How to Qualify for a Discount!
Citation below from:
“The National Institute of Justice estimates that rape and other sexual assaults of adults cause an annual minimum loss of 127 billion dollars, or about $508 per U.S. resident. This includes tangible losses such as initial police response, medical care, mental health services, property damage or loss, and loss of productivity; and intangible losses, such as loss of quality of life, pain, and suffering. These costs do not include the costs of investigation, prosecution or incarceration of offenders. This figure makes sexual assault the costliest crime; even higher than murder.” US Department of Justice, Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look, 1996; Summary by Virginians Aligned Against Sexual Assault
Prologue: A couple of recent cases illustrate all too well some of the points I attempt to make below. In one case, widely reported in the national media, a gay man filed a suit against the prison system, alleging that he had been repeatedly raped by other prisoners while the guards and prison admininstration turned a blind eye, despite his complaints to them. It seems that their attitude was that 'since he was gay,' then it really didn't count.
The jury, in spite of plenty of evidence and witness testimony, apparently shared this view, as they found in favor of the prison system. One has to wonder about just how long and brutal a future that man now can expect, now that the system has effectively been given carte blanc to allow the gangs to do anything they want to him.
In the 1980's, as a cab driver in the OC, I got to witness some of this when one of my customers from the notorious OC jail, a milktoast of a middle-aged man, overweigth, short, bespeckled, wearing a business suit, began weeping unconsolably in the rear seat. When I asked him what the trouble was, he related in a rather high-pitched voice that he was scheduled to be married in two weeks, and so his friends took him to a bar for a little celebration. A fight broke out, entirely unrelated to his group, and someone called the cops, who arrested everyone in sight.
Because of his appearance and high-pitched voice, the female prison guard assumed that he was gay, and thought it hilarious to put him in a cell together with a notorious prison rapist twice his size and at least 20 years younger. She watched and applauded while he was repeatedly raped and forced to perform other sex acts.
"Now," he wailed, "what am I supposed to tell my fiancee? I might have contracted AIDS! What am I going to DO?"
I had no answer for him... except to get himself examined immediately by a physician, so that at least he could file suit against the county. But he was naturally reluctant to even do that. I hope he was lucky.
Meanwhile, twenty years later, we have these young men, who, as typical irresponsible, drunk and horny juveniles, a couple years back raped a drunk and unconscious female associate, including rape with a pool cue and other objects. They did the girl no apparent physical harm, as she had no complaints afterwards and, in fact, would likely never have known that anything had even happened - or, given her alleged desire to become a porn star, likely even made a big deal out of it. (Apparently she had gotten undressed and layed herself down completely nude on the pool table while still conscious.) And if the boys had been a little younger, it would have been a slap on the wrist, and, younger still, all written off as "playing doctor."
Except that the boys naturally videotaped the entire episode and then gleefully showed it around to all their buds. Whatever the ribald humor value, unfortunately for all concerned, one of the offenders was the son of a major figure in the local Sheriff's Department, which made it prime-time news locally, when someone provided the D.A. with the tape.
While these sorts of stupid sexual hyjinks thing go on all the time in the cloistered gated communities of YuppieTown OC, once the news was out, the teens' fates were sealed. Essentially, in the OC, as in many wealthy communities plagued with spoiled brats whose daddies are assumed to be able to bail them out of any situation, the problem is not what actually happened, but rather how it appeared in the media.
The situation was further exacerbated when the kid with the law enforcement parent got allegedly caught with mariuana while out on bail and the officer involved drove him home, on alleged instructions from a higher up, with no charges. Somehow, however, the "OC Weekly" found out about this whole episode, gleefully splashed it all over their front page, and then things got really chancy...
So, a farcical comedy of errors, but one that made it critical that they be punished to the limit of the law, of course, even though no permanent damage had resulted from their crimes. The thousands of other teens in the OC who regularly push the limits of bored sexual or pharmaceutical experimentation, trash local restaurants on a weekly basis, deliberately run their RVs through flower beds to show how "bad" they are, beat up the homeless, etc., etc., etc. will doubtless take this lesson to heart and mend their boring little juvenile jerk ways. Right.
So, even though the victim here suffered minimal harm, certainly less than in the average car accident, the courts threw the book at the three young men, and decided to treat them as adults for purposes of sentencing. It will be a LONG time before they see the light of day, but the community retained "face."
For those who are not from the OC, it is useful to note that the heart of OC Yuppiedom, the city of Irvine, where there are virtually no sidewalks, as the city fathers reportedly felt that anyone who could afford to live there would drive everywhere, is well over half of Asian heritage, a set of cultures that largely share the subjectivist position that reality counts for much less than precious "face." I'm not picking on Asians, by the way (as I try to avoid the easy targets). There is certainly enough hypocrisy to go around.
But with the economic and academic heart of the OC largely and increasingly dominated by cultures that make hypocrisy a cardinal virtue, I'm just waiting for the next big implosion. Some readers may recall that the enormously rich OC went bankrupt in the mid '90's, due to all the investment funds being given into the care of one man, who hired an astrologer to help him pick stock options. For real.
And, a few years ago, the OC Register - one of the few OC institutions that I would rank as being among the "good guys" - ran a story about the OC being the world headquarters for internet and postal scams. It's just SO hard to keep those demons in their place and under control, darn-it! Do as we SAY, not as we DO! OK?
And now we have THREE (3) - and counting - major scandals coming out of UCI, the academic pride of the OC, in a few short years. First there were the stolen women's eggs, harvested and then sold on the black market. Then, out of the same medical college, the discovery that donated bodies were being cut up and sold on that same black market. NOW we discover that UCI was letting apparently dozens of patients over several years span DIE of liver failure, telling them that there were no organs available, while all the while knowing that there WERE organs, but they lacked the surgeons to implant them.
