Jailing the Innocent to Prove They’re Innocent…

“Many people charged with murder wait two or even three years for a trial. In New York, there is no statutory right to a speedy trial in a homicide, and as a result (and because murder cases are complicated and usually prosecuted and defended by very experienced and very busy lawyers) the mere allegation can land you in jail for a few years.” — Indefensible, by David Feige.

In the U.S., someone accused of a crime is “innocent until proven guilty,”the principle commonly referred to as the presumption of innocence. Yet, before someone is proven guilty, after the mere accusation that they committed a crime, they can be jailed for a long period of time waiting for a trial. An innocent person can be jailed for years! How is it just to imprison the innocent? The person has done no injustice that would make it just to punish them. The accused’s only crime is that they are citizens in a society where the innocent are allowed to be imprisoned. Imagine a year of your life being spend behind bars, away from you loved ones and your comfortable daily routine, simply because you were accused of a crime!

“If we are not allowed to detain people while collecting evidence against them,” someone will say, “they will be able to escape and elude the police. The guilty will never be punished; the victims will not get what is duly theirs.” I understand the worry, and I do not question its merits. Yet, when is expediency allowed to vindicate injustice? If an injustice “works better” than a justice, then so what? It doesn’t change the fact that the action is unjust. Are we to turn a blind eye to justice as long we benefit from the injustice? Are we to throw off the chains of oppression only if no one benefits from the oppression?

A quotation from the Mississippi Declaration of Secession from the United States of America: “Its [slavery] labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization” They used what works best — the “necessities of the world” — in order to justify the horribly unjust institution of slavery. Are we going to defend our unjust practice by appeal to what works, by appeal to the expediency of imprisoning the innocent?

In fact, the idea that we will imprison even the innocent until their trial in order to have a more efficient legal system treats the accused person — innocent or guilty — as a means to an end, as an object. The accused is simply another cog in the machinery of justice that can be manipulated — i.e. imprisoned until the trial — to make the machine more efficient. Treating a person as an object — what is more unjust than that?

There needs to be an outcry from us. This is not something we can allow to exist while “more important” issues are solved. Imprisoning the innocent is an abomination, and it makes a joke of our claim of having a just, humane society.

Sure, many of those who are accused, and, subsequently, detained until their verdict and sentencing, are truly guilty. Yet, in the eyes of the court, they should be viewed as innocent until proven guilty. The detainment then becomes an imprisonment of the innocent.

Sure, it is easy to ignore this when one imagines that it is the guilty and — dare I say it? — poor minorities being detained until their trial. However, imagine your sister or mother, girlfriend or wife, daughter or friend being accused of a crime, and then stuck in jail until their trial. In jail, they are terrorized and victimized. You are powerless to help. People agree that what is happening to your loved one is sad, but it is necessary — otherwise, the justice system would not work! How consoling is this answer? Do you sleep better at night? Do you think the jailing of your innocent loved one any less unjust due to the “necessity” of the process?

I do not know about you, but I would rather a thousand criminals be given a chance to escape police than my wife or sister be jailed for one day — no, even an hour — simply because she was accused of a crime they did not commit.

If anyone is interested in perhaps forming a petition to get something done about this, let me know. Not only am I outraged at the unjustness of this, but I am also scared: how can I be sure it will not happen to myself or a loved one?

Goin’ Postal on the U. S. Postal Service

Anyone who has read this blog will know that I am no fan of government. Not only do I think that many, if not all, of the government’s activities are unjust, but I believe they are also inefficient. One does not have to be an economist to understand that competition is beneficial. If businesses and entrepreneurs have hard-working competitors, the businesses and entrepreneurs work harder and are more innovative: they try to cut prices and increase quality to gain and keep customers. Other, more complicated reasons, exist to explain the benefits of competition, but the reason I gave should be enough to cause someone to at least stop and consider competition’s benefits.

Whenever a business gets a large portion of the market share, citizens and politicians start calling it a monopoly and advocating shattering the business into pieces. The reasons for the hatred of monopolies is usually that monopolies can unfairly limit competition, thereby allowing them to raise prices without the risk of driving customers to do business with the monopoly’s competitors. Why is it, when so many people denounce monopolies when they form on the “free” market (I put “free” in quotation marks to draw attention to the fact that what most people designate as monopolies did not form on a free market, but on a market where the government intervened heavily, often in favor of the monopoly.), they do not denounce government-created monopolies. An example of a government-created monopoly is the U. S. Postal Service.

