The Devil is in the details.
My family is generally internet savvy. We rarely get computer viruses or spyware installed on our machines unknowingly, and we can navigate the web without much difficulty. There are two exceptions to this general rule of computer-networking literacy: My father and my aunt (one of his sisters).
Almost as a rule, when I return to my parents’ home north of town, I turn on my father’s computer and run both a virus-scan and a removal program for spyware. Despite having installed these programs onto his computer and having left detailed step-by-step instructions to open each once per week to check for updates, no matter how long I’ve been gone from the house he has not done so. Inevitably I discover a few dozen computer viruses and several spyware programs installed to his machine.
Despite my protestations, he continues to use America Online as his primary method of accessing the internet, because “it provides him with better security.” As evidence of this, he points out that on startup, a little box pops up telling him to wait while AOL performs a system scan for adware. Obviously it must work wonders (insert rolling of eyes here) because I only catch a few dozen adware programs when I run the scans.
Nevertheless, I receive an endless stream of worthless e-mails from both my aunt and my father. On almost a daily basis I get an e-mail from one or more of them that is some chain letter or a sappy poem with a dozen fwds in the subject line. As often as not with my aunt, the forwarded message has at some point been actually deleted from the message, although she faithfully forwards me a ten-page header of other people to whom this e-mail has been sent or from whom it came.
About a week ago, I got an e-mail from my aunt forwarding a long message about religion in America. Now, she knows that I’m an atheist (as I’ve explained before, I believe that knowledge of the supernatural is permanently off-limits to the ken of mankind due to how we acquire and process information). I don’t go about sending her links to articles from “Humanist” magazine, and I don’t send her long essays about the inerrancies of her cherished scripture. Why it is somehow appropriate for her to send me a continuous stream of religious propaganda escapes my understanding.
This e-mail message purported to be by Ben Stein and claimed to have been read by him on some television network (claims which I find dubious), but in which he (or the anonymous REAL author) argues that Christianity is under assault by the secularist forces and that, in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, we are seeing God’s justice meted out for throwing God out of the public sphere.
Now, I’ll ignore the myth that somehow Christians, who compose complete dominion over every branch of government, are being persecuted. I’ll ignore the fact that there are no laws, or even movements, to prohibit individual citizens from practicing their religious choices as they see fit, even in public locations. I’ll pass over the fact that churches receive tax breaks, and pay no property taxes, while secular humanist organizations must pay taxes. Yes, Christianity – the religion of almost 75-80% of Americans is under assault by a group that composes about 1 in 10 citizens.
The real issue I have with the short essay is the nature of the remarks it had to make about justice. As a philosopher, justice is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. The classic definition of justice is an easy one to understand, although delving into it a bit further reveals ambiguity.
Justice is this: The allocation of the goods of life to an individual according to his desert. In other words, my life should be filled with good and bad things in direct proportion to how much I deserve them. This is why we think it is just when we put a criminal in prison. We are doling out to him some measure of punishment because he deserves it. We would think it monumentally unjust if we took a firefighter who rushed into a burning building to save two small children and stoned him to death for the act. Why? Because we would be allocating something bad to him when he deserved something good.
This concept of justice is not a new one. It is in fact, the explicit first covenant that God makes with the Israelites in the Bible. God demands that the Israelites follow his laws, and if a person does, God will shelter and protect him, and will ensure that his life is filled with good things. If he does not follow the law, he will be punished for his transgression. Indeed, this is precisely the objection that Job makes when his family is killed, his livestock destroyed, and his health shattered. “I followed the Law,” bemoans Job. In a real way, he views this as a contract issue. God made an agreement with him to reward him for his goodness, and here, Job was good and God fell through on the deal.
This notion of justice has been given by philosophers from the ancient Greeks and Romans straight through to the modern day as well. As a general rule, the only change to the notion of justice has been what constitutes one’s level of desert. To the Israelites, desert was measured by how closely one followed the law. Today, in criminal justice, desert is measured by how closely one follows the State’s law. In a moral sense, desert can be measured by how closely one adheres to the ethical precepts involved in whichever moral system you wish to propose.
One factor, however, has not changed. What matters in justice is that individuals are rewarded or punished for their level of desert and that the rewards and punishments be applied to their lives and not the lives of others. For instance, if my brother were to commit a murder, and the police came to my house and arrested me, knowing that I am not my brother and that my brother is the one who committed the murder, we would tend to think that I had been done an injustice. If I threw a baseball through my neighbor’s window, and my neighbors, knowing that it was me that did it, charged the cost of replacing the window to a different family, we would believe that the other family who was forced to pay the cost had been unjustly punished.