I'm just waiting for the "OC Register" to get off the dime and look into the likely mass cheating at UCI. Just how many of the stellar academic performances of the 70% Asian student body are for real and how many are more in the tradition of S. Korea, where parents quite literally rioted when the authorities attempted to stop the cheating in school that had become so rampant and sophisticated that the students no longer had to learn anything except how to use the very latest cheating technology.
So, getting back on theme, prison is clearly not about justice, if, by "justice," we mean setting things right, so that people who are injured are compensated by the injurer. The gay prisoner first mentioned above certainly suffered multiple injuries, likely with long-term effects, even if he is so lucky as not to come down with AIDS, genital herpes, and/or hepatitus, all prettly much long-term death sentences. He was GAY! So that makes it ok to kill him.
The guy in the cab only committed the crime of "looking gay," in a culture in which appearance is everything, but, hey, let's not take any chances here...
And the teens would have all gotten off scott free (including the girl, whose traumatization and shame from the trial and exposure surely exceeded the costs to her of the actual acts performed) if the boys had not followed up stupidity with even more stupidity in passing around the video, and then just suffering plain dumb bad luck.
Was anything "set right" in any of these cases? Or several million more of a similar nature? Or did our "justice" system not only fail, but actually serve to make matters many times worse?
So, what is our "justice" system really about?
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It's remarkable that so few people commit suicide in prison. The whole point of prison is to create a little preview of the Judeo-Christian HELL fantasy. That's why nothing is done about the high rate of prison rape (the total being twice that of all the rapes of women in the U.S.) or other abuses. Even if the victims of the worst horrors are generally the least "guilty" of the prisoners - newbees, youths, petty drug offenders, it doesn't matter, because the essence of prison is deterence by FEAR!
Not that it works. But, then, neither does the Hell fantasy itself. Very few people, is my best guess, are in the least bit deterred from "sin" by any fear of divine retribution. The really nasty "sinners" are not believers to begin with.
And, doesn't it seem rather hypocritical, after all? I mean, if it's ok for GOD to torture you FOREVER for the crime of not having sufficient faith, then how can it be wrong for you to torture someone else for only a few brief years? The Jesuits and the Inquisition both relied upon this logic. No merely mortal torture could possibly compare to the perfectly horrific pains of a hell designed by the perfectly knowledgeable Master of the Universe. Similarly, no earthly delight... On the other hand, if anyone actually believed this nonsense of heaven and hell, would they live their lives the way they do?
(Well, actually, a few would - namely the suicide bombers looking forward to their 70 perpetual virgins. So sad that they have to take innocent victims along, as their deaths almost certainly constitute a major improvement in the gene pool. I wonder if they realize that it's the SAME 70 virgins - for everyone...)
As Joe Strazinski, creator of the famous Babylon V SciFi TV series, put it at a science fiction conference, in a public debate over the existence of God between him and a Christian theologian, ~"If you believe half of the things the old testament says about God, then you have to conclude that God is a malign thug!"
But, actually, the New Testament portrait of God is worse! The old testament does not really describe or promise Heaven or Hell to the common run of men. A lot of Jews, then and now, who devoutly believe in God do not have any real belief in any afterlife, in fact. If some street goon came to you and said, "Hey, oofa! Yousa gonna believe in me from now on, ok? So, either pay up or I pour gas all over youse and set yer on fire!" - well, then you might pay up something right then, depending upon just how threatening this jerk might come across, but you sure wouldn't do it any longer than you absolutely had to, and you'd be thinking about guns and neighbors and cops, not about loving the SOB.
So, how is it any better if the threat is that you will burn FOREVER? "Love me of I'll torture you, forever?" And this is what most Americans believe? You know, good old Osama almost comes off as a nice guy, in comparison to Yahwa... I mean, Bin Laden only plans on killing you and destroying your way of life. Then it's over. What possible satisfaction does the Bully of the Universe get, anyway, out of beating up on poor humans who cannot possibly fight back?
But it is only the promise of literally infinite (if largely unspecified) rewards or infinite (much better specified) torture without hope of reprieve that backs up that mainstay of religious conversion, Pascal's Wager, which runs as follows: ~ Consider the consequences of belief or non-belief... If you believe and there is a God, then you are rewarded infinitely in paradise forever and ever. If you believe and there isn't a God, after all, then what have you really lost? If you disbelieve and there is a God, then you suffer eternal torment and damnation, but if you disbelieve and there is no God, how much has it gained you?
So, by this argument, if you assess the probability of there being a God as larger than zero, then any number multiplied by infinity is infinity! Right? So, all you atheists had better run, not walk to your nearest chapel and publically declare your belief in Jesus....
But, which chapel? And, should it be Jesus, or perhaps Mohammed? Sunni or Shiite? Or, maybe the Zoroastrians have it right? Perhaps they are all wrong, as they cannot possibly all be right. In which case your infinite reward scenario is faced squarely with an equally infinite possible number of hypothetical Gods, varying in every parameter and making contradictory demands upon you. I.e., Pascal's Wager fails on decision theory* grounds regardless - until you have actual proof, which none of these multitude of Gods seems to want to provide, they all being strangely shy, perhaps infinitely so...
Decision theory deals with how to apply uncertain knowledge to cost effectively make choices. Simplified, in brief, you assess the expected return of a decision by multiplying the likelihood of various consequences by their expected loss or benefit. Returns can be very high and yet provoke no course of action, due to the very low probability of an outcome.
