When the Bible describes God “punishing” people, most of the time he’s actually harming innocent people instead of the person who actually did something wrong. But even when he does manage to target the right person, is it right for him to be harming people?
If you’re going to be inflicting harm on people, you’d better have a very good reason to do it. There are several purposes that punishment is meant to accomplish, that are said to justify the practice of punishing people. But those justifications are questionable. And particularly if you’re God, none of the justifications apply. God has no excuse for ever punishing anyone.
Retribution
Some people think it’s just inherently good to do bad things to people who have done bad things. That’s just wrong. That’s revenge, and revenge is evil. You shouldn’t be doing this regardless of whether you’re God or not. Doing bad things to people is bad. The fact that they did bad things too doesn’t change the fact that it’s bad to do even more bad things. The barbaric idea that some people “deserve” to have bad things happen to them is often the kind of thinking that made the person want to do a bad thing in the first place.
(Retribution should not be confused with restitution. If it’s possible to actually undo the wrong, then that’s a good thing to do. Taking stolen property back from the thief and returning it to the owner, for example. But that’s not punishment. You’re not doing anything bad to the thief here. The only thing you’re taking away is something the thief never should have had in the first place.
Retribution and punishment are also not the same thing as self-defense. You attack people in self-defense because you have to. You don’t do it because you want bad things to happen to them, or because you think that’s what should be done to them.)
As for God, he’s supposed to be the author of human nature. So that means it’s not even our fault if we do something wrong. God is the one who programmed our nature into our brains. Therefore, God is the one who is actually responsible for everyone’s sins. God knew exactly what humans would do if he made them the way he did. If he didn’t like it, he could have designed us differently. Our nature is his fault, not ours. If anyone needs to be punished, it’s him.
Deterrence
The threat of punishment is supposed to prevent people from doing bad things in the first place. It’s not super effective, because when people are in a state of mind where they’re inclined to commit serious crimes, they usually aren’t giving that much though to the consequences.
And the threat of harsh punishments doesn’t actually deter bad behavior any better that the threat of just getting caught. So there’s no way deterrence can justify extreme punishments like, say, torturing people for eternity. In fact, threatening people with milder punishments is a good way to get them to convince themselves that they never really wanted to do a bad thing. In the absence of a strong external reason not to do it, they’ll have to rationalize their choice with this internal explanation.
Intrinsic motivation, where you behave a certain way because that’s just what you actually want or think is right, is much stronger than extrinsic motivations coming from other people, like punishment. But giving people extrinsic motivations can actually permanently destroy the stronger intrinsic motivation they would otherwise have naturally had. Extrinsic motivations distract from the real reasons to be good, which leads to selfishness and moral apathy.
Manipulating people with artificial personal consequences should not be anyone’s first choice for promoting good behavior. And rewards and punishments are not good reasons to be good, anyway. A much better option in every way would be to make sure people actually understand how their actions will naturally affect everyone. Behaving morally because you care about what happens to everyone else is more moral than behaving the same way just because you expect to be personally rewarded or punished for what you do.
Teach real morality, not selfishness-based morality! Then there won’t be much need to continue to intervene and enforce good behavior. People will tend to want to do right automatically, if their morality doesn’t consist of just blindly following somebody else’s rules. But teaching real morality is something the God of the Bible never even bothers to try.
If God wants to prevent people from doing bad things, there are plenty of ways he can do that without resorting to doing bad things to people himself. He’s all-powerful. He could intervene to block the consequences of any bad things people try to do. He could arrange things so that no one has any reason to do bad things. He could have designed the human mind to be more consistently and strongly averse to doing bad things. He could have designed the laws of physics so that it would be impossible to do bad things even if you wanted to.
Instead, the Bible says God actively causes people to do bad things. He makes some people for evil purposes, and they do evil just because they can’t resist God’s will. And then he punishes them for what he made them do. If anybody needs to be punished, it’s the guy who keeps forcing people to do evil, not the helpless human puppets of this malevolent God.
Ignoring that, a lot of religious people say the reason God can’t intervene more to prevent evil is that it’s very important to God that we have free will. And they say it’s particularly important for us to be able to freely choose whether to accept him. If that’s true, then what God definitely should not be doing is coercing people with threats of punishment. It’s hardly a free choice if you’re threatening to torture people forever if they don’t make the choice you want them to make.
Incapacitation
Some punishments physically prevent people from doing more bad things. Note that this can only do any good if the person actually would have repeated the offense if left alone. Which is less likely to be true the more serious the crime is.
So incapacitation can’t justify sending people to hell. It’s not like people who have already died are going to keep harming people if you don’t imprison them in hell. And of course the torture part contributes nothing to the goal of incapacitation. So that’s just needless cruelty that does no good.
Incapacitation also becomes unnecessary (and therefore unjustifiable) after successful rehabilitation. The goal of incapacitation does not justify continuing to incapacitate people after they’re no longer dangerous. It doesn’t even justify restricting people’s ability to do things other than the thing they’re being punished for.
If incapacitation is what God is trying to accomplish when he kills people after the fact, that’s clearly not the best way for him to deal with people doing bad things. He should be doing something to stop them before they can get in any wrongdoing. If God is all-knowing, there’s no reason he can’t prevent the initial offense too. He has no excuse for choosing the option that involves both inflicting more harm than is necessary, and letting people do evil when he could have prevented it.
Rehabilitation
Some punishments are supposed to train people who have done bad things to be better people in the future. But do they really? Successful rehabilitation generally involves treating people more humanely rather than harshly. Rehabilitating criminals has very little to do with actually punishing them. Since rehabilitation is really something unrelated to punishment, it can’t actually justify punishment.
Being punished generally just makes you focus on what’s happening to you, when you should be thinking about how you’re affecting other people. It also sets a bad example, sending the message that when people wrong you, you should wrong them back. And it incentivizes you to lie, so you won’t get in trouble. Eliminate punishment, and people would have a lot less reason to lie.
If you’re traumatized and resentful of the authorities as a result of being punished, that state is not going to be conducive to learning to behave the way they want you to behave. You’re probably not going to learn much if you’re been executed, either.
Punishment is not a great way to change how people behave either before (via threats) or after the punishment. So why does God insist on punishing people, when he knows it’s not actually going to improve people’s behavior?
The Bible tells us we should follow God’s example, because everything he does is right, supposedly. So in the case of God’s punishments, what people are going to learn is to be like him, and murder people in anger at the slightest provocation. That’s certainly not going to make them better people.
And when God sends people to hell, or even when he just kills them, he’s clearly not even trying to rehabilitate people. No one is going to be able to learn from the experience and know how to behave going forward, if the punishment never ends.