Certain items have jumped out at me in the news lately.
A family is taking a chain of fast food restaurants to court, because their child eats there regularly and is now obesely overweight.
A undercover cop is assigned to go into an illegal gambling establishment to do some sleuthing. In the process, he gets addicted to gambling, and loses not only the cash float he is given, but steals and loses over $100K. Now there is a question of whose responsibility this is, and should he take the police department to court and sue them for his losses?
A student stabs her vice principal with a letter opener. Her defense is PMS.
We are being flooded with victimization insanity.
Hear the words of the famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow who once delivered the following address to the prisoners in the Cook County Jail:
There is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral conditions of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible ... There are a great many people here who have done some of these things (murder, theft, etc.) who really do not know themselves why they did them. It looked to you at the time as if you had a chance to do them or not, as you saw fit; but still, after all you had no choice ... If you look at the questions deeply enough and carefully enough you will see that there were circumstances that drove you to do exactly the thing which you did. You could not help it....
In one of his famous murder trials, he defends two young men from the hangman’s noose. In their defense, he blames the murder on their youth, their parents, their nannies, their wealth, their hormones, a dead German philosopher (Nietzsche), and World War I!
Perhaps you have heard of Anna Russell’s Psychiatric Folksong, which concludes with this verse:
At three I had a feeling of
Ambivalence toward my brothers,
And so it follows naturally
I poisoned all my lovers.
But now I'm happy; I have learned
The lesson this has taught;
That everything I do that's wrong
Is someone else's fault.
Darrow, of course, was a determinist. “If men are not free moral agents,” he argued, “how can we hold them morally responsible for their acts?”
If we see ourselves as being merely at the top of the food chain and discern little distinction between humanity and the animal kingdom, then it is easy to blame our environment or even our genes. Everything is more or less predetermined. Life ‘happens’ to me. I can’t help my responses to the circumstances that come my way. Of all the consequences of the Darwinian theory, (and Darrow was the attorney who won the now infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial”) the loss of moral responsibility has probably had the greatest impact. We are not made in the image of God, and therefore there is no universal law or moral code to which I am bound. Furthermore, who is to tell but that our actions, as illegal as they might be, are a part of our evolution? I have heard the claim that altruism can now even be explained in an evolutionary schema. Why can’t altruism’s opposite then also be a predetermined result of evolution? If it helps me to survive, why not?
Christians need to recover a purely Christian response to perceived injury. We cannot buy into the belief that we are helpless products of our conditioning. That is a betrayal of the Sovereign whom we profess to believe in. Sadly, many Christians join in playing the blame game or the victimization card. Sad for the Christian, because he has forgotten that the basis on which he became a Christian is confession of real sin and receiving real forgiveness for real guilt because of real responsibility as a real person, created in the image of a real God.