For example, getting hit by a meteor is possible, and has happened once in documented history (not counting the larger strikes, which may have been comets or asteroids like the 1908 Tunguska event, which killed a fair number of people in Siberia) and that person survived, but measures that would constitute effective protection would cost $x and the likelihood of them being useful is $Y (value of expected death or injury) X z% (a VERY tiny number). Bottom line, you are well advised to spend the money getting flu shots or any number of other ways that yield a much higher expected return.
While, collectively, there are grounds at least seriously inquiring into the real danger level of a significant asteroid strike, as we know that devastating strikes have occurred in eons past, there are no known reasonable grounds for an individual expending time on his own personal behalf, as the probabilities are just way, way too low. If we had much longer lifespans - in the thousands of years at minimum, it would be reasonable to make such a personal inquiry at least, as unlikely events do still happen, given enough time, but there would still e a host of other potential calamities ahead of meteors in the queue.
So, taking up Pascal's wager, if the loss or gain of belief in a diety is assumed to be infinite - which itself is not certain at all, as it will vary by God - then you multiply infinity times the expectation that a given God is involved. But, since there are an infinite number of hypothetical Gods and you really have no proof that any particular one actually exists, you have to divide the second term by infinity, which cancels out the infinity you started with. Infinity divided by infinity is not defined, as such. It might be infinitely large, or infinitely small, or some real number. We simply don't have enough information to make that kind of assessment.
But, in place of God, just for laughs, substitute some new hypothesis to explain the universe and everything. "42?" Sure, why NOT? You can demonstrate that there are literally an INFINITE number of explanations for ANY and EVERY event. We rule enough of them out by virtue of integrated experience and applied decision theory that we are able to act and make choices that more or less work in practice, but that doesn't change the fact that we might be dreaming, hallucinating, in an "epistemology machine," in a spiritual test for fitness to join God in Heaven, or perhaps to serve the real ruler of the Universe, his Satanic Majesty, who is chortling on the sidelines as these stupid Christians act out their moronic fantasy, proving their unworthiness. Or, it's really the laboratory mice, who are just running the Earth as a laboratory to test less intelligent creatures, i.e., us, perhaps trying to determine how we could possibly have made it so far.
If you've never smoked pot, here's a good reason not to, I suppose.... Pot opens the gates of the brain, so that information gets past the normal filters, and you find yourself awestruck at the beauty of the shadow of a spider on the wall, or the taste of peanut butter, not because the perception has changed, but that the raw data is getting to you more. It's also noteworthy that a major characteristic of pot smokers in general is that they lose the ability to make choices. There are just SO MANY!!!
So, our whole mental life is focused around using common sense - another word for undocumented, implicit decision theory - to filter out all the nonsense and get to the meat of what will allow us to live long and prosper. But because we don't document it - most of us - or try to examine just how it really works, it fails much more of the time than necessary, and, for some people, the "safe" patterns derived from it become a straight jacket and a set of blinders. Some people live their entire lives that way. Others thrash out against it, but all too often in unhealthy ways, such as overuse of drugs or escapist fantasies like religions.
As a further comment on Pascal's wager, someone might tell you to "DUCK!" and when you did so and then asked why, explain to you that there might be a meteor about to strike you and kill you, which is a large consequence to most people. However, when they tell you that they really have no evidence of a meteor here, today, and they actually wouldn't be able to demonstrate any reason to think that it is coming from any particular direction, then your reasons for ducking in any particular direction fall to zero. If two or ten thousand or ten million or a billion people all tell you to duck, but cannot offer any more proof than the one, then you have no more reason to duck, either (although you would surely be curious as to why that many people all advocated such a silly act).
And, what would qualify as proof for a Diety? If Jesus came to Earth descending on a golden stairway from Heaven, with the ArkAngels tooting their horns (what, no Moog synths? - And why is mere 20th Century tech out of place - or felt to be? Surely GOD has the highest possible tech, right?), my assumption would be that the aliens have landed and have some good, benign reason to pose as dieties. After all, aliens are real, somewhere or other (did you really think it likely that out of trillions of galaxies and many more star systems, that WE are FIRST or ONLY? Now THAT takes an act of FAITH!)...
Imagine that George Lucas travelled in time back to ancient Palestine, circa 30 AD, and put on a show using state-of-the-art 21st Century Digital technology, aimed at convincing the local population that the Christ foretold for hundreds of years in the Torah had indeed arrived. Everything described in the New Testament, so far as miracles, could have been set up by a clever 21st Century con man. All the witness testimony could have been the result of trickery or simply paying or threatening the individuals involved.
Recall that when one of the first movies, depicting a locomotive coming straight toward the camera, was shown, many people panicked and ran from the theatre. And these were modern-era people, not technological primitives. So, which is more believable - that an all-mighty deity who created the vast universe decided that we paltry humans were worth the death of his "son," or that it was just trickery, fraud or mendacity, probably well after the fact, when the "gospels" were actually first written.
Aliens don't violate any laws of physics or biology or logic by their existence, unlike the typical attributes ascribed to GOD - omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, which are simply logically impossible. The only problem is that real aliens, if they have interstellar travel, would be so far advanced beyond human that we would likely be of very little interest to them.
Not that they would likely eat us or otherwise do us in, trivial as such an act would be for them - after all, simply surviving truly high tech means that you have learned to be ethical, as the capacity for mass destruction rises more quickly than the capacity for defense. So, if they're alive and truly high-tech (which is what would be needed, after all, to get here, right?), then they must also be ethical. That said, there is still precious little that we have to offer a species that is to us as we are to the ants.
