While I'm at it, here is a post on thinking about torture from some time ago, the link to which I found on William Luse's weblog Apologia: It's titled Hypothetical Sin and Pure Evil. It begins:
If you commit adultery with her in your mind, you have committed a sin even if she would never sleep with you in reality. The internal act of assent in your mind - that assent which says "if the circumstances allowed I would do this" — is as much a sin as actually performing the act. Being tempted is not bad in itself, but assent to an evil act is bad even if the circumstances never allow the act to be performed.
The "ticking bomb" scenario for justifying torture is like that.
The comments quickly veer off into a discussion of contraception, but Luse and his readers comment here. (Later: Thanks to Bill for correcting the link.)
Where is the line? It seems clear from the Sermon on the Mount that if you would commit adultery, you are guilty of the sin. But what if you would not commit adultery given the opportunity, because your Christian faith would prevent you, but you wish your Christian faith weren't so much in the way? At that point, if you ARE guilty of sin, is it a sin equivalent to adultery, or to faithlessness? Or is it not sin, but merely temptation?
In short, while it seems clear to me that temptation is not sin and the assent of the will to a sinful action is, it does not always seem clear where precisely to draw the line. (Yes, I know this is wildly off-subject, but it's what happened to strike my mind when I read the post, and I wanted to know what people think.)
Posted by: firinnteine | January 21, 2006 at 04:24 PM
It seems to me that if you don't believe something to be a sin it cannot be a sin to dispassionately allow for the possibility for commiting the act. Making the ticking time bomb scenario an expercize in mental indulgence of a sin only applies if the one contemplating it knows that the torture would still be a sin.
If I contemplate that if the lives of many depended upon my having sex with a woman not my wife and that I was willing to do so on those conditions, this hardly qualifies as lust, because I am not doing so for my pleasure. If the ticking time bomb is just an excuse for me to get some sadistic fun, the that would be a sin.
Posted by: Christopher Hathaway | January 21, 2006 at 11:03 PM
That's a good point, Mr. Hathaway. (Though of course, while you might not be lusting in that scenario, you'd still be committing adultery, period. And it would still be a sin.)
Of course, the ludicrousness of the scenario you envisioned, which could only happen on TV or in a movie, shows the ludicrousness of creating such scenarios as the "ticking time bomb" one the Wall Street Journal created: as one of the bloggers in one of the linked threads noted, the payoff for such would only work in the movies; in real life, all you'd get is the evil of torture, without the information. (Does anyone think a suicide bomber would not happily submit to torture in order to kill large numbers of their enemies? Of course they would, smiling. We've seen how little they value human lives, even their own.)
Anyway, we aren't permitted to willfully do evil, that good may come of it. (We aren't to deliberately sin, that grace may abound, as God said, through Paul of Tarsus.)
Posted by: Will S. | January 22, 2006 at 10:42 PM