"Is it moral to believe that your sins can be forgiven by punishment of another person?", posits the Preening Popinjay of the Potomac. And he answers, "I would submit that the doctrine of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is utterly immoral."
Well, that submission is certainly a point of view. But on what basis can it be shown to be valid? Surely it all depends on the type of moral framework within which the submitter lives his or her life. And I would have thought that for a a man like Hitch, whose moral framework is quite capable of stretching to accommodate millions of dead or devastated innocent Iraqis, Afghans and, hopefully soon some Iranians too, not merely with equanimity but with relish, that a little scapegoating, human sacrifice, or whipping boy justice is a small price to pay for all the moral efficacy it is capable of achieving. After all, as our old friend Montag used to say, "they're only Sand Niggers."
A serious objection to the Contrarian's argument is that he is talking about sin in the Christian or Biblical sense of the word, and yet he doesn't regard this concept of sin as being valid in the first place. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, which is infallible on this issue;
Sin is nothing else than a morally bad act, an act not in accord with reason informed by the Divine law. God has endowed us with reason and free-will, and a sense of responsibility; He has made us subject to His law, which is known to us by the dictates of conscience, and our acts must conform with these dictates, otherwise we sin.
As Hitchens, miserable sinner that he is, does not acknowledge the authority of the Divine law, he can have no opinion on the matter of Biblical sin any more than he can on the number of angels that can dance simultaneously on the end of a pin. The only sin he can reasonably opine about is Hitchensian sin, which is as different from the Biblical kind as Johnny Walker Black Label is from Wild Turkey.
An even more serious objection to Hitch's diction concerns his pronunciation of the adjective "vicarious" as vye-care-ious when any Oxonian worth his mortarboard would say vick-air-ious. Is our carpetbagging flag-of-convenience naturalized American finally going native or what?
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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