Author: Teresa

Something needs to happen

Teresa, , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

-homicide, gun control and the American, or more directly, human experience

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In 2012 Chicago had 450 deaths by shooting, Detroit 350, LA over 500, New York City 400, Philly 300, D.C., where our legislators meet on capitol hill, 100.

Chicago’s murder rate matches all of Japan and is higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. But Chicago isn’t even the worst. New Orleans and Detroit are in competition year to year for the number 1 spot of most murders by firearm per 100,000 people.

Of course where there is a higher population there will be more murders. Let’s break it down by gun murders per 100,000 people. Chicago had 18 murders per 100,000, New Orleans 54, LA 7, Philly 21, NYC 5, D.C. 13, Detroit 57.

Interestingly, New York, California, Illinois and Pennsylvania have the strictest gun control laws yet house these cities with high murder rates by firearm.

Firearm related deaths in the US are 3 per 100,000. This paints a better picture but cannot be considered a relief.

65% of the time males are murdering other males. 22% of the time males are murdering females. 90% of black men kill other black men. 84% of white men kill other white men. Which busts the myth that racial tensions are leading to murder. An FBI statistic says while black Americans constitute less than 14 percent of the population, in more than one out of two homicides, the fatality is a black person.

Murder rates are falling but it could be due to the skill of medical professionals or the lack of proficiency of gunmen than decreased violence. Or could it be more?

Does being an NRA member predispose one to homicide? The NRA has 3 million members, which is a large number but is relatively small compared to the 70 million Americans who own a firearm. Lets say all firearm-related homicides were done with legally licensed firearms. Out of at least 70 million guns owned legally in the US 11,000 would be used to murder someone. This means most people who own a firearm don’t murder and even less people who own a firearm belong to the NRA. About half the NRA members have their firearm for protection and the other half for sport (hunting and target shooting). 74% of those that do belong to the NRA support expanded background checks at stores and gun shows.

What about gang-related homicides? Classification of a crime as gang-related is somewhat elusive much like a hate crime. The LAPD classifies a homicide as gang-related if the victim or the assailant is known to be a gang member but in some cases, a crime can be classified as gang-related if it occurs in a neighborhood where there’s an ongoing rivalry. In LA and Chicago 60% of homicides are gang related. NYC is much lower with 9% gang related homicides, which many accredit to the expansion of the ‘stop and frisk’ program under Rudy Guilliani.

Many homicides by firearm are committed by people with a criminal history. This speaks to recidivism. Recidivism is one of the most fundamental concepts in criminal justice. It refers to a person’s relapse into criminal behavior, often after the person receives sanctions or undergoes intervention for a previous crime. Recidivism is measured by criminal acts that resulted in rearrest, reconviction or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the prisoner’s release. Within 3 years of release 2/3 were rearrested. Within 5 years of release 3/4 were rearrested.   71% of those that relapse are violent offenders. Why do offenders recidivate? Many offenders had an extensive criminal history before prison which means they were quite used to a lifestyle of crime. They had developed bad habits, criminal habits, and probably collaborated in these bad habits within their community making it quite easy to reacclimatize to their criminal lifestyle once immersed in their familiar environment again. Also, while in prison they’re exposed to inmates that have a higher propensity to crime and may increase criminal behavior and reinforce anti-social attitudes. In short, prison hardens many of them emotionally and gives them connections to even more criminal conditioning.

There is also the ‘broken windows theory’. Here are some examples of the theory:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars because they’re inconspicuous from litter accumulation.

This describes the deterioration of neighborhoods into the downward spiral of crime.   Serious crime such as rape and murder are the final result of a lengthier chain of events. Mild disorder turns into major chaos if left unaddressed. The disorder also strikes fear into the minds of citizens who are convinced the area is unsafe. So the citizens withdraw from the community and it further falls into disrepair. There is physical disorder and social disorder. Physical disorder is run down buildings, abandoned vehicles, vacant lots filled with trash. Social disorder is panhandlers, noisy neighbors, groups of youth congregating on corners. While the broken windows theory may describe that a normally ‘good’ person may be persuaded into bad behavior and then act on it, it doesn’t explain what would tempt a person to see a broken window in an abandoned building and thus smash another one. Why one person would and another person wouldn’t smash the window is a crucial question.