But, even though, privately, many, perhaps most, individual Christians in the U.S. or any of the Ist World might admit doubts about heaven and/or hell, they jointly, tacitly agree that such doubts must not be voiced lest it affect society - especially the CHILDREN... After all, why would anyone be good if there weren't a divine torturer waiting in the wings to fry any deviants from his rules?
I well recall growing up in Bible-pounding Georgia, where the same weekday sinners became the "amen" choir on Sunday, presenting a united front to the world. In Sunday School, we would spend 45 minutes discussing football - or the other boys would, anyway, as I had no interest in either football or the Bible, personally - and then 15 minutes going over GOD's word. So, which was more real to us - football or GOD?
For such people, questioning the ultimate practicality or morality of prison itself is too close to home, to questioning the reality of the medieval fantasy they have bought into supporting, regardless of their unvoiced internal doubts. And, of course, the less tenable a cherished belief, the more righteous the defense!
As I discussed in my "Anthony L. Hargis & Co. - A Case Study in the Present Danger " , Joseph Harsch, the Christian Science Monitor's Berlin correspondent - up to the entry of the U.S. into WWII, in his Pattern of Conflict searched high and low among the German bureaucracy for someone who would privately attest to being an actual NAZI believer, without success. He finally found one person who insisted that he was a good NAZI, but that individual qualified it with a disclaimer to the effect that but of course, he didn't belief in this silly racist nonsense....
Thus, it is quite possible for a successful meme to take over a whole society and bring it to complete ruination even while no one at all actually believes in it. It is not the truth or belief that count - only the willingness to ACT AS IF IT WERE TRUE!
It could be argued - and has been, of course - that there are positive results for both the individual and society in a belief in a diety, at least one similar to the Judeo/Christian/Mormon/Moslem God. For one thing, there is the acceptance of a common set of values, examplified by the idea that people as Children of God should all consider every other person to be a family member first, due every consideration and even love, transcending national, class, and ethnic barriers and hostilities. Additionally, there is the deterent to evil of God's wrath, in this life and thereafter.
The all or nothing of heaven or hell, of course, tends to make normative moral calculation difficult, which is why the Catholics evolved this whole elaborate system of mortal vs. venal sins, confession, penance, purgatory, etc., to provide gradations in the operant conditioning. Many Jews, of course, also believe that "happiness is the smile of God," i.e., that God actively rewards and punishes in this life.
There is also the issue of moral transcendance, that because of God's role, we value positive things that otherwise might be of little importance to any given individual. God has ordained certain rules for society and requested or implied that individual humans are to be held responsible for enforcing them, or, at minimum, obeying them. As opposed to moral nihilism, which is generally how the dichotomy is pictured by the religious, this certainly has some advantages. People who attach any credibility to the God idea to begin with are also bound to give a similar weight to these social/moral concerns, transcending their personal interests.
On a related note, philosophic arguments in favor of virtue can be quite compelling in the abstract, but rely much upon a society of high trust in reality. It is our expectation that other people will also behave morally and on the basis of a long-term perspective that makes us willing to work and think long-term in turn. In a society of range-of-the-moment actors, no one is safe and no property is secure and no long-term planning is likely to be feasible. This is why mobs are so dangerous, as they quickly generate the feeling that anything is possible, people are going to run amok, and so why not join in? In fact, resistence may be dangerous, futile, even fatal.
But this itself involves another hidden cost of religious morality. Consider the person who is moral because he fears the consequences from authority and then rests that fear upon a faith that is supported only by wishful thinking plus the idea that since many other people also believe, then it must be true - or at least the prudent thing is to assume that it might be true. Then he or she finds himself in a large group, including people he knows personally or that seem to be more or less just like the people he knows and that group seems hell-bent to behave as destructively and immorally as possible, as though there were no authority and nothing to fear.
Given the painful repression that is involved in convincing most people to be moral - OR ELSE! - there is naturally a stored-up anger and resentment against the repressors and any excuse will do when the restraints appear to be lifted or even given the sanction of authority, as in the mobs involved in Pogroms or other attacks upon heretics.
But, to be fair, there are positive psychological aspects to religious belief. This first occurred to me as a direct consequence of hearing a talk by Gene Roddenbury, in which he described how he had developed the characters of the original "Star Trek." Gene related how he had a room with just a bare desk and a chair in it. On the desk, he would place a sheet of paper and with his pencil, draw a vertical line down the middle. At the top of one column, he would write "Me." The other one, he labeled "Spock."
Then he would carry on a conversation with Spock. He would write down a question or comment, and then he would write Spock's response. At some point, he started getting answers that he had never thought of before. For example, he asked Spock what he thought the universe was in fact all about. Spock immediately responded, ~"Well, obviously, the universe is a hothouse for evolving intelligences."
Similarly, in dreams, we enter scenes and landscapes, occasionally meet people, etc., that we have never seen or experienced in real life. These people act like autonomous entities, although there is every reason to believe that they are simply generated by our own minds.
Now consider that case of prayer. A devout Christian might reverently beseach God to grant him wisdom or insight into some troubling problem. Using the Roddenbury paradigm, it should not be surprising that often this person in fact feels that God has spoken to him, and, if his concept of God is of a wise, benevolent, and objective entity, who will provide insight into the real truth of a matter, whatever his personal ties to it are, then he may well get guidance into how to behave better than if he simply followed his own narrower inclinations. To coin a phrase: "What would Jesus do?"
