Burning Indignation
A law student’s callous treatment of a homeless man sparks a national outrage.
If the Coyne case illustrates anything other than merely itself, it is the superiority of the Christian to the dogmatically secular view of a situation like this (and I write as a nonbeliever). The Christian accepts, without the need for second thought, the duty of charity toward others; he can respond unself-consciously to his natural feelings of sympathy for such as Davies because he knows that we are all sinners, and that there but for the grace of God go we. He can also extend mercy to Coyne.
The adamant secular determinist, who experiences the same natural feelings of sympathy for someone like Davies, has to justify them to himself, for if such people are to any extent the authors of their own downfall, sympathy is no longer due them. The easiest way for the secularist to justify his sympathy is to turn people like Davies into immaculate victims, usually of society. The secularist does not notice that, in so transforming them, he dehumanizes them: in essence, they become for him no different from amoebae that move toward, or retreat from, chemical stimuli. But to deny the part that people play in their own downfall requires painful intellectual contortions and the mind’s assent to what it does not, because it cannot, truly believe. The secularist ties himself up in knots, often complex ones, to prove to himself what he knows in his heart to be untrue. That he cannot empty human conduct of its moral dimension, a dimension that requires that human beings are not just amoebae responding to chemical stimuli, is proved by his often extreme anger toward those whom he believes to have acted badly—but who, according to his theory, ought to be just as much automata as those to whom they have behaved badly. That is why those who claim to forgive all because they understand all, in scientific outline if not in scientific detail, can also espouse extreme cruelty.
Perhaps it should not come as a surprise to us, then, that many of those who expressed themselves about Ronald Coyne’s awful behavior did so with a violence that belied their supposed humanity.
