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When Is a Thought Crime Worse Than Murder?
Someone asked a question the other week that really got me thinking: is it possible that idol worship is worse than murder? The question seems ridiculous on its face – after all, we believe in Free Will and in the freedom to make one’s own mistakes, so why should worshipping idols be such a problem? But murder… murder is something uniquely and especially evil, snuffing out a life and all that it might yet achieve (not to mention the damage to the murderer). We all know that murder is a major crime, while people who have wrongheaded notions about Gaia or pantheistic tendencies are just harmless fools. … Right?
Actually, once the question was asked, I started thinking it through, and I came to the opposite conclusion: murder, as bad as it is, is not the worst crime. Idol worship is actually worse, and if you’ll keep reading, I’ll explain why.
All lives end. Everything that is alive now will be dead, sooner or later. Whether you want to say that death was created by Adam or by G-d, it is the central fact of life itself: we are mortal.
All we have to decide, as Gandalf said, is what to do with the time that is given us. And this is where idol worship becomes most dangerous, most insidious. Last week my future daughter in law @ishottheserif quoted Invictus: “I am the master of my fate.” And she is, because she believes herself to be so.
But the vast majority of people in the world, including in the United States, do not believe themselves to be the masters of their own fate. In primitive societies, the gods of nature rule all, with men as nothing more than leaves being tossed about in the storm. In neo-pagan science fiction ideas like “The Force” lead to thoughts of Destiny, of unavoidable fates, indelibly written in the scrolls. And, ever-present in our modern world, we have the twin Idols of Nature and Nurture, a false dichotomy if ever there was one, for deterministic predictors of a man’s future.
The culmination in America today is the cult of the victim: people who decide that the Master of their fate is their membership within an oppressed or wronged class. They outsource everything that happens to them, and in the stories of their lives, they are always the hapless passenger, never the driver.
When we outsource our lives, we willingly enslave ourselves and our futures to comfortable bromides and the kind of deliciously self-indulgent wallowing at which moody teenagers excel. There is a reason why the Torah takes it so seriously.
The failure to take responsibility for one’s own life is at the core of the classic Torah understanding of idol worship. And this is why the founding text of Western Civilization spends so much time and so much ink forbidding idol worship in all its forms, leaving murder to relatively few lines. After all, murder ultimately burns itself out as a practice in any civil society (or it is commonly practiced only by a few ruling elite). But idol worship is a debilitating disease of the mind, one that infects and spreads more effectively than any virus. Murder kills a few people, here and there. But a widespread epidemic of blaming other people for one’s own misfortunes can be the fatal rot in the pillars of civilization itself.
Published in General
I wouldn’t complain with having a Susan 2.0.
But, stick around, because Susan 1.0 is just fine for now.
March 1 this year! (Beginning the night before)
Thank you, @ishottheserif! I’ll be reading, praying, and enjoying, too! :-)
In other words,
If,
a=b, and
b=c, then
z=Gerbil
Q.E.D.
Or not. I don’t think you succeeded in making a clear nexus between your observations and your conclusion.
Agreed. I believe in individual rights and individual victims. Each murder is bad in its own light. If some vague concept of “idol worship” has a tendency to influence the occurrence of mass murder, it is still not a direct cause. A person can be guilty of whatever type of “idol worship” you might want to define (and it seems to stretch thinner and thinner of late) but that person may not directly kill someone. I put blame on the individual murderer, not on a group of people in a civilization that doesn’t spend the time and thought to worry through whether or not some idea is now considered “idol worship” or not.
There are lots of people I disagree with. I don’t call them murderers for that alone.
The last comment got me thinking a bit, although I was hoping to avoid it!
You could well be right here–that this is a reason idolatry gets more attention than murder in the Torah. But it’s at least as easy to give another reason: that idolatry dishonors G-d directly, whereas murder only dishonors G-d indirectly. For the same reason the justification given in Genesis 9:6 for the rule against murder is that man gets his dignity from G-d, and the four rules against dishonoring G-d are given first in the Ten Commandments.
More likely the reason is that murder is intuitively wrong. Idolatry, not as clear.
I agree. And for a free society such as ours, we can articulate rules about murder (we do allow killing in some circumstances, perhaps too many) and punish the crime. It doesn’t stop it, but it does communicate clearly that society finds it unacceptable and will protect itself against it as best it can. But we can do little against idolatry in the sense it is used here. So I agree with the premise here that it can introduce a sickness of the soul that over time can be quite destructive of society precisely because we can’t say that it is intuitively wrong or demonstrate its consequences clearly enough to defend against it.