Simply the idea that there is a God who knows best, who will make everything turn out right in the end, is enough to impel the true believer to accept without complaint perils and pains well beyond what he might otherwise be able to handle. To give an extreme example, a person who realized that some calamity - war, pestilence, an asteroid strike, etc. - was about to undo and completely obliterate every good thing he had accomplished in his life might well feel despair. But the Catholics explicitly view despair as a major sin, as it implicitly denies the reality of God and his alleged plan.
I have even known people who accepted faith in God based on that very perspective. One young woman with whom I had a lengthy intellectual/emotional affair in a past life finally related how her faith had come from the tragic death of a very young sister, who she and everyone else had adored. That a person who engendered this love could die, without any good reason, made her conclude that only God could make it all right. Otherwise, for her, life itself was unliveable.
The one episode of "Star Trek, the Next Generation" that everyone remembers is the one in which Picard, the Captain of the Enterprise, has the memories of a member of a lost civilization implanted in his head. The Enterprise has stumbled accross this artifact floating in space. There is a sudden anomylous burst of energy and Picard falls into a coma, during which he relives portions of this long-dead person's life, enough to understand that an ecological catastrophe had doomed this entire extinct intelligent species countless millenia ago.
All they were able to preserve of all the millions of years of their evolution and culture and art and philosophy in the brief time they had to prepare for the end, is in the memory stored in this artifact, which is now incorporated into Picard's memory, and, as most of their knowledge was technologically inferior to that represented on the Enterprise, the only thing that truly survives is a simple tune, which Picard plays pensively on a flute alone in his quarters at the end of the episode.
Yet, our cosmology gives us only a little hope that this is in fact not our own fate. All that we are and ever will be, as humans, consciousnesses, moral actors, representatives of four billion years of evolution, will not only shortly become dust for us personally in most cases, but will also be completely and utterly lost as though it had never been, with the heat death of the universe, even assuming that we undergo the "Singularity" and transcend our biological limits and are able to travel among the stars and galaxies, seeking out the ever-more-rare concentrations of extropic energy.
There is much speculation among physicists and especially cosmologists that there may be a "metaverse" of perhaps an infinite number of other entire universes that goes on forever in space and time. It has also been suggested that consciousness might be able to move to a new universe when ours fails. But, eventually, through sheer chance, we will still individually die, and all our knowledge and impact lost in the noise level of countless future universes.
It is tempting in that light to postulate a God Who makes it all ok, just like my friend did to live with the death of her sister. However, it is not generally valid to base beliefs upon what we might like to be true. The long-term consequences of such an intellectual perversion are many and pervasive. And, there is no reason for assuming that such a God, whatever his nature, would not also be subject to the same problems. Adding additional dimensions and saying that God exists transcending our meager four dimensional universe does not appear to truly offer any solution, as there are still the issues of action, free-will, etc. through those other dimensions, however many there are.
Perhaps there are creatures of transcendent dimensionality Who gaze benignly upon the whole stretch of our universe, both time and space, seeing the whole span of our limited existence in a single glance. But if they are living actors with choice, intelligence, free-will, etc., then they can also fail, make mistakes, change and ultimately die.
In the worst case, life has no real meaning and we are doomed to an existence in which transient happiness results only from a failure to appreciate the real situation, an understanding of which should impel us to commit suicide rather than stretch out the misery, like the recruit in the Vietnam war movie, "Full Metal Jacket."
However, decision theory provides an out. Death, like Hell, lasts forever. Life, no matter how smart and powerful we may evolve to be, eventually ends. Death is an irrevocable decision, however, and it lasts forever. Life is a choice made moment to moment, only so long as we are alive. Death offers us nothing, as we do not exist in death, by definition.
Any conclusion that life is not worth it has to be set beside the relative consequences. We can undo a choice to live, but not a choice to die. We also know that we might be wrong about life, as we have the experience of being wrong about other things in the past. Thus, however bad we many feel, we could be wrong in concluding that life is not worth it, and any positive number we might assign to the probability that life has meaning and value has to be multiplied by infinity to assess the probable cost of ending it all. (Or, I could be wrong... 
)
A belief in God as a moral base undermines any attempt to arrive at morals from a natural base. What happens when faith conflicts with nature? Nature can only offer a limited amount of evidence for anything, while faith has no such limits. We see this today in the abortion issue and the related stem-cell controversy. There is NO evidence that an embryo or an early feotus has any of the characteristics that we would use to determine that it is a "person." There is no consciousness approaching anything human.
A laboratory rat has a far greater claim to personhood than any embryo. That rat clearly has a consciousness, makes choices about values, experiences feelings, emotions and empathy toward other conscious creatures comparible to our own, has a sharp and clear understanding of its world (although certainly not on the level of a typical human), none of which is present in any embryo of potential rat or human, any more than your thumb has a claim to being a person.
Mind you, I'm not arguing for "animal rights." "Rights" arrise out of the particular nature of human consciousness. However, a lab rat has a lot more of what it takes to have rights than a human embryo. This much is obvious, yet when set against the limitless certitude of "faith" (by definition, belief without evidence), we see what is very likely to be critical research sidetracked or denied funding. Thus, faith kills. Whatever random moral system is believed in without evidence, whatever chance good effects it may possess in terms of behavior, in the long run, it prevents us from making the rational value judgments upon which our survival and happiness depend.
There is also the "flattening of affect." Who cares - about mortal happiness or suffering - when it will all be as nothing once we have the pie in the sky by-and-by.
