Is there an afterlife?
In that afterlife, is there reward and punishment for what sort of life one has led prior to arriving in that afterlife?
Is there a set of objective and binding guidelines for one's behavior in life that determines one's eternal destiny?
If the answers to these four questions are an emphatic yes, as most Americans believe whether in response to divine revelation or to common sense observations, our society must be ordered accordingly with personal altruism being a virtue as most of us believe and not a crime as Ayn Rand and Margaret Sanger believed, a society in which there is recognition of an obligation to enforce objective right and wrong (as even our pagan Greek and Roman forebears agreed), a society structured on principle and reason and not a moral anarchy in which each individual defines morality for himself or herself and devil (dissenters should pardon the expression) take the hindmost, also a society which recognizes that neither government of whatever sort nor the unrestrained individual is or ever can be our highest authority.
Ann Coulter's latest book Goddess, whoops (I must read the title and not just look at the cover picture), that is, GODLESS has a lot of worthwhile fun to poke at those with imagination so limited as to accept Darwin.
Her analysis is far better than my usual one whereby I am willing to concede that Darwinists are descended from apes or whatever so long as they are willing to concede that the rest of us are descended from Adam and Eve via the wonders of God.
Why is punishment necessarily meted out in an afterlife? What if punishment were to be inflicted more directly and more immediately? By that I mean, barring accident or illness, one lives the usual three score and ten, or even four score, and then passes on, but why to an afterlife? If one believes, as a matter of positive evidence and knowledge, that life is but a brief interval here on earth, followed by eternal and utter oblivion, then why should that not be his fate? What could be more merciful and just? The one, who believes that life is finite and is followed by eternal oblivion, receives exactly what he expected; no more, no less. His free will is not even violated.
I think you're projecting. I like the fact that you concede that you lack the ability, intelligence or education to articulate or defend your own position (asking a highly trained newspaper columnist to do so instead), but not the ability to insult those with whom you disagree.