When Living is a Crime

I’ve said it before on here. Other, more adept and well-known writers have said similar: a non-belief in God requires, philosophically, that one must find or apply Godlike attributes to something else. It’s an accidental side meaning smuggled in Voltaire’s famous quote: “If God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent him.”

Related to this is an article from Reason.com, a site not particularly friendly to religious belief but not necessarily opposed to it. “Born Guilty: How the fed govt has replaced Original Sin with its own version of existential guilt“:

Have you diverted rain water from around a building? Then you might be guilty of a crime. Inadvertently pick up a feather that once belonged to a bald eagle? Same deal. Welcome to the Kafkaesque world of “regulatory crimes,” a vast atlas of misdeeds that increasingly covers just about the whole of everyday existence.

Writes the Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds of University of Tennessee, in USA Today:

“Regulatory crimes” of this sort are incredibly numerous and a category that is growing quickly. They are the ones likely to trap unwary individuals into being felons without knowing it. That is why Michael Cottone, in a just-published Tennessee Law Review article, suggests that maybe the old presumption that individuals know the law is outdated, unfair and maybe even unconstitutional. “Tellingly,” he writes, “no exact count of the number of federal statutes that impose criminal sanctions has ever been given, but estimates from the last 15 years range from 3,600 to approximately 4,500.” Meanwhile, according to recent congressional testimony, the number of federal regulations (enacted by administrative agencies under loose authority from Congress) carrying criminal penalties may be as many as 300,000.