The human being has values and ideas with a universal dimension. In this way, friendship, love, solidarity or justice are common in all cultures, although each cultural tradition contributes its own vision and its nuances with respect to each one of them.
The desire for justice arises from the need to live in a society in which a certain harmony prevails, in which there are no situations of abuse and where a balance is imposed. The desire for justice is born the need to create laws, so that the human being forms codes and legal norms that serve to restore justice. However, human justice is by definition imperfect, since man sometimes makes mistakes when judging, acts with prejudice and his vision of what is just or unjust depends on a social context and the limitations of the laws themselves.
Divine justice as an ideal
The limitations of human justice mean that in the sphere of all religions there is a superior justice, divine justice. It is a belief based on faith and consists of the conviction that a God, a higher entity or the order of nature itself imposes authentic justice in some way, without possible error and giving everyone what they deserve.
For Christians, divine justice will be effective in the Final Judgment or Universal Judgment, when each man will render an account to God, in such a way that God will judge each one according to what he has done in his life. The same idea is maintained in Islam, but instead of the Last Judgment the expression Day of Retribution is used.
For the ancient Egyptians there was also an idea of divine justice, since they believed in reincarnation and in the next life the deity known as Maat would be in charge of eradicating evil and imposing good.
In most religions, divine justice is presented as a force that counteracts the weaknesses and inadequacies of human justice. This is what happens with Hinduism, a polytheistic religion but with a key concept, karma. The so-called Law of Karma governs everything that has been created and is the entity or force responsible for establishing true justice.
Criticism of the idea of Divine Justice
From some philosophical approaches it is understood that the concept of divine justice is nothing more than a human invention that arises as a logical consequence of believing in a creator God or a spiritual entity of a higher order. For these philosophers divine justice is a conceptual fiction and does not make any sense from a strictly rational point of view.
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