Sunday, January 30, 2011

Punishment

One of the reasons I sometimes have trouble defining my beliefs is that I don't have a whole lot of solid evidence to work on. It's hard to experiment on an omnipotent being, so I'm left with the jumbled record of people's experiences of God that we call the Bible, and with the equally jumbled experiences of people since then up into the present, and with my own reasoning and that of much smarter people who wrote stuff down. But there's so much inconsistency in the experiences and so many different ideas and no way to test them. I can talk about what resonates with me, what aligns with my own experience, what seems to make sense, what seems morally good, but I have no way to find out what's really real as far as the divine is concerned. So I have trouble talking about what I believe because in some sense, it seems like it doesn't matter – the nature of ultimate reality is unlikely to be determined by my beliefs about it.

So instead of making claims about what I believe God to be like, I make declarations about what I think God should be like. This is, of course, dangerous territory. For one thing, there's the hubris of me, a mere mortal, daring to pass judgment on God. But I think I've demonstrated in my previous posts that I'm willing to do that. My moral compass may be just a mortal one, but it's all I have. If I'm going to think in moral terms at all, that's what I have to use, and that same moral compass tells me that actions that would be condemned if carried out by humans can't then be morally okay for God. I may be cosmically wrong, but I'm constitutionally incapable of believing otherwise.

The other danger, and I think a much more real one, is that of just deciding that God agrees with me – of completely enshrining my own desires and inclinations and calling them the will of God. In order to fight this tendency, I feel like I need to ask myself do I really believe that something is right, or just that it's convenient and I want it to be justified? But humans are good at self-deception, so it's entirely possible that I will sometimes fall into that trap and probably not be aware of it.

But I don't see much in the way of other options. If my religion is to inform my life, it has to have some content. In order for it to have content, I have to evaluate ideas in some way, mortal and fallible though I am. I have to use my own judgment because I have nothing else to use – even if I decide to defer to someone else's judgment, I have to use my judgment to make that decision.

And all that was just so I could get around to saying that I can't quite say that I don't believe that God uses punishment, but I do say that I think God ought not to use punishment and I'm not sure I want to worship a God who punishes.

I've done some reading on animal training, and one of the things that's emphasized very heavily is reliance on positive reinforcement as much as possible for the simple reason that punishment damages trust. This is especially true with animals because without verbal communication it's hard to give warnings or make yourself understood – you can't explain as easily that you still love them and only punished them because it was important that the animal not carry out that behavior. But I think punishment damages trust among humans too. If someone punishes you, however necessary it seems to them, it also makes it clear that they are willing, at least in some situations, to cause you suffering in order to enforce their will upon you. It's hard to have complete trust in someone who will do that.

I want to clarify here that I'm not suggesting that humans should never use punishment. We're imperfect and often pressed for time, and I doubt that it would be possible to raise a typical child to functional adulthood without using punishment sometimes. We just don't have the time or the wisdom to manage with only positive reinforcement. There are definitely times when punishment is the lesser of two evils. But here's the thing: it's still an evil. I think one of the reasons probably everyone could benefit from therapy to a degree is that as children, we all have to deal with coercion. Some parents may manage it less, but even the best parents will have to sometimes just make their kids do stuff they don't want to do. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with their parenting – it's just the nature of the world. But I think part of that reality is that we all develop ways to deal with being coerced and punished and having our freedom curtailed – even if it really is for our own good and it would be irresponsible for our parents not to do it – we still find ways to function that don't always work well in adulthood. But I'm getting off track – the point is, the world is imperfect. I think one of the clearest signs of what we might call the fallenness of our world is the fact that we sometimes do have to choose between evils – that the very best thing we can choose might still cause some harm.

But that's humans. We are mortal and imperfect and finite and living in a broken world. By many understandings, God doesn't have those limitations. An omnipotent God should have the wisdom and the time to teach us to be good without punishing us. For God to use threats and plagues and fire to get us to do His will sounds like a cop-out, and, assuming omnipotence, doesn't sound like a loving God. So for the time being, I'm working under the hypothesis that God can be trusted wholeheartedly and doesn't punish us in order to lead us into His will. If I'm wrong, then...I'll probably be punished someday.

2 comments:

  1. I very much agree with you here. At the very least, I don't think that fear of punishment should be our reason for doing or not doing anything. You write about nonverbal animals and the idea of punishment being bad especially for them because it is less effective. This may be a minor point, but what do you think about John's Gospel and the obsession with Logos/Jesus/The Word. The voice and breath of God doing so and so. Does human's capacity for language hold us to different standards when it comes to punishment?

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  2. I don't know...I still think punishment isn't good for us, but I can accept that for humans it's sometimes necessary because not learning what we need to know to survive and function in society is worse. I'm not sure what you're getting at with the comment about John's gospel though.

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