It might surprise many of you to discover that it is illegal for a private company to handle non-urgent letters in the United States; it is also illegal to put mail in a private mailbox that the USPS uses to put mail in. It is not that the government allows the monopoly to exist, as they might a private company that turned into a monopoly; but, instead, the government has created and enforced this monopoly. In fact, early in the 19th-century, due to the notoriously high postage rates, a few private mail agencies were created and competed with the USPS. However, since they were in violation of the federal monopoly (under the Private Express Statutes) on mail delivery, they were eventually shut down or put out-of-business due to the financial drain of the legal defense fees. They succeeded, though, in causing the USPS to lower its rates. Read this article for a nice history of Lysander Spooner’s battle against the U. S. Postal Service’s high rates and its monopoly.

So, why should there be a monopoly on it? Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says, “The Congress shall have power…to establish post offices and post roads….” It does not, however, say that Congress must provide the service. It certainly does not authorize Congress to forcibly prevent private companies to provide competitive services. The competition might put the USPS out-of-business, but if they cannot efficiently provide service to the customers, they should bear the fate of any other inefficient business. As the example of Lysander Spooner’s private postal service shows, competition will cause the postal service to lower rates and increase efficiency.

All laws protecting the USPS’s monopoly should be repealed. Thankfully, the USPS does not receive government funding. However, the repealing of the laws creating the government’s monopoly would not only benefit citizens, it would end an injustice.

Greed and American Christianity

One could learn much about the present state of Christianity, specifically the so-called “Fundamentalists,” by studying the unevenness of their interpretations of Scriptures. By “unevenness,” I mean looking at passages and commands similar in structure and noticing how they are interpreted in entirely different manners, noticing the passages and commands that they emphasize and the ones they do not, etc.

Fundamentalists oppose such “evils” as drinking and gambling, though I have never seen or heard a cogent argument against either. I, however, have attempted several times to discover one. Yet, as someone who does both and yet still attends a Fundamentalist church, I have to keep my head down.

If you were to ask them why they thought drinking and gambling was a sin, they would have trouble finding a verse that condemns either one: one does not exist. Instead, they usually claim gambling is “bad stewardship”; drunkenness is condemned by the Bible, so they usually point to the dangers of drinking because it can lead to drunkenness. (Though, it is debatable what “drunkenness” exactly means: the state of being drunk, or the condition that we call “alcoholism.”)

Now, as the title suggests, I am not trying to defend drinking and gambling, though I think it can be successfully defended. Instead, I am interested in an “unevenness” in the Fundamentalist approach to these two “vices” and their approach to wealth and greed.

I am continually surprised at the high number of high-end cars in my church’s parking lot. While not every car is high-end — admittedly, probably less than one-tenth of the cars could be described as high-end — a good number of them are high-end. Lexus, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Saab — they are all represented. The number of people who have bought expensive china, jewelry, houses, etc. would be considerably higher, not to mention those who take vacations, wear nice clothes, eat at nice restaurants on a regular basis, etc.

Do not misunderstand what I am saying: I am not condemning spending money on these items or activities. I only point it out to demonstrate that the arguments used against gambling and drinking are inconsistently applied.

First, let me explain this in regard to gambling. If gambling is bad stewardship, why is it not bad stewardship to spend money on the items or activities I mentioned above? They are not necessary, and the money saved by either not buying (or doing) them or buying (or doing) a less expensive version could be given to the church or to the poor. Certainly the latter would be the best option. Why excuse this behavior, but not excuse gambling, especially when engaged in for entertainment purposes? Appeals to the high risks of losing money when gambling are irrelevant here. If it is acceptable to “waste” money on a luxury car or an expensive vacation, why is it any less acceptable to probably waste money when gambling?

Regarding drinking, the reason many Fundamentalists regard drinking alcohol wrong is because it can lead to “drunkenness,” which is condemned in the Scriptures. One can do without alcohol, so the partaking of alcohol is wrong because it is “playing with fire” or “tempting yourself to sin.” Why are luxury items any less a temptation to greed? I would contend that more Americans struggle with greed than struggle with drunkenness; certainly, surrounding oneself with luxuries (nice cars, high-quality food, nice vacation, expensive homes, etc.) can easily tempt one to want to accumulate more. If drinking is wrong because of the temptation of drunkenness, the middle-class (or better) lifestyle is wrong because of the temptation of greed.

Though the Scriptures speak against greed at least as much as they do drunkenness — perhaps more than they do drunkenness — and definitely more than they do gambling, Fundamentalists have conveniently ignored the implications of their reasoning regarding a middle-class or better lifestyle. This is only one of the many uneven interpretations of Scripture in the Fundamentalist branch of Christendom, much less Christendom as a whole. I hope no one thinks I am claiming to be free from the problem of unevenness, for I am not free from the problem.

I write this not to condemn this type of lifestyle, or even to defend gambling and drinking; but, instead, I have written it to explain part of the reason I am annoyed by upper-class Fundamentalists who condemn others for drinking and gambling — it reminds me of a saying by Jesus concerning a speck and a plank.

