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Agreed, "he's a very bad man" doesn't really seem to cut it.

dp

Fritzl has treated his own daughter with horrendous cruelty. Of course ordinary language seems inadequate to convey the revulsion that most people will feel on hearing of his crimes. We use ordinary language to deal with the everyday world, but the incestuous sadism of Fritzl lies outside the everyday world that we inhabit. So our language strains to cope with it.

I do not see how religion can help us to express our revulsion any better. All it provides is a set of ancient ideas and concepts which wrap the crimes before us in worn-out myths. Calling Fritzl "devilish" is no more effective than calling him "vile", "cruel", or "vicious", and merely deflects our outrage at him onto some mythical demon or devil.

There is no need to look for divisions, nor to quibble over terminology. I think that Humanists, Christians, Muslims, etc, will all agree that the crimes which Fritzl committed are vile and repellant and deserve the maximum punishment that the law can deliver.

It'll be interesting to see what emerges from Jersey over the next few months. So far what we've learned from that situation has been pretty horrific as well

Les, I accept that you as a humanist regard these crimes as vile and cruel and that we are all agreed on this. I disagree about the language issue though. I think it is the case that something deep inside all of us wants cries out in the face of this kind of evil. I believe that is the voice of God inside each one of us, our conscience. That conscience, in the face of this depravity, reaches (to use Will's word) for the term evil because we recognise that this man has sinned against the order of the universe itself. This is a version of the moral argument that CS Lewis favoured. Our conscience is the voice of God. The fact that we NEED to reach out for religious language to condemn this order of crime is evidence of God's existence. Thank God we can in fact be sure of eternal justice and that criminals like this man will be finally punished. That is because God is the ultimate judge. Without belief in God, there would be no hope of a final reckoning.

PTL-

So if your conscience fails to react against an evil deed, either you are wrong about the conscience being the voice of God or you have a defective conscience.

John, the Bible describes how "the truth is supressed in unrighteousness". In other words, sin enters our experience and distorts our senses. My point doesnt relate to the sociopaths like this man in Austria. Rather, I'm trying to explian why the rest of us feel the need to descibe his behaviour as evil!

jovialPTL wrote: "Thank God we can in fact be sure of eternal justice and that criminals like this man will be finally punished. That is because God is the ultimate judge. Without belief in God, there would be no hope of a final reckoning."

If that was true, there would be no need for ordinary human law and justice. We could leave all questions of guilt and punishment to be dealt with by the gods in the hereafter. The gods would have omniscience and would match villain and punishment perfectly.

Sadly, however, there is no hereafter and no eternal punishment. So it is up to us, humankind, to devise our own system of law and to punish the brutal, sadistic thugs in our midst ourselves. That is the Humanist view of crime and punishment.

Strangely, very few religious believers seem enthusiastic about leaving all questions of law, crime and punishment to the gods and the hereafter. Perhaps they have some doubts about it and so they go along with human justice, just in case?