A simple question for theists

[emjay]

But that doesn't really make sense when you think about it:

If you live in a democracy then you have some say, directly or indirectly, over the laws of the land. For instance, given that there are some American states with the death penalty and some without, that shows that it is not an absolute... it is arbitrary... and whether it exists in a given state or not presumably comes down to the electorate, either directly - eg if there was a referendum on it - or indirectly by electing a government sympathetic or unsympathetic to it.

Whereas if you don't live in a democracy, then it is just completely arbitrary from your perspective... up to the whims of a ruler.

In either case, even if you didn't directly or indirectly influence the law, you could hypothetically move to a jurisdiction with laws sympathetic to your stance. An extreme example of that would be in one of the Purge films where there are 'killing tourists' who come from all over the world to take part in the legitimised killing on Purge night.

So I don't see how you can ensure the legitimacy of that rule of law when in all cases it is arbitrary and given that you are either indirectly or directly complicit in it or, in the case where you have no say, you have to make a subjective judgment about the validity of it, in order to determine whether you resist or comply with it, and where your own stance can influence your decision in that regard.

And if you argue that you would only recognise a government with Christian values as legitimate in that regard, there's a problem there too because it's still arbitrary... different in different times and places... I'm sure the Spanish Inquisition thought they were doing God's will with their killings. As is always the case, there are always many different interpretations of Christianity, so again there seems to be no way of ensuring - with certainty - the legitimacy of government sanctioned killing without coming back to subjective opinion.

The reason it doesn't make sense is because I was not referring to the rule that govern countries, but individuals.

Men's laws are arbitrary at best. which is why we can free move away from those who do not wish to live as we do.

Fair enough... thanks for the clarification.

At first sight it didn't look much different for the case of individuals vs governments... individuals are also given arbitrary rights regarding violence depending on where they live... America with its inalienable right to bear arms vs the UK without such rights, different gun laws in different states, or different self-defence laws in different places. But ultimately they all come down to self-defence so that's perhaps a different moral issue. Is that what you mean?

But even in that situation there still seems to be at least the potential for the sorts of problems above... where a government blurs the lines between murder and self-defence... arbitrarily raising or lowering the bar of what is deemed acceptable provocation/threat to warrant a lethal reply.