Similarly, if a worker invents a new efficiency-generating machine for his factory that will generate millions of dollars in cost-savings for his company each year, we should expect that he gets a raise, and would find it unjust for the CEO to take a huge bonus for the work of another in which he took no part (which of course is exactly what we usually see in corporate America).
In real life examples, this is why I can condemn Israel for the iniquity of their treatment of Palestinians. When a suicide bomber detonates his charge, killing innocent victims in a Disco or on a bus, he has surely committed a wrong. As such, he should be punished. The dilemma, of course, is that he is dead and can no longer be punished. Perhaps his estate could be drained as punishment or something, but what in fact occurs is that Israel sends out bulldozers to level the homes of his family members. Usually, the family is only notified of the demolition of their home minutes before it begins and are only allowed to salvage what belongings they can carry and snatch up as they are escorted from the building by armed soldiers. This is a manifestly unjust action, because wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and children are punished (made homeless and destitute) because of the actions of a third party over which they had no control.
In sub-Saharan Africa, it is common to attribute misfortunes to the actions of ‘witches.’ Elaborate trials are set up to identify the local witch, and once identified, they are forced to pay reparations to the family whose livestock caught a disease, or whose house burned down. Such a system is also surely unjust because, barring the existence of witches who can cause such disasters, an individual is being deprived of their property for the chance occurrences which harmed a third party.
This analysis of justice has been leading up to a single point which I’d hope should be clear. There are people out there who whole-heartedly believe that large disasters which kill thousands, cut apart families, render people homeless and destitute, and inflict immeasurable suffering on countless individuals are an expression of divine wrath at removing government-mandated morning prayers at your local high school. While I believe that most Christians would find such an idea ludicrous, the fact remains that a significant number of these people (like my aunt) do exist, and that, if true in fact, their ideas would be the perfect example of a god of injustice. It is impossible to reconcile the infliction of suffering on the innocent with justice, and to suggest that every single person along the gulf coast who lost their lives, property, or any other good thing from their lives due to the hurricane was guilty of being a part of the “secular conspiracy” is surely mind-boggling.
And yet, these people worship a God whose actions are indefensible morally. They do not just attend services where they purport to renew their service to their God, but do so willingly and jubilantly. If their worldview is correct (and I, along with millions of deeply religious people would deny that), they are in service to a God whose actions epitomize injustice and gross iniquity.
Makes you wonder if they are worshipping the wrong one, doesn’t it?
Almost as a rule, when I return to my parents’ home north of town, I turn on my father’s computer and run both a virus-scan and a removal program for spyware. Despite having installed these programs onto his computer and having left detailed step-by-step instructions to open each once per week to check for updates, no matter how long I’ve been gone from the house he has not done so. Inevitably I discover a few dozen computer viruses and several spyware programs installed to his machine.
Despite my protestations, he continues to use America Online as his primary method of accessing the internet, because “it provides him with better security.” As evidence of this, he points out that on startup, a little box pops up telling him to wait while AOL performs a system scan for adware. Obviously it must work wonders (insert rolling of eyes here) because I only catch a few dozen adware programs when I run the scans.
Nevertheless, I receive an endless stream of worthless e-mails from both my aunt and my father. On almost a daily basis I get an e-mail from one or more of them that is some chain letter or a sappy poem with a dozen fwds in the subject line. As often as not with my aunt, the forwarded message has at some point been actually deleted from the message, although she faithfully forwards me a ten-page header of other people to whom this e-mail has been sent or from whom it came.
About a week ago, I got an e-mail from my aunt forwarding a long message about religion in America. Now, she knows that I’m an atheist (as I’ve explained before, I believe that knowledge of the supernatural is permanently off-limits to the ken of mankind due to how we acquire and process information). I don’t go about sending her links to articles from “Humanist” magazine, and I don’t send her long essays about the inerrancies of her cherished scripture. Why it is somehow appropriate for her to send me a continuous stream of religious propaganda escapes my understanding.
This e-mail message purported to be by Ben Stein and claimed to have been read by him on some television network (claims which I find dubious), but in which he (or the anonymous REAL author) argues that Christianity is under assault by the secularist forces and that, in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, we are seeing God’s justice meted out for throwing God out of the public sphere.
Now, I’ll ignore the myth that somehow Christians, who compose complete dominion over every branch of government, are being persecuted. I’ll ignore the fact that there are no laws, or even movements, to prohibit individual citizens from practicing their religious choices as they see fit, even in public locations. I’ll pass over the fact that churches receive tax breaks, and pay no property taxes, while secular humanist organizations must pay taxes. Yes, Christianity – the religion of almost 75-80% of Americans is under assault by a group that composes about 1 in 10 citizens.
