Indiscriminate Justice

A President has been elected under the slogan “Make America Great Again”. The greater part of the States award him their Electoral College votes, but the few States on the east and west coasts with much larger populations skew the popular vote toward his opponent. The President is a man with a great sense of business and a definite vision of what the office of President entails, but he lacks political and diplomatic skills. He delights in directly communicating with the people, but in doing so, frequently antagonizes those who disagree with him, because while he can be charming, he is also used to getting his own way, by bullying if necessary. He is not a politically correct communicator.

The nation has suffered for a number of years from economic and domestic policies which have been viewed as egalitarian and desirable by the President’s opponents. Large numbers of people have become wealthy as a result of those policies, but a much larger part of the population has suffered poverty and despair. Large numbers of aliens have been permitted to enter the country, skirting the legal immigration process, to take advantage of the social programs, bringing with them customs which clash with the resident society and diseases which medical services are unfamiliar with and ill-equipped to handle. Some also bring with them the threat of terrorist activity as a part of their religious beliefs. At the same time, the social programs are strained and cannot meet the needs of the citizens for whom they were originally designed. Local law enforcement is taxed not only with criminal activity imported with the new arrivals, but also with the added problems of domestic abuse, identity theft, and voter fraud from people who have a very different perception of what behaviors are appropriate in this country.

The new President takes measures to enforce the existing laws, which his predecessor deliberately ignored to allow the situation to grow. His predecessor, and the two Presidents before him, had identified seven nations which were particularly prone to harbor terrorists and which either lacked adequate information services to identify such persons, or who actively trained and encouraged them to attack the country. The President calls a 90 day halt to allowing persons from those countries to enter or visit in order to set up a system to provide better background checks. He also instructs the immigration services to enforce the existing immigration laws, deporting aliens who have entered the country without going through normal channels and have also been convicted of crimes since they arrived. Large numbers of people see those actions as inhumane or contrary to their vision of what the country ought to be, and carry out protests and riots to block the authorities. Some of the people who have benefitted financially from exploiting the migrants file lawsuits to halt the action, and unjust judges, obeying the voice of the mob rather than the law, enjoin the President from enforcing the law.

What is a follower of Jesus Christ supposed to make of this? Is not God a God of mercy and compassion? Should the church rebuke the President for enforcing the law and taking steps to control the entry of persons who are unknown or might have dubious backgrounds?

What is the Christian to make of such verses as Micah 6:8 and Matthew 23:23? Should not mercy and compassion be at the forefront of our efforts? Is this a case of discrimination in justice against foreigners?

Micah 6:8 tells us that God requires us to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God”. Matthew 23:23 contains a statement that the weightier matters of the Law are “judgment, mercy, and faith”. Why is mercy second and not first in both sequences? What of the statement in James 2:13, that “mercy exults against judgment”?

Prior to leaving office, President Obama was asked if he would pardon Hillary Clinton for breaking the law regarding using private emails for government business, and Edward Snowden for releasing secret government communications. Neither request was granted. He could not pardon them, because they had not been convicted of a crime, even though it was evident that they had committed crimes. Mercy is not possible until judgment has been passed first. If one is not capable of judging, then neither is he capable of being merciful or forgiving.

What is judgment; how does one apply justice? After all, Deuteronomy 16:20 concludes how righteousness in judgment was to be effected under the Law : “Justice, justice, you shall do!” The Law was to be applied without discrimination, and was to be applied equally to both the citizen and foreigner alike.

Are there unjust laws? Possibly so, but when a law is in effect to treat all persons equally, and one group of people is allowed to disregard it, that is injustice. When a nation has laws designed to protect its people, and foreigners are allowed to disregard those laws, that is injustice. Is a person who permits someone to break those laws — even for “humanitarian” reasons — being merciful, or is he being unjust? Unless the lawbreaker has been convicted of his lawbreaking, mercy is not possible. The person who permits the lawbreaker to proceed is being unjust to his fellow citizen, and is actually discriminating against those strangers who do obey the law, who do not practice identity theft, who obtain legal permission to hold a job and earn money. That person who permits the lawbreaker to proceed unhindered is a partner in crime.

So the Christian is commanded to love; to show compassion and mercy. Can he do that without considering the precursor to mercy? Can he show favoritism to the stranger over the fellow citizen and still consider himself just? Before we speak out against the authorities which God has placed over us, should we consider whether we ourselves are acting in indiscriminate justice?

