Serve Time In Jail...Or In Church?Follow

And how exactly are we going to define "better person"?

Someone in a gang, with a gang mentality, is going to think that belonging to his/her group, rather than the opposing one, makes you a much better person.

One problem is that we have no objective set of guidelines for what a moral person looks like. Many people (even leaders of some of these churches) think I'm the spawn of Satan because I think men can look pretty nifty naked. Others think that it's acceptable to bomb Planned Parenthood, because they are just a bunch of murderers. They all believe that these are moral, god-mandated beliefs.

But, realistically, that's only a small aspect of the problem. The real problem? Making this, in any way, about morality. As far as I'm concerned, that should have absolutely no say here.

To me, a just law is one that is created to protect the freedom and equality of peoples under its domain, which ultimately protects the social order of a community.

Punishments are made with that in mind and *should be* proportional to how you impeded someone else's liberty (which ultimately disrupts the social order).

I'm perfectly okay with community service as a punishment, since it forces someone to repay a community in proportion to how they injured it.

I'm not okay, at all, with someone bypassing the sentences other people receive because they are willing to go learn someone's version of morality. To me, morality had nothing to do with it from the start, and should have nothing to do with the sentence.

1. You shouldn't be begging, your first "option" is jail. The second option could be digging in a mine, it doesn't matter, you were supposed to go to jail like most other people have done and will do.

2. Read above. You were supposed to go to jail. If the only option is Wicca, you either or take it or leave it. You broke the law, we don't have to be cater to your desires outside of current laws.

3. Don't see it.

4. That just sounds biased against church. What difference does it make if the place is a church, Klan's meeting, school or a library. If the focus is to make someone a better person via a socially approved code of ethics, then the origin shouldn't matter. You shouldn't be able to pick and choose which religion. You already had that option, you chose to go against it and commit the crime. Now you should do the time.



FTY


Edited, Sep 24th 2011 1:11am by Almalieque

What Nilatai said. This is one enterprising criminal's lawsuit away from being made illegal at least.

FUCK THE ESTABLISHMENT clause

I used to go to church 3 times a week when I was younger. Look how well I turned out.

Hmm, this sounds like the perfect opportunity to gin up new cultists, for the enterprising megalomaniac and/or bookseller.

If you want to get right down to it, being a Christian makes you more likely to commit a crime than if you hold no religion.

isn't it Obvious.

Atheists could just be better at not getting caught.

I think your bias is showing in that exaggeration. They give plenty of reasons beyond that. The usual stuff, about trying to make people happy and the like. The same stuff that an atheist would use to motivate himself to do good. It isn't all just "trying to make the big guy in the sky happy, otherwise we wouldn't give a toss." There's a lot of overlap.



So says you. But church has demonstrably helped people reform before, so I don't see how you can back up that conjecture.



They'd probably just sentence them to jail time, I'd suspect. That's a solvable problem, at any rate.



The more educated that you are, the less likely you are to be religious. I'd say that fact, and not the religiousness, is the true cause; that the religiousness is tied by correlation, but the education level is the causation.

Edited, Sep 24th 2011 1:16pm by Eske

Edited, Sep 24th 2011 1:17pm by Eske

You're confusing "believing in the Christian God" with "following religious principles". The two aren't the same. Just because 80% of the population believe in God, doesn't mean that they accurately reflect the teachings of the religion. Since the point of this discussion is to teach the teachings to the criminals, it makes all the difference in the world. Else, I could easily say "people who eat pizza are massively more likely to commit crimes". That might be true, but there is no causation between the two. Likewise with your statistic.