Several years ago, I saw a news story unfolding on television. It was about the collapse of a coal mine in West Virginia (the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster). Over two dozen miners were trapped, and for many hours the mining company was not able to tell whether the men may have survived. About 24 hours after the collapse, in the evening when many family members of the trapped miners had gathered at a local church, a rumor spread that the men had been found alive and were being rescued. But then a short time later the rumor turned out to be utterly false, and the despair of the family members at that realization, after their hopes had been substantially raised, was almost beyond description.
A news reporter briefly interviewed the wife of one of the doomed miners. She said that she was so distraught, after praying so fervently and having her hopes dashed, that she was unsure if she even believed in God at all anymore after finding out that the rescue rumor was erroneous and her husband was surely dead.
People who profess a religious faith and say that they “believe in God” conceive God in a wide variety of ways; God can be many things. This wife of the doomed miner apparently worshipped and prayed to a God that was to behave as a servant, like a waiter at a restaurant: you tell the servant what you want and you expect to be given it. God, in this instance, was to respond in accord with the earnestness of the supplicant.
But while we all might scoff at the idea of God as obedient toady, we too fashion a convenient image of God. Even as we fancy God as creating us, (with a nod to Voltaire) we create Him! I repeat, it is a God of convenience, and generally what we already believe and want to believe our God believes too.
Mere coincidence? For many of us, God is a tireless fount of hope. And for many of these same people the idea of God has also been a bane; the very same doctrines that declare God as provider and comforter often characterize God as the author of vengeance and retribution. We want the cruel, the violent, the wanton and merciless, the profligate and the murderous to suffer awful things and – wonder of wonders – so does our “God”.
The result of this failed ethic is that we have worked to rationalize an ilk of “justice” with all the trappings of its opposite – injustice and badness. And violence and killing are central to this retributive, ultimately irreligious concept. We proceed to oppose oppressive actions by oppressions of our own, and we perversely advocate for those who have suffered at the hands of the unwholesome and unwise by the deliberate imposition of suffering. And in supposed defense of those who have been killed, we kill.
Our future is as difficult and unenviable as is our illiberal insistence that oppression must be a central feature of our justice. We want the protections of civilization, but we want it only in the comfort of knowing that our oppressive wants will be satisfied too. We’ve sacrificed nothing, and we’ve created the our god of obedient service. There is no credible and impartial statistical evidence in support of the idea that killing (in the death penalty) has any remedial effect. And statistics do not suggest any special deterrent effect at all. And there is no evidence that – taken holistically – torture is a prudent and efficacious policy for a forward looking, modern, and functional government.
We embrace the idea of women and racial minorities as equals while denying the reality that their oppression depended upon unsupported suppositions of convenience, and not upon science or any internally consistent morality! These demographic groups are equal and thus not eligible for any conspicuous oppression now simply because it is culturally popular now to view social equality as natural and just.
Yet we count as proponents of oppressions of other sorts in our time.
As I will explain in later writings here, this embrace of oppressions cannot continue. The survival of humankind requires that we eliminate policy oppression from our array of behaviors. If we don’t do this soon, we will again face the gruesome certitude of war, and the inevitable risk of thermonuclear war too. And it is because wars will persist so long as we have no real concept of the human person as inviolable.