You are, of course, absolutely right. Thank you for the correction!
I doubt it.
I think you nailed it.
Without a doubt.
Good. Another reason is that idolatry is very easy to do without knowing it (most people who recycle would recoil at being told they are worshipping a false god), while murder is much harder to ‘splain away with bromides about being “sustainable.”
Though abortion and euthanasia advocates manage this trick without losing sleep at night.
I thought about that, and I am not so sure. Cain killed Abel. Nazis reckoned they were engaged in pest control. I am quite sure that Saddam Hussein and Assad both knew they were good people. We have many otherwise-good people who advocate euthenasia for the old and handicapped, those who are deemed to have poor quality of life.
Perhaps the relevant point here is whether the evil of idolatry is less intuitive than the evil of murder.
I suspect neither were intuitive to most ancient peoples untrained by the Torah.
So . . . we’re not disagreeing, are we? That’s nice.
And . . . how many possible reasons have we accumulated?
That people can be evil is without question. That people can recognize murder as evil is facile. The Nazis and Hussein didn’t think they were murdering. In the case of the Nazis they kept up a pretense of legality for their murder because they didn’t want their murders to look like murders.
I’m not so sure that wouldn’t be the result of proclaiming that idolatry is worse than murder.
Different solutions for different problems
Who decides what is idolatry? Who decides if correcting for idolatrous behavior is the “solution” for which problem?
No, sir. I will not be subjected to vague terms and oppressive punishments. I am a free man and should I decide that I want to have an idol or exhibit whatever it is you or a citizen’s committee declares is idolatry, then I will not consent to being punished for it.
I think whatever ills you perceive, and I agree there are always many ills in society, I will not allow anyone to tell me how to think. Or pray. Or not pray.
Freedom trumps all other sentiments. Punishment for idolatry, whatever that is today, does not even get a place at the table of governance.
Then you have made an idol of freedom.
Idols aren’t limited to bad things. Idolizing something means elevating it over the Eternal. Can it really take the place of everything else?
wow. Just wow.
I will not agree to being put to death for valuing my freedom, thank you. When the most common punishment for murder across all societies has been death, saying that idolatry is worse than murder means that there is an intent to kill people for being idolators. That is absurd on its face, unless you’re the sort that believes that Al Qaeda and ISIS are wrong only in the detail of what they deem constitutes idolatry.
I think the evil of idolatry always leads to human sacrifice, either on an installment plan in the most direct way. The worst current example would be that hideous Aztec Temple of Blood Sacrifice that Molech Inc., i.e. Planned Parenthood, built in Houston. But every life lost to some Greenmonger’s latest scheme to protect precious Gaia from human depredation is in effect a human life sacrificed on the altar to a nature goddes.
Huh? Is it? That is not the way I have ever understood the prohibition on idol worship. Do you have a scriptural reference to support that?
Don’t get me wrong. I think that failure to take responsibility for one’s own life is a terrible choice, and wallowing in victimhood is so damaging to the individual that it borders on psychic suicide. But I don’t understand what it has to do with idol worship.
You’re mixing jurisprudence with theology. Don’t do that. I think it says not to in that Constitution thingie, and anyway it’s rude.
You are free to do what you like. I am a religious libertarian – do what you like! I retain the freedom to call it as a I see it, but there is no punishment or power of the state involved.
As I see it, I (and people who agree with me) are in a marketing campaign – we have to sell people on the good life, and they are free to choose their own paths.
This is a common thread that runs all the way through the Torah, every time Israel is compared to Egypt, holiness and growth compared to harmony with nature and pagan deities. You can find it in Jacob’s wrestling match, wrestling with himself to decide what kind of person he is. It is found in the Korach rebellion story, where the pagan understanding of appeasing G-d (Korach’s) is destroyed. It is found with all the comparisons of our relationship to G-d to marriage (as opposed to a father or king). It is found in the story of Moses, the person who takes the most responsibility and grows the most. It is found in all of the symbolic commandments (called chukim) that are there to help us grow and change, to change who we are by taking responsibility for ourselves.
And it is easiest to understand the effects of idol worship by seeing how incredibly unproductive idol-worshipping societies are: from fate-based Africa, China and India to blame-the-other societies like the Arab world and inner-city race-mongers.
Very good point: I could not agree more.
You can also very much find it in all of the commandments that are inherently different from pagan idol-worship: no pagan deity cares about human morality, as long as they get their tribute. The Torah is deeply concerned with what we actually do in our own societies and in our interpersonal relationships.