Tuesday, August 1, 2023

The Statute Of Limitations For Murder

A crime with a statute of limitations has a specific period of time someone can have legal charges brought against them.  Texas, for instance, has a general statute of limitations for rape, although there might be random exceptions even to the states and crimes that would normally have a statute of limitations.  Different states might have their own respective statute of limitations for specific crimes.  One crime that lacks a statute of limitations for the most part, though, is murder.  This is a reflection of the very engrained cultural belief that there is no deed worse than murder, no cruel, harmful, or vile act that matches or exceeds the severity of murder.  The evangelical church is dominated by this idea even if they do not always empathize it outside of specific circumstances, but it is demonstrably false and is even contrary to the Bible.

Murder ends the lives of its victims, but acts like rape, no matter the gender of the victim, can leave someone with decades of deep psychological pain and conflicted attitudes towards sexuality.  Murder is a Biblical capital sin (Exodus 21:12-14), and yet the only murders that are not significantly less depraved than rape or certain forms of torture are those which are coupled with abuse before the killing.  Even then, it is not the murder itself that truly rivals rape or plenty of other abuses in their harm and depravity, but the actions inflicted on the victim before they were killed.  Though anyone can realize from reason that even if there is no such thing as morality, rape is still a more oppressive, cruel thing than mere murder itself is, Mosaic Law states that the rape in the scenario of Deuteronomy 22:25-27 is "like murder," so the Bible very directly admits that rape is at a minimum no less vile than murder, and of course rape can be far, far worse.

Again, as unjust as murder might be, it ends terrestrial suffering for the victim rather than amplify it.  Also, murder is an unjust form of killing, something that is Biblically obligatory in some cases and that is itself just one human ending the life of someone who likely did not deserve to live anyway--though deserving to die and deserving to be killed are two different things, as not everyone in the former category is in the latter.  Murder is not anywhere near the ultimate offense against one's fellow humans that conservative Christians mistakenly think it is in Biblical theology, much less when it comes to the general philosophical nature of reality.  As such, it would be highly irrational for any legal system to prioritize punishing murder over punishing rape, not that American law is just to murderers as it is (life imprisonment is far more harsh than a quick execution, and that is even aside from factors like facing sexual assault in prison, with the whole of this being utterly unbiblical).

It is likely that conservative theologians and conservatives as a whole would believe that murder is somehow worse than all other sinful behaviors, and thus they are likely to at least not be opposed to having a statute of limitations for all crimes other than murder, or at least for most other crimes.  However, there also does not need to be a statute of limitations for any sin that deserves to be legally punished.  Someone does not deserve to avoid fines, lashes, execution, or whatever else their Biblical penalty would be because an arbitrary amount of time has passed.  They could not, for it is the act that merits punishment, not committing the act and then getting caught and prosecuted before some random, subjectively chosen number of days has gone by.  Even more idiotic is that the different states of America could have different statutes of limitations, despite not all of them being valid at once even if there was not anything invalid or assumed about the notion of a statute of limitations to begin with.

Subjective conscience, irrelevant cultural traditions, consensus, and more have nothing to do with making or revealing if something is morally good, and not only does only Christianity have significant evidence in its favor, but other theonomist religions like Islam--and theonomy is the only logically possible moral framework--have contradictions in their tenets that render them false.  People might not like it, but if Christianity is not true, and it there is much probabilistic evidence that it is, then either the uncaused cause has a different moral nature that one is ignorant of or the uncaused cause has no moral nature, from which it would follow that nihilism is true.  American legal norms and those of any other community or country have no validity just because someone wants them to.  If someone commits a moral error that deserves legal retaliation, then no amount of years could change that or the exact penalty he or she deserves.

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