The Two Faces of Charles "Chuck" Colson
Shame on Scotland Scotland freed the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber last week so he could die at home in Libya. "Our beliefs dictate that justice be served, but mercy be shown," a Scottish official said. Did Scotland do the right thing? Should we have any mercy for mass murderers who are terminally ill? Scotland has made a mockery of justice. Ask the families of the 270 people al-Megrahi murdered. By any measure, serving only eight years in prison for blowing up an airplane full of people is nothing short of scandalous. . . .
In his essay, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," Christian writer C. S. Lewis argued that we ought to punish people for no other purpose than just deserts, and in so doing, we recognize that humans are free moral agents, responsible for our actions. That's why Lewis wrote, "To be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we 'ought to have known better,' is to be treated as a human person made in God's image." In my view, to usher al-M…