And, perhaps worst of all, there are all the truly good things that never get done, because to focus effort upon them would be to trivialize and implicitly discount God's plan. I'm referring to research on ending disease, including aging. Many bio-scientists are convinced that we could probably eliminate 95% of the cause of death in a couple of decades if we only placed enough priority on the quest. Again, this is not "eternal life," just a further step down the path of evolution.
Eventually we will all probably die, but if life is worth it for a paltry 75 years, almost half of which is spent either in growing up or getting old, then how much more interesting will it be to live for centuries, millenia, perhaps outlive our sun? What wonders will we witness and create as the demigods of our local space, what transcendant wisdom will we achieve, what art that takes a million years to perfect?
We are so close to being there.... Yet, how little of our precious time and energy is spent on making that final step, as we mouth formulae designed to keep us as mental slaves to parasitic memes like religion.
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And of course, back on track, there is our penal system, born out of a need to impose a set of divinely ordained values upon our fellow humans. No matter that it doesn't work, in fact makes things worse, as a continually growing prison system attests. It fulfills our artificial need to bring reality to a fantasy, a definition of neurosis. The common law dealt with earthly, human justice. It concerned itself, not with intent, but with restoring equity, as humanly possible. But we are not satisfied with mere equity. We NEED to make other people act out our fantasies. We need to inquire into the contents of their minds. So, we have the criminal law, which is all about intent. A maxim of criminal law, in fact, is that, without intent, there can be no crime. So, we attack those who do not share our values, and call it justice.
As Max Stirner discusses in his classic "The Ego and His Own," the modern "Christian" level of conflict is that of "ideas." First, as with the ancient Greeks, it was physical reality that bested us and was feared because we could not control it. But once we had gotten some control over physical reality and felt that it's challenges could be handled, then the next level was that of the "spirit," the idea.
Thus it was that when I picked up a cute little bumber sticker years ago at a libertarian convention that read "Have a Nude Day," with the mandatory happy face, several people deliberately tried to ram my mini-truck! And I got more hateful stares than you could imagine. For the Christian or Christian-minded, as most people in the 1st world generally are, it is the spirit that counts over anything else. It is not the mere physical and emotional consequences of someone's stupid, vicious or callous act that they are concerned with. It is the aspect of serving the "spirit." The "criminal" has violated the spirit of goodness, and the only solace for their pain at the mere idea that someone would do such a thing, is "punishment."
And that, my friends and other readers, is what our "criminal" justice system is really about.
Thus, a perverse, perverted penal system that accomplishes nothing positive except keeping the occasional psychopath off the streets - worthwhile in itself, to be sure, but hardly worth ruining the lives of the other 99% of the prisoners - is the subject of learned scholarly studies about how many years of incarceration are appropriate for a given offense. I wonder how much money flows directly or indirectly from the Prison Guards Union, the most powerful lobby in California, by far, to grants for university research on these pseudo issues?
Maybe we should just give people a choice as to the punishment. Instead of five years, how about fifty lashes? Or cutting off three fingers? Or castration without anesthesia for sex offenders? Or a lottery ticket, the winner to be executed without appeal, with the losers set free?
The choices people then made would give us a real estimate as to the destruction our mini-Hell's really create, and the floggings, multilations and quick and final executions would be far less expensive both near-term and likely longterm as well, as we would no longer be paying the equivalent of a college tuition for colleges of crime...
On the other hand, this might open pandora's box... For example, we used to treat rape as equivalent to murder. I.e., rapists were executed. Then we decided that they were "sick," and needed to be "rehabilitated." Now we equivocate between a position of punishment and one of treatment.
However, we never thought to ask the victims. That's because our justice system is not about the victims, at all. It's about our need to force other people to live by our values. It's about defending the "spirit" of good. Which is why most prisoners are in for drug-related offences. And why we keep raising the ante, 3-Strikes being merely one step in the escalation of a neurotic need's symbolic fulfilment.
What if we did ask the victims? "KILL THE BASTARD!" might be the response in many cases. However, in tort cases, which are about restoring equity, not imposing values, we have methodologies for establishing the real values held by the injured parties.
So, which would you rather: a) be raped, without further consequences, such as AIDS or hepatitus or herpes or 
lose an arm or a leg? What about a hand? Three fingers? One finger? Ok, let's suppose you settle at one finger. How much is a finger worth? Would you rather lose your house - without insurance compensation - or one finger? Your car? Ok, how much does it cost to replace your car?
$25,000? So, now we know that a simple, uncomplicated rape with all its emotional, psychological trauma, etc., is worth not more than $25,000 to you.
See how simple that was?
Of course, some people might take out ads on EBay... As in, "I only care $20,000." And, if someone is willing to pay the $20,000 for forced sex, and the other party is satisfied.... ? But then, the objection arises "but that wasn't really forced sex. It was just an expensive act of prostitution." So, what would make it forced sex? What qualifies as REAL rape? Doesn't the woman have to fight to the death, literally? (Ignoring rape via drug intoxication, clearly.) Otherwise, she's in effect saying that the rape is worth less than her life, right? So?
The issue here is in fact two radically different and incompatible views of justice. The one is represented by tort law, by the "good and ancient" common law, in which there were no "crimes," only inequities, in which one party owed it to another party to set affairs right. That law sufficed for much of Northern Europe, such as England, Ireland, Iceland and the other Scandinavian countries to a lessor extent, for many centuries, including a period we refer to as "the Dark Ages," during which Ireland, in particular, a functional anarchy whose social fabric consisted of the decentralized common law, was a shining beacon of sanity and scholarship. Prisons under the common laws in these various cultures were only for temporary custody, or for rare political prisoners under the monarchies, or other people deemed genuinely dangerous.
