Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Creationist and fundamentalist Christian evangelist Ray Comfort (colloquially referred to as the Banana Man) likes to envision the post-mortem judgement of each human being as akin to a court of law. God, Comfort claims, is the divine judge, and man has broken His law.

He begins the trial with his usual technique of getting the person to admit to several point of transgression against God's law, the Ten Commandments. Once the charges have been laid, Comfort, acting as God's prosecution attorney, states that the accused has admitted to being a lying thief, a blashpemer and an adulterer at heart.

He then goes on to ask "If God were to judge you by the ten commandments, would you be innocent or guilty? Would you go to Heaven or Hell?" (I'll get back to this in just a moment). No doubt, under Comfort's proposed legal system, each and every person to take the stand would be found guilty, and that is the way he likes it, because it opens him up to present his clincher.

When the accused asks, "But I thought God is forgiving, if I confess my sins he will let me in to heaven, won't he?" Comfort pounces with all the skill of a trained salesman, "Yes, God is forgiving, but He is also a just judge. Would a righteous judge say to murderer 'Because you have confessed your sin, I will forgive you and let you go'? No, the murderer has broken the law, and justice must be served. Because God is a righteous judge, he must punish murderers, theives, liars etc."

Here is where he sells his product, having given the pitch, "You have broken God's law and He must give you justice. But God doesn't want that any should perish, so He has made a way for you to go free. The penalty for your sin is death, but God sent His only son, Jesus, to take that punishment for you. You broke God's law, and Jesus paid your fine. God can legally dismiss your case."

Well, first I would like to point out the internal inconsistency in Comfort's analogy. In the scenario of the murderer, imagine someone like Jesus offering to pay the murderer's fine. No, that would not be allowed. The punishment for murder is jail time. For Ray's analogy to work, Jesus would have to take the jail time for the murderer, and no just judge would allow that. This is what happens in Christianity, the punishment of sin is hell, which could be analogous to jail time. It would appear that Jesus did not stay the full term as punishment for the sins of man, and so justice has not been served.

But back to the point that I said I would return to. In the justice system of most modern western societies, the accused is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. This is not the case in Comfort's analogy to the court of law, which operates under the premise that each individual is already guilty. Now, taking Comfort's scenario and applying it to real life, we can see that it does not work. First of all, Comfort has not demonstrated that the justice system of the Bible is valid. Secondly, he has not demonstrated that the supernatural court room exists. Thirdly, he has not demonstrated that the judge exists. Fourthly, he has not demonstrated that the supposed sins of lying, theft, blasphemy and adultery are actual crimes under his justice system. Comfort has not and cannot prove the guilt of the accused because he cannot prove that there is any cosmic court room awaiting all who die.
Until he can demonstrate that his premise is supported by evidence that would stand in a real court of law, there is no alternative than to declare the people he accuses, innocent.


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Theistic Evolution

Let's talk about theistic evolution, for those who like to imagine that evolution was the process God used to design all the wonders of life. Say God initiates first life. For billions of years with God guiding the path lifeforms evolve and go extinct, dying of starvation, disease, natural disaster, being eaten by predators. Countless numbers of God's loving creation suffering and living in agony and struggle for survival with limited resources. Billions of years of this.

Then the Lord finally reaches his apex of creation: man. He looks back over the last four billion years and says to himself 'This is very good'. Now man is walking in the garden and falls into temptation, eating the fruit, or disobeying God in some other metaphorical way. It is at this point that God curses the earth. Seemingly oblivious to what he had done for billions of years, only now does he pass the blame on to someone else, humans. Ignorant of all of the death and suffering that he caused, he declares that man's sin is the cause of all suffering in the world.

This God is the directing agent of this entire process, and is responsible for more death and suffering than any human could ever be accused of. Not only does he call this debacle 'very good', when things go wrong he realises the travesty of the state of affairs he has created, but even worse is that he blames humans for it. I am glad to say that this God most likely doesn't exist, and neither does any other.

Any God who had the gall to use evolution as his way of creating life is a sadist and a murderer of the highest degree, exceeding in evil far beyond any human holocaust.

Yes, evolution is a fact, but that does not mean that it is a good thing. We are very lucky to have been left with the beneficial results (with many negatives mixed in too) of a system of development that is calice and cruel (from human perspective), but ultimately one with no guiding or creative hand directing it. If evolution were designed, I certainly would not worship the criminal mastermind who pulled the strings of the biggest mass murder in all history.


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Inconsistency and God's Law

Question: You say that our actions cannot be labelled as sinful because we are not born with an inherited fallen nature by which to classify our natural desires as such. But what if God's law applies to us individually, regardless of whether or not the fall of man actually occured, and that Christ died for each of us for our own transgressions of God's law?

Answer: Firstly, we need to understand the nature of what is being declared as God's law. God's law is to be understood as a reflection of his morality and holiness. Now, if the foundational moral system of the Bible is based on a falsehood, what further credibility should I give to claims about God's law applying in spite of it's foundational falsehood? But let me indulge in the question.
If there is no basis for God's law applying to each and every one of us, in other words, God's law is right because He is holy and just, then that is arbitrary. It is simply, as Hitchens puts it, a celestial dictatorship. It is because it is because it is.
This is to say that homosexuality for example would be immoral, even if it were not the result of Adam's sin, because God sees it as such.
However thankfully that is not the way the Bible works. It is explicit in it's claims that we feels these desires and lusts due to the original sin in which we are born. Our nature was corrupted by sin.
If Adam didn't exist, then the Bible's claims about homosexuality, or sexual lust, or loving the wrong person, are inconsistent, because it claims that they are the result of being born with a fallen nature. If lust etc, are the result of a sinful nature, why then do they exist if we do not actually have a sinful nature?
This leaves no room for God to arbitrarily declare these acts sinful, without a sin nature being inherited.
Your standpoint would imply that even though the cause of sinfulness never happened, the result of sinfulness still follows.

So could God's law apply even though we aren't born inherently sinful? Sure, but it would be inconsistent with His own word, and God by definition cannot be an inconsistent being.

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