God, The IPC, and Justice.

So the court pronounced a verdict on the Nitish Katara murder case today, and thankfully, they convicted his killers, something that rarely happens when the suspects are from the upper echelons of our decadent Indian society(upper echelons at least as far as power is concerned)

Yet, I don't heave a sigh of relief, because the defense plans on appealing to the High court, and maybe even the Supreme court. The whole concept is so silly, its akin to saying "So we weren't able to subvert justice this time, let's appeal to a higher court so that we might succeed in finding a judge whom we can feed our bullshit to" but that is not the point.

What bugs me is the fact that if the victim's family were say, poor laborers or workers, the verdict would have been 'Not Guilty.' With one of the lowest conviction rates in the world, committing a crime and getting away with it, in our country, is as easy as attributing one's success to god.

What interested me when Mrs. Neelam katara spoke to the media is the fact that she credited the successful conviction to 'God.' This does not go well with my thoughts.

Let's look at the process objectively. (The salient points are numbered for easy referencing)

1) The justice system is comprised of human beings, who follow the Indian penal Code which is again a man made system of laws.

2) A crime may or may not have been committed.

3) Human Beings posses Free Will, at least as far as law is concerned otherwise the whole concept of accountability\Mens Rea falls flat on its face like when I tripped in the mall many years ago.

4) Either God (if he exists [a fact that shall later be disproved]) has control over people's actions or not. This is tied in with fact #3 but is here for the sake of completeness.

For the discussion let us assume that a) people have free will, b) god has no control over people's actions, c) the decision involved the participation of no super-natural beings (god being excluded) in the judicial sense.

Now if god did help the conviction by influencing the minds of the judges or whoever was involved in the decision, we might say that god was involved in the original crime too. Maybe it was a bad day, and he was feeling a bit malevolent? or maybe he was bored, we may never know. In fact being god, he should have stopped the killers from doing what they did by using the same mind-bending powers of his, but he did nothing to stop the murderers, as is painfully obvious. Would you accept such a god ?

If however, he could not influence the minds of the decision makers, because free will is not prone to such divine external influence, then he didn't help at all now did he ? The men just came to a logical conclusion and pronounced their verdict in the light of the available evidence.

This would render the statement "God helped make this decision happen in the favor of the victim" false, however, those who believe in god's existence would say that the above quoted statement was perfectly reasonable and probably true. A blatant contradiction. Hence, prompting the only conclusion that may be got; God does not have the power to stop evil. Would you accept such a god ?

Therefore I do not believe in god.

(I know that this is a very old argument against his existence, I claim no original thoughts in this article)

Disclaimer;
I am not a law student so, I may be off on certain things. I am willing to listen to an argument otherwise.