The other law is the Biblical law of vengence by an angry God - or God's agent on Earth, the Church, or the Church's agents, the anointed rulers. In secular terms, this is the positive law that is necessary for conquerors, such as the Norman invaders of England, or the European invaders of the Americas. After all, you can't very well have the victims of your conquests sueing your soldiers, hey? So, you institute by force a new kind of "justice," no longer based on equity, on compensating victims for their losses, but on perpetuating and preserving social norms - especially those of the ruling class.
But, if we didn't frighten the criminals, they could commit as much crime as they could afford!
True, but then they would have to keep paying off their victims to the point that they - the victims - didn't care, right? While the common law - the law of equity - does not allow for punitive damages, or any penalty based on motive - there is still the fact that juries tend to lean strongly towards the upper limits of assessment when the offender is a jerk who cares nothing about the suffering of the victim, plus, there is nothing forbidding consideration of emotional or psychological costs, provided that they be documented, normal under the circustances and reasonable.
In general, the award granted to a victim under the common law is aimed at setting things back to where they would have been - for the victim - had the damage never occurred. The costs are to be borne entirely by the offender, or his bondsmen or insurance or whoever has contracted to stand for it. But, failing other recourse, the costs still fall to the person responsible for the deed.
Sure, if it's worth it to you, take a poke at the obnoxious drunk ruining the wedding party. Be aware, however, that unless he is actually aggressing or refusing to leave after being requested to do so by those in legitimate authority, you will quite possibly, under the common law, find yourself paying his ER bill.
There will be, predictably, under such a system, also those scam artistes who put themselves slyly into harms way to collect damages - just as they do now, with the faked or contrived auto accidents. However, they will not find the huge punitive awards available under the common law.
And then there will be the penniless bums who have no assets to sieze or cash to pay damages. Without prisons, what will prevent them from stealing or intimidating peaceful folk into handouts? (As they do now under the positive law...)
Even without prisons, however, there is the issue of having access. While there is generally a common law right of passage, which antedates and supercedes other property claims, which are, after all, taken out of the commons and put to private use at a cost to all those who no longer have the use of them, this right of passage has limits as well.
Your itinerate bum has no general right to enter your house, or your gated community, or your private shopping mall, or your subscriber financed street.
I.e., while he still has the basic right to get from point A to point B, he does not have a right to all the things and associate benefits that you and other productive people have brought into existence by your own labor. Thus, the poor bum's existence will be rather circumscribed, mostly locked out and left to the companionship of his similarly unproductive fellows - not an especially pleasant prospect for most of us, although some people appear to prefer it.
And, at worst, you still have the right of self-defense, including your property. You just can't expand that into the right to blow away some ten-year-old stealing an apple off your tree. He or she owes you an apple and reasonable compensation for the time and trouble he or she has caused you by the annoyance. Unless the choice is between surviving in one piece and not, however, deadly force is generally not a right.
The point, for those of us who expect to live on this earth, and not in some pie in the sky bye and bye, is not to get rid of bums, or to drive "crime" to zero, but rather to enable those of us who are positive and productive people to effectively get on with our lives in reasonable security and peace. Why should we care what goes on on the "wrong side of the tracks?" Of course, we would like to provide opportunities to those unfortunate people. Our general prosperity depends upon all of us being as productive as possible. So, innovation and investment directed at successfully bringing poor, under-educated or psychologically damaged people into more productive lives may often be worthwhile.
However, this is not the purpose of our lives. For most of human history, a lot of people have lived comparatively brutal, often miserable and mercifully short lives. We can regret that we or our ancestors weren't better at dealing with such problems, but we each owe it to ourselves and the ancestors who made it possible for us to be here to live as best we can, in prosperity and happiness.
And that brings up the final note in this discordant symphony of clashing ideas: Honesty pays...
As I have argued elsewhere, the worst costs of being a criminal are psychological or psycho-epistemological.** The criminal must continuously disguise his or her nature, or be ostracized, humiliated, shunned, locked out, despised, and generally unable to enjoy the most valuable aspects of human company, such as friendship, or romantic love, or anything that depends upon unchecked, uncontrolled emotional interaction.
**See Nathaniel Branden's "The Psychology of Self-Esteem" for an introduction to this subject as well as objective morals.
These are not just some kind of human frailty or conditioned weakness. There are many criminals who do try to take a Nietschian position, that the truly strong and independant person, the Zarathustran UberMensch, makes his own morals and enforces them on the world, not visa versa. Others try to take the tack that we are all of us weak and sinners, so there is no real difference between the criminal and anyone else, except perhaps that some "criminals" admit more to their basic, flawed humanity.
Neither position is valid. Real objective morals are about identifying what is valuable and the fundamental principles of how to achieve it. This is not a matter of whim, but of rational investigation into the nature of man and his universe. And, just the fact that we all occasionally make mistakes in our lives and our value judgements does not invalidate our moral standing. If we were complete moral incompetents, we could not possibley survive, much less be happy, but most people do survive and most people do achieve some degree of happiness. The criminal is someone who is trying to cheat at life. That's the bottom line.
And what he or she gets is an empty existence, devoid of love or other basic human values that most people will risk their lives to preserve, always on the outside looking in, barred by a history of unmentionable guilt and treachery from ever experiencing an honest moment of trust and mutual acceptance with any other human being. The ultimate ground state of the criminal is the psychopath, who has learned that he or she can only experience real emotional interaction when the other party is in a state of totally helpless, abject terror.
Most criminals fortunately do not spiral down to this level, as they try to live a segmented life, keeping up a front to their friends and family, etc., living a lie, because the truth, that they have betrayed themselves more than any of their victims, is too terrible to face.
