** Donald Trump!’ and ‘F*** white people!’ Instead, they believe the 18-year-old victim was a target because of his special needs.”

To protect the special status of hate crime laws, minority advocates are reluctant to apply the specialized legislation to whites and heterosexuals. To me, a crime is a crime, whether a person did it out of hate, greed, or revenge. If the goal is equality before the law, then all hate crime legislation should be done away with since some victims are treated differently from other victims. The inner motivations for crimes should not be a determining factor. The punishment for someone who rapes and murders a white woman should be the same for someone who rapes and murders a black woman. The John Grisham novel and film A Time to Kill come to mind.

The following exchange took place between Don Lemon, who is black and homosexual, and Matt Lewis:

“You just try to wrap your head around evil,” Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller told Lemon on Wednesday night. “That’s what this is. It’s evil. It’s brutality. It’s man’s inhumanity to man.”

But Lemon took issue with that assessment.

“I don’t think it’s evil. I don’t think it’s evil,” Lemon responded. “I think these are young people, and I think they have bad home training.” (The Blaze)

I have a different take on what happened to this young man that exposes the weak moral underbelly of modern-day social theory built on the unchallengeable claim that nothing can be explained if you don’t believe in something-from-nothing evolution. In a previous article, I noted that Harvard Professor and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers ridiculed “creationism” as being worse than voodoo. If we are not endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence states, then who or what has or will endow us with these rights? The State. The courts? A king? A right arbitrarily given can arbitrarily be taken away.

Once God is removed from the moral equation, there is no way to account for either good or evil. One group of evolved meat machines vying for superiority over other meat machines is the necessary outcome of forward evolutionary progress. There’s no outside moral judge to say either “yay” or “nay” to what might be morally right or wrong. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” is doing what it does best, advance the species without regard to feeling or outrage. Jack London, who imbibed the pure naturalism of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, filled his stories with the philosophy as Nancy Pearcey explains:

“The way [London] served his god was by writing stories expressing spender’s evolutionary worldview. In ‘The Law of Life,’ Koskoosh is an old Eskimo, abandoned by the tribe and left to die in the falling snow. Weak, blind, and waiting for the wolves that will inevitably devour him, he reconciles himself to his fate by musing that, in the evolutionary scheme of things, the individual does not really matter anyway. Nature assigns the organism only one task: to reproduce so the species will survive. After that, if it dies, ‘what did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?’ The story pounds home the naturalistic theme that humans have no higher purpose beyond sheer biological existence.”1

Try teaching anything in a government school today that questions the operating assumptions of evolutionary theory. Try getting a job in a major or even a minor university if you believe that God created the world and everything in it.

If you don’t believe in God and contend that we’ve evolved from the primordial soup and got where we are today because of the inevitable evolutionary doctrine of the survival of the fittest, then Don Lemon is right, but not for the reason he stated. There can’t be any “bad home training” since there can’t be any objective definition of bad. These four meat machines didn’t do anything evil. They went about living out the unassailable ramifications of evolution. Like a lion trains her cubs to survive to perpetuate the species, maybe what Lemon describes as “bad home training” was important for the perpetuation of the human species.

When someone tells me that he’s an atheist, I ask him if he’s a consistent atheist. Most aren’t. A consistent atheist would shake off all sentimentality that is mostly borrowed from a Christian worldview. The beating of a human being is no different from a pack of wolves weeding out the runt to keep the gene pool strong.

Here’s an atheist and evolutionist who understands his worldview:

“According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created.’ They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal.’ The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a directly created soul, and that all people are equal before God. However if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation, souls, what does it mean that all people are created ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated ‘evolved differently.’

“Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals. ‘Endowed by their creator’ should be translated simply into ‘born’.”2

So, what if these four malcontents “evolved differently”? Can we judge their actions as either moral or immoral since they were “born” in terms of “a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose” because “there are no such things as rights in biology” because “[t]here are only organs, abilities and characteristics”?

At trial, the four physically superior bullies should call on Dr. Harari as an expert witness to argue that their “organs” made them do it. They were only doing what came naturally as evolving beings. It’s “science,” and how can anyone argue against science?

While I can’t prove that the teaching of evolution led to the four tormentors to justify what they did to the mentally challenged man, I can argue that there is no foundational basis within the operating assumptions of matter-only evolutionary science that can be used to claim that what they did was fundamentally immoral.

Barbara Reynolds, a former columnist for USA Today, made some excellent points in an article she wrote in 1993. I’m surprised that USA Today published it, and Barbara Reynolds mostly likely was too:

“Prohibiting the teaching of creationism in favor of evolution creates an

atheistic, belligerent tone that might explain why our kids sometimes perform like Godzilla instead of children made in the image of God.

“While evolution teaches that we are accidents or freaks of nature, creationism shows humankind as the offspring of a divine Creator. There are rules to follow which govern not only our time on Earth, but also our afterlife.

“One philosophy preaches happenstance with mayhem as a conclusion; the other, divine order. One suggests the survival of the fittest; the other, a commitment to serve the weakest and sickest among us. To me, there is no contest. Teaching evolution makes about as much sense as teaching our kids that humankind was grown in a cabbage patch or raised by wolves. Even in the dullest mind, a light bulb should go off: Who created the cabbage, and who made the wolves?

“Under the rules of evolution, teachers are forced to answer to King Kong rather than to the King of Kings.

“We are not human animals. We have written speech and higher intellect, but more important, we have souls fueled by a spirit of right or wrong.

“Human action is determined by core beliefs. Creationism teaches that humans are wonderfully made with the promise of high expectations.

“If evolution is forced on our kids, we shouldn’t be perplexed when they beat on their chests or, worse yet, beat on each other and their teachers.3

Reynolds’ comments are reminiscent of what C.S. Lewis wrote: “We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”4 We strip men and women of the certainty that they are created in the image of God, and we are surprised when they act like the beasts of the field.

The beasts of the field have been roaming the streets of America for some time. “In Chicago, two boys C one 12, one 13 C are sentenced to prison after dropping a 5-year-old out of a 14th-story window because he wouldn’t steal candy for them. In New York, two teenage boys and a young woman lock up a 13-year-old girl, repeatedly rape and torture her, then hang her up in a closet by her heels before she manages to escape.”5

Notes: