In modern criminal law, a crime does not have a widely accepted or correct definition. Many know it as “someone who breaks a law” or “someone who does something wrong.” While some crimes such as murder and theft are clear cut, others are not so black and white. The definition of a crime changes over time as laws and societal sentiments change. Even some crimes that may seem obvious were once thought to be normal. For example, slavery today is abhorred and it is a widely-held opinion that owning a slave is both a legal and moral crime. However, until only two centuries ago, the ownership of slaves was neither a legal nor moral crime. It is clear that the definition of a crime changes over time to fit the needs of society and its ideas of what is “wrong.”. To define crime would be to differentiate between right and wrong, a …show more content…
Going directly against divine orders was considered a crime in the eyes of religious authorities such as the Catholic Church. Laws in the church were generally in the form of sins. Sins were considered moral violations rather than legal ones. From this belief came the idea that a sin and a crime were one and the same. In many ways they are, but this idea also introduced the notion that right and wrong were ingrained into humans and that they naturally knew what was right and wrong. As such, a criminal was seen to be someone going not only against a divine order, but against his own nature as well. The church itself was part of the divine order so going against it was a crime as well. Galileo Galilei, one of the fathers of classical physics, was considered a criminal because his works had directly contradicted the church. Although he had not violated any moral laws, he had, in the eyes of the Church, gone against the divine order and his own nature. The definition of crime can then be expanded to encompass both a violation of natural morality and divine