Crime and divine retribution

The question has been asked for ages whether faith in cosmic or divine retribution discourages crime.

Russell and Hume thought not but Voltaire, Gibbon, Hobbes, and Rousseau felt otherwise.

And for just this reason Epicurus was labeled a practical atheist, since he held and maintained in public the indifference of the gods to all things human.

Personally, I think that in the larger view the skeptics are right and that, far from helping, religion often actually makes matters worse, encouraging its own special crimes and atrocities.

Which leads to the question whether not religious but moral faith discourages crime.

I will grant that on the face of it the amoralist may be more immoral than the moral believer, as an atheist is apt to be less pious than a religious one.

But that is not the same thing, and I think the answer to our question is that he is not more given to crime, and that the moral believer is not less so.

Voltaire, who insisted on an afterlife of divine retribution, wondered whether a society of atheists was even possible.

One might ask whether a society of amoralists is possible.

As to Voltaire's question, Hume thought faith practically unreal in any case.

He was quite confident people act as though there is no God, coerced behavior, worship, and other meaningless faking aside.

And one might surely say the same, and much more emphatically, about morality, widely recognized in all ages to be almost exclusively an affair of hypocrites and the more trusting of children.

All the same, in our time amoralists convinced of the social usefulness of morality likely far exceed atheist defenders of the like usefulness of religion.

Atheists as a group are just far enough past the age of faith to be comfortable with the idea of popular incredulity.

But the age of moral faith is still upon us, and moral disbelievers have a kind of faithlessness that still doesn't quite dare to speak its name.

A faithlessness not yet respectable even among the educated.

So far as it crosses inclination, we comply, so far as we do, with law and morals out of policy.

"Live according to the customs of the country," said the ancient skeptics.

Within reason, of course.

As measured by carrots and sticks - and our own tastes, of course, regarding carrots and sticks. 

And for most of us politics - like so much of human life - is a matter of looking out for ourselves and our near and dear.

And that's all.

None of which is to deny that some people really drink the Kool-Aid.