A University of Texas study found that 84% of women and 91% of men have had at least one clear fantasy about committing murder. The idea of murder is not a monstrous deviation that only crazy killers think of. As the stats show many people fantasize about killing and nearly all people express a willingness to kill in some circumstances—to prevent being killed or to defend their children from killers. Interestingly, men indicated an increased willingness to kill when their status or reputation was threatened which are important qualities in attracting a mate. They also expressed a willingness to kill when their mating prospects become dire. Husbands that kill their wives often do so when they’ve discovered their spouse was cheating or after the couple has separated. 85% of these murders happen in the first year of the separation when it becomes clear that she won’t go back to him.

If a desire for a mate is not the impetus, it could be a desire for a drug or a desire for a piece of property or desire for a status.

The leading manifestations of homicide are ‘competition killing’ and ‘revenge killing’. Of course, there’s also random killing and disturbed mental health killings. But most homicides have motive. Most people don’t act on it but why not?

The why has to do with human nature and its conflict between right and wrong or good and evil. This manifests mentally as values and physically as the skill of restraint people have over their actions. This, in my opinion, is the most foundational point that needs to be addressed when confronting gun violence.

Something indeed needs to happen and that something is cultural. Change the values of the culture, equip people with better conflict managing skills, and everything else will fall in place the most it can. Of course, in this life because of our fallen nature there will never be utopia but reduction can happen.

Let’s start with the history of American culture, it sure has been rich hasn’t it? In the frontier days you had order but few laws, now you have laws but little order in many metropolises. We had the first pious Puritans, then the survival of the fittest vagabonds of the wild west, then the tragic era of enslavement, the turbulent toughness of new life experienced by the early tide of immigrants (mine were fleeing the potato famine in Ireland), the early gangs of New York, later the mafias, the depression of the 1920’s, women’s suffrage, the civil rights era, a revolution of ideas from the 1960’s, the rise of recreational drug use, several major wars, the ‘death of God’, the rise of popular culture and technology making our experiences and exposure ever so instant and global. America became a unique mosaic of different cultures and attitudes. Where does this leave us? Now. How does it leave us? Right where we started. With the problem of good, evil, brain chemistry, and social skills. It is a problem inherent in our nature.

As John Locke stated, self-defense is the first law of nature. Each human being owns his or her own life and no other person has a right to take that life. Those who would attempt to stop you from defending yourself, are attacking the very right from which all other rights are derived, protection of one’s own life.

Life is our only inalienable right and all other rights emanate from this. It’s no surprise then that our 2nd constitutional right is a right to bear arms. Defense of one’s life from death and tyranny is the substance of this right. It’s not mandatory for anyone else to save your life, though one does have a moral obligation to act on behalf of life, you are responsible for your life. A society that doesn’t value, or undervalues human life is one that breeds corruption.

Of course, you value your own life. A will to live is inherent to our nature. But what would compel us to value another’s life? If it’s your own opinion of right and wrong then what if you change your mind? Your opinion would be subject to the waxing and waning of your own heart or mind, right? Why would your definition have any more legitimacy or authority than another person’s definition? In other words, where does the all encompassing, inalienable right to life for human beings come from? It is no surprise that the value of life has deteriorated since the deterioration of an objective authority. Luckily, the value of the inalienable right to life still impresses on our laws and society even though many of us have discredited the authority from which this value comes. Most of us just accept that my neighbor’s life is valuable and that he has a right to live regardless of where this right comes from. Most, but not all. To many this right to live means little or worse yet, nothing.

Just like the broken window example. You start with their property and end up taking their life. If you don’t value the ownership someone has of their property then why would you value their person?

It could start very subtly. On the micro scale: eliminate the influence of the father, the absence of the father creates a poverty and dependency on the state, it creates a pressure on the mother to solely provide morals and care of basic needs and often the state shapes the child’s idea of right and wrong. On the macro scale: eliminate an objective authority, beef up state authority to take its place, undermine inalienable rights on behalf of popular opinion, undermine objective ideas of right and wrong. Over time, this perpetual cycle creates a hostile culture that is missing the influence of good morals and restraint on acts of evil. If accountability to fixed truths outside yourself are missing, then a domino effect takes place in which the citizen isn’t accountable to the family, to the community, to the human race. People that fantasize about murder but don’t become criminals have a respect for the value of life or at least a fear of the embarrassment or consequences if they were to commit crime. Interestingly, in the study I mentioned above most people who had a fantasy about murder but never acted on it said the reason was that they were afraid they would get caught. But I have an optimism that many also don’t act on it because they know it’s wrong.

