Law and Punishments

Governments enact and enforce laws to protect their citizens, restrain evildoers, and promote the general welfare. God is the origin of law; He created this universe to function according to the laws of science and implanted a conscience within each human heart to know right from wrong. The constitutions and statutes that constitute a nation’s laws approximate the heavenly law; that is why we they usually are in agreement with the dictates of conscience.

Laws are needed to restrain wickedness. People who do not follow the dictates of conscience, by which they ought to govern themselves to do right and avoid wickedness, are restrained by the law’s sharp distinctions between right and wrong, what is permitted and what is prohibited. In this sense, people who cultivate their character to become people of conscience do not need the law and are unlikely to run afoul of the law.

Laws prescribe punishment as a deterrent to crime and to establish justice. The government in meting out punishments is a co-worker with God, who is the final dispenser of justice. Indeed, one can regard hell as a vast prison in the spirit world to restrain evildoers from trampling on heaven’s domains. Punishment can serve as ‘indemnity,’ an opportunity for the criminal to pay the debt of sin.

On the other hand, there should always be an element of mercy in the criminal justice system, should the criminal repent with sincerity and turn his life around. Father Moon teaches that the chief purpose of prison should be education and rehabilitation. This was, in fact, the core idea of the twentieth century movement to convert prisons where inmates languished in cells into ‘penitentiaries’ where they could be rehabilitated through work and education. The two poles of justice and mercy form the perspective from which to view ethical issues such as the death penalty.