It is better missed.

Can you think of a situation in which properly using the three criteria above would leave the need for punishment (the state taking vengeance) unfulfilled?

Okay, that’s fair enough. But I don’t think we can leave punishment ENTIRELY out of the equation. Less important than protecting the public, but I think it still needs to be a recognized goal.

I don’t dispute that. However, deciding what “proper” punishment is for an infraction (or whether a punishment is even proper — insert the lyrics for “Only a Lad” here) is increasing hard in a pluralistic society; there isn’t a schedule of weregild that we can all agree upon.

I think as well that there ISN’T an instance (certainly not one I can conceive of) in which “someone is highly unlikely to commit another crime, and punishing them wouldn’t stop any third parties from committing similar crimes.” Those people who would commit a one-off crime for a specific circumstance that’s not likely to ever come up again (I’m now having flashbacks to ALL of the Columbo TV-movies) are the most likely to be deterred by the awareness of a severe penalty if they’re caught.

Let me be clear: I have as strong a visceral urge to feed vile monsters into a slow woodchipper feet-first as much as the next guy, and as I indicated, I have no problem with the death penalty as such. But if we concentrate on punishment as the PRIME motivation for criminal penalties, we’ll always get caught up in questions of ultimate culpability vs. societal influence, mental health, etc. Whereas if we were to privilege the principles above in making decisions about criminal penalties, then the issue of punishment would largely take care of itself, either by being fulfilled in a penalty prescribed by adherence to those principles, or by having the action requiring the punishment curtailed in the first place.

For instance: Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., the piece of human excrement who killed Iryna Zarutska at random, was walking free because he was released with a pinky promise by a judge who had relied entirely on whether “punishment” was warranted for previous infractions and whether someone with his mental problems was truly culpable. Whereas if she had used the criteria above in rendering her judgment, it’s very likely that Brown simply would not have been at liberty to to what he did. And if his current committed to a federal medical facility (due to being adjudged as incompetent to stand trial) were committed first and foremost not to the stated goal “restoring his competency” but of protecting of the innocent at large, then the odds of him every being able to commit further atrocities would be greatly reduced.

Of course, the problem of getting from where we are the the adoption of the principles above is gargantuan enough to render the thought experiment almost entirely hypothetical with the application of a flux capacitor. But even in cases where there’s no reasonable means to effect a societal change, we should still devote thought to formulating what a more perfect society would look like, so that we can recognize incremental changes in that direction.

It’s not necessarily a noble goal or a logical goal, but there’s something in us that demands, “When one among you harms another, he must be punished.” A big part of what makes society works and keeps it from devolving into feuds and vendettas is the bargain that, if someone is wronged, the state will take vengeance on that individual’s behalf.

Even if it’s someone is highly unlikely to commit another crime, and punishing them wouldn’t stop any third parties from committing similar crimes, I doubt anyone personally involved would be satisfied with, “Oh, well. You get your one free murder. As long as you don’t do it again, you can go through life happily.” That would likely lead to a lot of crimes having a de-facto death penalty, as the victim or someone close to him decides that it’s time to make use of HIS free murder…

Nevertheless, some point form answers:

While one can certainly say there’s a kind of “elevation” in being adopted into God’s family and granted an eternal inheritance in Heaven and having Jesus acknowledge us as adopted brothers and sisters, that’s a far cry from being actual “gods” with anything even remotely resembling God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.

Ah, the limitations of language… but also the limitations of human thought expressed in language. When these debates go into trying to define what “god” actually means, despite it being something that is entirely beyond our experience and comprehension, I simply end up back with the simple declarations that we can be made “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17) — Christ who, as you constantly note, is as God as God can be. Beyond that, we’re talking so far out of any human expertise that it’s overreach to say that this and that absolutely CANNOT be, because it conflicts with a philosophical framework extrapolated out of scripture. Anyone who claims that they know exactly what form any of this will take in the eternities is, frankly, wrong.

You also twisted the Scriptures to imply that God acknowledged there to be other gods up through the book of Judges.

