Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Why Hammurabi's Code still has relevance

You remember Hammurabi's Code, don't you? It's the "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" thing. Dennis Prager explains why this can still be a righteous doctrine, undercutting Spielberg's inability to see that, sometimes, you have to stand up for yourself. Thus, he says in relevant part:

Now, in general, especially in personal life, this is not a good policy. If someone steps on your toe, it is not wise or good to do the same to him. However, the desire to see identical harm inflicted on the evildoer is not only not wrong, it is at the essence of an empathetic, moral and just heart and conscience. What sort of person reads what a torturer did to an innocent victim and doesn't want to see that torturer suffer? Those who have no desire to see such people suffer commensurate with the evil they have inflicted have blunted the natural human desire for justice. And talking about justice, what sort of justice would it have been for Israel not to seek the death of the murderers of their athletes? Would the world be a finer, kinder, let alone more just, place if all those murderers had been allowed to live?
I'd say this is so obvious that this logical response is, "Well, duh." But apparently in the morally challenged world that is Hollywood, justice is nonexistent, and the only thing that matters is psychoanalysis -- a doctrine that has many, many virtues, but that can be fatally confused with justice.