The real issue I have with the short essay is the nature of the remarks it had to make about justice. As a philosopher, justice is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. The classic definition of justice is an easy one to understand, although delving into it a bit further reveals ambiguity.
Justice is this: The allocation of the goods of life to an individual according to his desert. In other words, my life should be filled with good and bad things in direct proportion to how much I deserve them. This is why we think it is just when we put a criminal in prison. We are doling out to him some measure of punishment because he deserves it. We would think it monumentally unjust if we took a firefighter who rushed into a burning building to save two small children and stoned him to death for the act. Why? Because we would be allocating something bad to him when he deserved something good.
This concept of justice is not a new one. It is in fact, the explicit first covenant that God makes with the Israelites in the Bible. God demands that the Israelites follow his laws, and if a person does, God will shelter and protect him, and will ensure that his life is filled with good things. If he does not follow the law, he will be punished for his transgression. Indeed, this is precisely the objection that Job makes when his family is killed, his livestock destroyed, and his health shattered. “I followed the Law,” bemoans Job. In a real way, he views this as a contract issue. God made an agreement with him to reward him for his goodness, and here, Job was good and God fell through on the deal.
This notion of justice has been given by philosophers from the ancient Greeks and Romans straight through to the modern day as well. As a general rule, the only change to the notion of justice has been what constitutes one’s level of desert. To the Israelites, desert was measured by how closely one followed the law. Today, in criminal justice, desert is measured by how closely one follows the State’s law. In a moral sense, desert can be measured by how closely one adheres to the ethical precepts involved in whichever moral system you wish to propose.
One factor, however, has not changed. What matters in justice is that individuals are rewarded or punished for their level of desert and that the rewards and punishments be applied to their lives and not the lives of others. For instance, if my brother were to commit a murder, and the police came to my house and arrested me, knowing that I am not my brother and that my brother is the one who committed the murder, we would tend to think that I had been done an injustice. If I threw a baseball through my neighbor’s window, and my neighbors, knowing that it was me that did it, charged the cost of replacing the window to a different family, we would believe that the other family who was forced to pay the cost had been unjustly punished.
Similarly, if a worker invents a new efficiency-generating machine for his factory that will generate millions of dollars in cost-savings for his company each year, we should expect that he gets a raise, and would find it unjust for the CEO to take a huge bonus for the work of another in which he took no part (which of course is exactly what we usually see in corporate America).
In real life examples, this is why I can condemn Israel for the iniquity of their treatment of Palestinians. When a suicide bomber detonates his charge, killing innocent victims in a Disco or on a bus, he has surely committed a wrong. As such, he should be punished. The dilemma, of course, is that he is dead and can no longer be punished. Perhaps his estate could be drained as punishment or something, but what in fact occurs is that Israel sends out bulldozers to level the homes of his family members. Usually, the family is only notified of the demolition of their home minutes before it begins and are only allowed to salvage what belongings they can carry and snatch up as they are escorted from the building by armed soldiers. This is a manifestly unjust action, because wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and children are punished (made homeless and destitute) because of the actions of a third party over which they had no control.
In sub-Saharan Africa, it is common to attribute misfortunes to the actions of ‘witches.’ Elaborate trials are set up to identify the local witch, and once identified, they are forced to pay reparations to the family whose livestock caught a disease, or whose house burned down. Such a system is also surely unjust because, barring the existence of witches who can cause such disasters, an individual is being deprived of their property for the chance occurrences which harmed a third party.
This analysis of justice has been leading up to a single point which I’d hope should be clear. There are people out there who whole-heartedly believe that large disasters which kill thousands, cut apart families, render people homeless and destitute, and inflict immeasurable suffering on countless individuals are an expression of divine wrath at removing government-mandated morning prayers at your local high school. While I believe that most Christians would find such an idea ludicrous, the fact remains that a significant number of these people (like my aunt) do exist, and that, if true in fact, their ideas would be the perfect example of a god of injustice. It is impossible to reconcile the infliction of suffering on the innocent with justice, and to suggest that every single person along the gulf coast who lost their lives, property, or any other good thing from their lives due to the hurricane was guilty of being a part of the “secular conspiracy” is surely mind-boggling.
And yet, these people worship a God whose actions are indefensible morally. They do not just attend services where they purport to renew their service to their God, but do so willingly and jubilantly. If their worldview is correct (and I, along with millions of deeply religious people would deny that), they are in service to a God whose actions epitomize injustice and gross iniquity.
Makes you wonder if they are worshipping the wrong one, doesn’t it?
posted by The Academian | 8:34 AM
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