That is not what I was implying. (Shall I accuse you of “twisting?”) My point was that several of the human figures in the OT, definitely up through David, are portrayed by the text as expressing their devotion to YHWH in terms consistent with monolatrous henotheism (that is, the idea that exclusive devotion to a single god does not deny the existence of other gods). This is not an argument about whether other nation’s gods existed or not; it’s simply that, as the OT reads, many prophets and laudable figures seem to accept the idea that other nation’s gods are real but that they are to limit their devotion to YHWH, and God doesn’t seem to be affronted by that idea in his followers.

It seems you’re straying close to “modalism,” which I’m told is a heresy.

As noted, neither you nor I are scholars of the Greek. From those who are, however, I have learned that the Greek word rather dubiously translated as “made gods” in the quote from Athanasius is theopoiethomen, which refers neither to being given any divine powers (as many in the Greco-Roman Pantheon—such as Heracles a.k.a. Hercules—were said to be) nor being granted some divine title as with some of the Emperors who got “deified” as mentioned in Suetonius’ biographies (an Eastern practice which neither the Western Roman public nor their Emperors took all that seriously except at times when megalomaniacs like Caligula or Domitian were in power), but to sharing in God’s communicable divine traits like goodness, holiness, and love. While one can certainly say there’s a kind of “elevation” in being adopted into God’s family and granted an eternal inheritance in Heaven and having Jesus acknowledge us as adopted brothers and sisters, that’s a far cry from being actual “gods” with anything even remotely resembling God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.

Moreover, this twisting of the meaning of “deification” as the Fathers from the Early Church spoke of it is also very like Satan’s deception in Genesis 3:4-5. It’s true his claim in verse 5 was not an out-and-out-lie as you said; the plain lie was in verse 4 when he said they would not die, which (as Paul would outline in Romans 7:9) their souls certainly did immediately do just as God had warned. Rather, Satan’s deception in saying “You will be like God [Elohim], knowing good and evil…” lay in his omitting “…but in pretty much no other way whatsoever.”

Thanks to that deception, as acknowledged in Genesis 3:22 (as you said), we’ve certainly known a lot about good and evil ever since: even those who foolishly deny the distinction or insist they are somehow beyond it (like Nietzsche, who wrote a whole book on the subject) know of good and evil from seeing others be wronged and being wronged themselves (and—for those with a working conscience—from having wronged others) and in some cases seeking to right these wrongs. Knowing good and evil, however, certainly hasn’t granted us anything even remotely approaching God’s infinite knowledge, infinite presence, and infinite power, has it? In fact, one could say Adam and Eve (and consequently we as well) were made a lot less like God in having been stripped of the everlasting life their residency in the Garden of Eden provided for them.

You also twisted the Scriptures to imply that God acknowledged there to be other gods up through the book of Judges. To pretend that acknowledging people were worshiping things other than God (in disobedience to the very first of the Ten Commandments) is the same as acknowledging those other things to be actual gods (rather than fraudulent substitutes for the real thing) is to engage in an equivocation fallacy. In case that whole first of the Ten Commandments didn’t spell it out for you clearly enough, God unambiguously states in Isaiah 43:10 that “Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.”

While I won’t deny God may well have created other worlds—maybe even infinite other worlds—with other beings made in His image, possibly even populated some of the other distant planets in this world (which I won’t call a universe, since this entire “multiverse” concept is a gross corruption of the original meaning for the word “universe” which is supposed to be “everything that exists everywhere”) with all these images of Himself, none of these possibilities leave any room for other actual gods to exist. The reason no god will ever be formed after God is because since He is the “everlasting” God, there is no such thing as “after” God; and conversely, God being eternal (“from everlasting to everlasting” as the Hebrews put it), there is no such thing as “before” God either. To be “deified” in the Biblical sense means we will have a seat at God’s table in Heaven, and (according to Revelation) a select few will even have thrones and crowns and authority to preside as judges over the world, among other Heavenly rewards for true faithfulness; what it does not mean is that we will ever be “gods” in any sense that your church’s theologians and other scholars are wishing it did.