The Moment of Repentance

The Christian life is marked by continual struggle with sin. This does not mean that one does not ever make progress, but simply that the progression is due to the types of struggles with which one is engaged. As St. John says in his First Epistle, if we say we are without sin we are a liar, and the truth is not in us.

We can all look at any given day and identify sins that we have committed. Some sins might be “worse” than others, some more public, and some might be sins of thought which only you are aware of. They are all sins and we are to always continue to struggle against them. It is certainly incorrect to think use the fact that we all sin as justification for our sin; it is instead justification for our continual struggle. That we all sin does not mean that we can let down our guard and accept our sinful lives, since sin will always be with us, but instead it means that we cannot let down our guard, because sin will always be with us.

The moment of repentance (and here I am talking not about he repentance that marks conversion from a life of disbelief to a life of belief, but instead about the repentance that marks the struggle with sin) is indeed a weighty moment. Kierkegaard spends much time discussing this is The Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing, a book that everyone should spend some time with.

The moment of repentance is the moment when the true nature of our spiritual life is laid before us: the defects do not hide our true self, but instead they make it more discernible. We truly see how bankrupt we are, and, as a result, our dependence upon God reaches great heights. We beg forgiveness, though we feel like we are so bankrupt forgiveness cannot be granted us. The feeling that an eternity of perfection would not compensate for our sins overwhelms us. We long to be perfect, to completely turn away from our sins and give God the honor and praise He deserves, but perfection is beyond reach, and the height of dependence on God that one reaches during repentance is not sustained for more than a few moments.

In the moment of repentance, due to the increase clarity with which we see our sins, we look back upon the past and see not the improvements, but instead we see the times when our sinfulness reached its greatest, times when we effectively turn our back on God. Perhaps it is only me, though I suspect not, but in the moment of repentance I feel that I have made no progress from the last moment of repentance.

I believe that a key to true spiritual progress, the mark of spiritual maturity, is to live every moment as a moment of repentance. However, I do not know how to do so! I continue to have moments of repentance, with varying lengths of time in between, sometimes with righteous struggle with sin in between the moments, and other times with a complete lapse into an godless existence. Somehow I must learn to live with constant repentance, a constant “metanoia” — a constant “changing of mind”. The route I need to take to do this is to perform more spiritual disciplines, e.g. fasting, praying, meditating, etc. However, the problem with spiritual disciplines is that one must be disciplined in order to embark upon a regular observance of them. I, however, lack the discipline it takes to regularly observe spiritual disciplines. This should be one of the places that I work hardest at, for the results are beneficial if I can discipline myself well enough to engage in spiritual disciplines.

May God bless me with the strength and disciple to regularly observe the spiritual disciplines, and may He grant me perseverance in my repentance.

Pondering an Argument from Two Years Ago…

In reading a book unrelated to the philosophy of religion — perhaps it is wrong to say it is unrelated, but, at most, it is distantly related — I recalled an argument by a physics major in my Philosophy of Religion course. I took the course two years ago, so it is odd that the argument surfaced again. In fact, the argument is not a great argument, but for some reason it caught my attention then and resurfaced now.

The physics major, whose name I do not recall, was the typical annoying science major. Everyone is aware of the type I am referring to: they are know-it-alls, argumentative, and decidedly close-minded towards contributions from other fields. As you could imagine, he constantly referred to scientific truths whose truths he apparently regarded as undeniably true, and then asserted that this “truth” told us something about religion, specifically, that God does not exist.

The argument that I happened to remember a moment ago was that, since quantum physics tells us that there is a chance, albeit a small chance, that his hand could pass through the surface of the desk he was sitting at, the world exhibited a lack of design; therefore, since the world lacks design, there was not a Designer.

Yet, this argument is a poor one for other reasons besides the following, it is a poor argument because it his example, i.e. the hand going through the desk, does not prove a lack of design. Like the absolute skeptics about the external world who still look both ways when crossing the street, I’m sure this physics major had no reservations about putting his hand on the desk, sitting in a chair, walking up a flight of stair, or any other menial tasks which would prove doubtful, if not dangerous, if what he claims is true.

“I have no reservations about doing those task,” he might reply, “because the probability is so small that it is negligible. I have no need to worry about them.” Yet, it is precisely this that I am wanting to make manifest. The situation of one solid passing through another, though possible, is so far removed from being probable that we can neglect it; in fact, no one knows if it has ever happened or if it ever will happen. So, the fact that we can continue are lives ignorant of this small possibility could be viewed as an example of design.

God’s design in the world would be apparent in how well it worked, and the physic major’s counterargument does not affect the fact that the world works well and displays design.