When False Accusations Are Capital Sins

Not all Biblical capital offenses, or capital sins, as I sometimes call them, have equal moral weight.  All of them are severe enough that they deserve death according to the Bible, with only utter fools actually believing that to kill people for these actions is not a universal obligation in Christianity, but even then, some are more cruel, more selfish, and more vile than others.  Cursing one's parents (Exodus 21:17) has a nature deserving far less concern than cursing God (Leviticus 24:16) or kidnapping someone (Exodus 21:16), for instance.  Bestiality (Exodus 22:19), the rape of an animal, is more severe a sin than physically striking one's parents outside of self-defense (Exodus 21:15).  In one sense, these acts are all evil by Biblical standards, and in another sense, some are far less depraved.

To falsely accuse someone of murder, rape, kidnapping, adultery, or any other such capital sin is of course not as evil as actually carrying out the acts in question, but that the Bible prescribes the same punishment for malicious, false accusations that the falsely charged sin should receive (Deuteronomy 19:16-19) reveals just how seriously Yahweh takes the matter.  To intentionally accuse an innocent person of something like rape or murder--a person innocent of the particular deed in question at the least, even if they are not innocent of other other major sins--merits the same response as if the accuser himself or herself had actually committed rape or murder.  Now, some cases of intentional, malicious false accusations would only deserve financial damages, a small number of lashes, or (very rarely) the removal of a hand or other body part in accordance with what non-capital crimes of the Bible deserve.  False accusations of capital offenses simply deserve death itself.

So grave is the malicious attempt to have someone punished for a capital sin they did not carry out, even if they wanted to carry it out but did not, that it is also prescribed the very same penalty of execution that would be deserved by the accused if they had indeed done what they were charged with.  Some people might treat accusations of sins deserving death as so weighty that they should never be made at all out of respect for how grave they are and because of the possibility of a community rallying against an innocent person; others might trivialize or forget the severity of saying that anyone at all has sinned, capital offense or not.  There are even ways that theological liberals or conservatives might specifically succumb to the latter of these two general errors.

When liberals pretending to adhere to Biblical ideas call for all women to be assumed to speak the truth about male abuse against them, they are not only sexist, but they do not care about the seriousness of charging someone, male or female, with wrongdoing of any kind.  When conservatives pretending to adhere to Biblical ideas assume conspiracy theories that tend to target their often arbitrarily despised political opponents, they are not only irrational for embracing the unverifiable, but they too do not care about the seriousness of charging someone, regardless of how mysterious they are, with wrongdoing of any kind.  Unfortunately, these liberal and conservative Christians are the ones most commonly confused for the ones who represent the worldview, and they usually do not even handle this issue well despite supposedly caring about justice.