There is a strain of theology which teaches that God is merciful and loving and non-judgmental. If that were true, then there would have been no need for Christ to die in our stead for the sins which we have committed and for which we would suffer eternal deportation to the Lake of Fire. God has judged all humankind worthy of eternal damnation, for there is no one who has not not transgressed His law. The Scripture relates that even the thought of foolishness is sin, punishable by eternal separation from our Creator, who is holy and abhors the violation of His orders.

Having judged us, He was then able to be merciful, offering Himself by taking on a human body in the person of Jesus, and forgiving us by paying the price for our sins Himself on the cross. Forgiveness is not possible without paying the price for the wrong in place of the one who has wronged us.

It would be the gravest injustice to tell someone outside the Church that God will save him from eternal damnation by simply “accepting Jesus” without also telling them that they must repent of their sins because salvation comes through the payment in Jesus’ blood for those very acts. Jesus may have forgiven a person and paid the price of admission to Heaven, but the Scripture is clear about the woes of those who disregard the preciousness of the blood of Christ and go on sinning as though the price was despicable.

The Christian must feed and clothe and help the alien in his land, but must also warn him that his breaking of the immigration law is an insult to those who serve and protect. To despise the laws that were set up to protect the health and safety of our country’s citizens — laws defended and paid for in the blood of those who have sworn to uphold the law of the land for our good — is to despise their sacrifice. The alien who has entered the land illegally should understand that we judge that action as unrighteous, that we can mercifully meet his immediate needs, but that he must repent by returning to his own land and following the rules if he wishes to join us here. Repentance is never easy. Repentance is usually accompanied by tears. But supposed “mercy”, without such judgment, is simply a form of damnation, leaving the alien to live in fear until the day he is caught and banished from the Promised Land.

A Sticky Situation

Once upon a time, I heard that deer flies were attracted to the color blue. In fact, I read that one trick to reduce the annoyance was to hang blue balls — Christmas ornaments, I believe —- covered with insect trap goo, from trees. Or, as one person related, to place a blue ball on a rod on his lawn tractor, just higher than his head, so that as he mowed, the deer flies would land on the ball and be trapped.

Not having blue balls, I was puzzled as to how I would get a similar result. Then I spotted an anti-freeze container in the garage. One gallon. Blue. Polyethylene. Time to check out the tale.

Tools. Some Tree Tanglefoot for making it sticky. $11 at Home Depot for a 15 oz tub; $10 at Menards. Two tubs sitting in my garage cabinet for years.

Brushes. I always knew that someday I would need these. $2.99 for a pack of 36 at Harbor Freight. Sitting on the shelf in the garage.

Ah, yes, the blue polyethylene. Empty containers have to go away somehow. The jug provided two 6”x6” pieces, which I hung in the pear tree and the cherry tree.

Then another thought materialized. What if other bugs like other colors? Back to the garage. A small Folgers can provided three 4”x4” red squares.

In the kitchen, a sour cream container was recruited for the white rectangles — 3”x4”.

So there they dangle in the wind. Red, white, and blue, fitting for the 4th of July. As for the white ones, they have printing on one side. Maybe some bugs prefer to read while they expire.

We shall see how this turns out. What kinds of bugs prefer red, what kinds prefer blue, what kinds prefer white, what kinds can read?

Hi, There, Pigeon!

One of my required courses as an undergrad Education major at the University of Akron was Psychology. I must confess that listening to Dr. Popplestone lecture was not one of the more exciting things that happened in my academic career. I got a D in that course because I found other things to hold my attention. Nevertheless, the good doctor did capture my attention one day with his description of the experiments of B. F. Skinner.

In a nutshell, for the unenlightened, Skinner discovered that he could induce superstitious behavior in pigeons by rewarding responses to stimuli that had nothing to do with a situation. The pigeon would associate the appearance of food with whatever behavior it was performing at the moment. The essence of the experiment was a demonstration that superstitious behavior was caused by linking correlation with causation.

It was in my post-graduate courses that I was provided with the opportunity to distinguish between experimental and quasi-experimental design. I was also provided with the understanding that science is an exercise in the reduction of uncertainty, and that in a true scientific endeavor, it is never possible to prove a hypothesis (or a theory, of which a hypothesis is a subset), but that true certainty only arrives with the disproval of a null hypothesis.