What a tragic, terrible fate - both for victims and criminals! And what a travesty that we are taught by our "moral leaders" that we are weak and sinful by nature - thus endorsing and excusing the path of crime, and that then we are given the moral example of a God who behaves exactly like a depraved psychopath, torturing his victims through infinite time, neverending, the psychopath's wet dream, and simultaneously demanding both belief and "love" without proof of existence, much less goodness! Aren't these exactly the characteristics of our most perverted psychotic killers?
And this is our moral base, who we are supposed to love and obey. Or else.
Yet, how honest are we allowed to be anyway? Take the extreme case of a Jew in NAZI Germany. He or she must conceal their identity, if possible, in order to simply survive. In such a case, you are given a choice - be honest and risk death or imprisonment, or be dishonest and pay the consequences psychologically. Whether you are gay, smoke the wrong weed, are catholic, protestant, Jewish or of any or no religion, black, white, brown, female, male, at some historical/geographic juncture, you would have been given the choice of dishonesty or death. Que bono?
Who benefits? How about all the institutions that promote wearing mental blinders, that tell you that it is sinful or disloyal to even consider certain ideas, and that the people who do so are traitors or evil and should be treated with scorn or worse. In fact, just like the street gang, these institutions, at the height of their power, typically require or reward acts of violence against the hated other.
This serves several useful purposes for the institution. The "enemy" is damaged. The "enemy" now regards the attackers as their "enemy," and may well retaliate, justifying further attacks on them, as well as those that have gone before. Most important, the attacker now has a moral debt to those he or she has attacked. Only by relying upon the moral authority of the institution/gang can he or she write off that debt in the name of principle. This puts a permanent psychological block in the way of ever leaving the institution/gang.
Ironically, it was Christianity that figured out a solution to the problem. I.e., Divine Grace. GOD says that you are forgiven, and all other believers are supposed to accept that. Now you may still owe restitution and may be required to prove your faith by reconciling with those you have attacked, but GOD has made it impossible for any other believer who has also accepted his Grace to attack you.
In fact, there is a program to it that any good Christian evangelical can lay out.
1. All have sinned and come short of the Glory of GOD - i.e., moral perfection (easy enough when You define what is Good or Evil...)
2. All will therefore die of the consequences of their lack of perfection (and, by most Christian accound, worse, go on to eternal torture in Hell. )
3. Only Divine Intervention can make things right (Only GOD can violate his own rules.).
4. GOD has put an offer on the table: Believe in Him, and confess that belief publically, and he will grant you eternal life in paradise - and forgiveness.
So, cut back to the Roman Empire of the 1st Century AD, with every sort of culture clash kept barely from exploding by the armed might of Roman legions and mercenaries. With all the hereditary enemies living side by side in the slums of the Roman cities, imagine how much festering hatred and crime excused as revenge for prior historical debt must have gone on. A lot of these people had been at each others throats until the legions stepped in and stopped the fight, incorporating them into the Pax Romana as a consequence.
This was NOT a high trust culture, and it cried out for a solution to bring people into a social contract that could undermine the cycles of violence. Early Christianity provided exactly that fix, and the Roman authorities, after losing early fears that this would be the source of yet another schism of fanatics, were fairly quick to catch on, making Christianity the official religion.
Of course, then, with the power of state backing, Christendom quickly became just one more little gang, persecuting the "other." Yes, it officially cut accross lines of wealth and poverty, race and culture, national soveriegnty, etc., all irrelevant in the eyes of the Almighty, but often, in reality, it did not, and it in fact became the consumate political gamesman, backing William of Normandy's invasion of peaceful Anglo-Saxon England, for example. Triage mutated and evolved into bribes and indulgences until finally there was protest and schism and the Reformation of Luther, which, predictably, became as intolerant in short order as anything before it.
By my neo-Reichian analysis, the social dynamic is that you are taught to lie right from the start, via the mechanism of repression, particularly of unpleasant or socially undesirable emotions and their implicit values. Then, with symbolic substitutes for real needs driving your neurotic behaviors, the great institutional liers compete for your allegience, offering their own symbolic solutions to your inherently unsatisfiable needs.
You are thus caught up, willy-nilly in a vast inchoate, unorganized, but self-dynamized network of lies and institutions promoting lies, and you will waste much of your life in their inherently destructive service, either through going to war for them, or paying the tithes and taxes that support those activities, or simply losing the motivation to ever do anything worthy of your heritage of four billion years of successful evolutionary survival.
In fact, however, this is simply evolution in action. Whenever some species reaches the point of success that it starts accumulating resources, such as body fat or simple numbers, for example, then the predators move in. Wealth is a target, and we humans are extraordinarily wealthy, compared to any species that has ever existed on this planet. We have to expect the predators and parasites, including meta-entities such as memes, which often survive and prosper by posing as positive things, while they sap our resources silently or stealthily, such as church or state.
For a truly excellent take on this whole subject, check out "Viruses of the Mind" by Richard Dawkins.
So, what is the solution? Simply deciding not to go along with the lies would help, at least psychologically, but it would not spare you the attacks from others and the need to conceal the fact that you were now one of the enlightened of the earth. We humans need a general social solution. Christianity has set a sort of example as to what is possible, but not a stable example, as it is based on a fundamental lie itself - the whole silly GOD shtick. It ended up defeating its own progress in the need to defend the lie - by shutting up any doubters.
What about a real social contract, that simply specified how you agreed to behave towards all other signatories, and how disputes would be resolved among the signatories? More later...