To explain that logic, understand that to prove that something “always is true”, it is necessary to test it an infinite number of times without failure. One failure in the testing destroys the concept of “always is true”. The ability to trust the results resides in the probability of the next experiment also concluding true — a wondrous exercise of faith in the theory, but which never concludes with absolute proof.

However, if one sets out to prove that something “always is false”, even though every experiment fails there is always the uncertainty that the next one will not — a true result destroys the theory — which engenders the real “scientific” attitude of skepticism that drove the Enlightenment. One failure to prove falsity results in an absolute surety that the idea of “always is false” is in itself false.

That may seem a bit like a dog chasing it’s own tail, but in reality most experiments end up with a set of mixed outcomes. There may have been a flaw in the experimental design, or an invalid set of inputs, or some other quirk that distorted the outcome. That leads to the concept of degrees of certainty, in which an experimenter may say that the null hypothesis was rejected at say, a confidence level of 5%. That is to say, the hypothesis is true up to a point, and the individual may choose his level of risk with it.

Thus the entire purpose of science is centered around “randomness” or “chance”; the user of the experimental results has the opportunity to decide if a certain action is worth the associated risk. Human nature, however, abhors uncertainty; we would rather have the weather witch tell us that it will not rain today (so we can place the blame if we get wet) rather than that there is a 50% chance of rain, in which case getting wet is our own fault.

Suppose, though, that we notice that it always rains after certain birds sing a particular series of notes. Without any other inputs, we might conclude that the singing of the birds causes it to rain. While we, as “scientific” people might scoff at that conclusion as being superstitious, it might be an entirely logical one to a less sophisticated or educated population. Similarly, if almost every time a policemen enters our neighborhood someone is killed, we might conclude that our chance of dying increases with the appearance of a policeman. When fear or trauma become factors in our decision-making, rationality declines and we tend to associate the factor with the greatest correlation as the cause of the event, ignoring any other factors which might be in play (such as hostility to authority, drug abuse, or other criminal activity).

As humans, we also find it easy to be lead by those who have established themselves as “authorities” with regard to various disciplines. Thus when an “authority” proclaims that he has found a correlation between the amount of man-made smoke in the air and an increase in average temperature, he can easily announce that he has “proven” that people cause climate change and that by modifying our behavior according to his prescription, we can change it in a different direction. That other factors such as solar radiation, tectonic movement, or position within the galaxy (yes, Dorothy, we aren’t in Kansas anymore — we are millions of miles away from the Kansas we were in this time last year and the part of our galaxy we are in now may have a different temperature than the part we were in last year!) could instead cause such climate change is uncomfortable because they are beyond our control. It is a hallmark of superstitious belief that people can choose freely to obliterate the cause of a frightening situation; the Salem witchcraft trials come to mind.

While science and the scientific method(s) have some obvious usefulness within our culture, allowing us to exercise our curiosity and design inventions which advance the good of humanity, they never provide certainty. Further, they never answer the questions about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. They never provide absolute truth, and with it, absolute reality. Those items have always been the province of metaphysics, and particularly, of religion. In the attempt to reconcile science and religion, there has always been a thrust toward elevating the humanity of men and the humanizing of deity. Wherever belief in causation has surfaced, man has tended to create his god in his own image, and the more sophisticated a culture becomes, the more urbane and sophisticated it’s god becomes until at some point, the deity is no longer needed and humanism triumphs. Unfortunately, without some superstition, humanism lacks any sense of certainty.

For myself, the specter of being a pigeon at the mercy of fate (or karma, as neophyte Humanists, Hindus and Buddhists might term it) is so unsettling that I would rather be in the hands of the Almighty God of Heaven, as described in the Hebrew Bible — a Being so all-powerful and all-knowing and good and righteous and holy that no matter what happens in my life, it is intended for good. A God who is just, but whose mercy endures forever. A God who is true, and who never fails to keep His word. A God whose love is so vast that He, the only immortal being, devised a plan whereby He could pay the penalty for my sins by dying in my place. A God so righteous that death could not hold Him, and He was raised from death so that I could be confident in the rightness of His plan and the surety of His promise.

So keep your randomness, your chance, your choices, your fate — whatever brand of uncertainty your superstition entertains. We are all superstitious, every one of us. Go ahead and be scientific. Phrase your basic beliefs as null hypotheses, test them and live with your insecurity, if you can do so without insanity. As for me, I will trust in the Eternal God of Israel, who keeps His covenant with His chosen people forever.