If the values are missing then any object will do to get what one wants. A fist, a knife, a gun. These are all just instruments. While there is evil, an apathy for authority, a breakdown of family and community, disrespect for people’s lives, there is crime. Take away the guns. They’ll be replaced by some other instrument. Instill values, instill (dare I say) a fear of authority, cultivate social skills and you will see a reduction in the use of a gun, or any instrument, to take another’s life. How is this done? Familially, locally, spiritually, culturally. Capitol Hill is an abstraction. Capitol Hill won’t change one’s mind and it won’t prevent the act. It will only define the consequences.

*I believe there’s room for revelation too and I thank God for that

Something needs to happen

Play me that Mountain Music: out of many, one

Teresa, , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

mountain-music

“You’ve got to have smelt a lot of manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.” –Hank Williams Sr.

Country music has become the subject of the quintessential ‘eyeroll’ of the 21st Century. It, as well as the South in general has become the pariah of the intellectual hipster and the urban Progressive. Those that have hung onto a respect or even downright like of country music are thought to be one of the following: either an unintelligent clueless mainstream suburbanite or an unintelligent inbreeding red neck yokel. Either way they have extremely bad taste and are not sophisticated!

They are not as cool as we.

What’s a travesty about all this is that Country music is a deeply American creation, E Pluribus Unum, that has influence from the Calvinist morals of the Puritans, the folk songs and ballads of the emigrating English, Scot and Irish settlers to the Appalachians, the Jazz, Gospel and Blues from the Black community, and Ranchera from the Mexican community. Country music always had history and heritage entrenched in its bones while navigating the rootlessness of the new frontier. It was one of the first genres of music to speak plain about death and suffering, especially around the Civil War, while music at that time was often too syrupy in its sentimentality. Country music embraced the rugged, drawing on the reverent. It was born out of a time of perseverance and fortitude. Life was not cozy and affluent as it is now. You worked hard and you barely got by but by the grace of God. Mourning was a very acute emotion. Death and suffering was a cloak over the rural working South.

My pocketbook is empty

And my heart is filled with pain

I’m a thousand miles away from home

Just waiting for a train.

-Jimmie Rodgers

As I said, Country music is one of the clearest examples of Southern working-class attitudes toward life and death. Evangelical hymns and sermons in the rural South fostered Country Music. The Protestants that founded America brought a deeply devout way of thinking that included Reformed Theology (Calvinism) advocating greater purity of worship and doctrine, as well as personal and group piety. They were archaic survivalists coming from State control in England, Lowland Scotland and Ulster Northern Ireland. They are familiar with being ostracized and believe in the strength of the family as a survivalist method but also as a deeply religious value. Southerners mourn in their songs. They mourn their wife, their lover, and their children, even their dog. In modern times this is heckled and laughed at but unlike the Northeast in the 19th Century who established institutions to avoid suffering and death, the South digested tragedy, mourned suffering, always looking to the afterlife, the eternal. To the struggling Southerner who was deeply poor with low mortality rates and a laborers stoicism death, if God wills it, was often a relief, for the Lord is on the other side. Interestingly, suicide rates in the South were strikingly low. There was an understanding of our status as human beings, fallen, in need of regeneration, of the love for community to shoulder the suffering together and to live with Godly dignity, not suppressing suffering but accepting it.

“Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.”  -Johnny Cash

Blues music, though that term was not coined yet, was born out of the black laborer slave community. The earliest blues-like music was a functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure that was rooted in the African American spirituals. It was later when the southern, black, ex-slave population was acculturated to a considerable degree by and among their Scots-Irish “redneck” neighbors. A common trait among Blues in the Black community and Country in the rural White community is both were generally regarded as poor people music, separate from the upper- and middle-classes. Which speaks to the bourgeoisie attitude, in fact prejudice, that still infects the intellectual and Progressive minds of today.

By the 1920’s broadcast radio made exposure for country music more available and the first country ‘hit’ was in 1923; Fiddlin’ John Carson’s album. By the late 20’s the fiddle and guitar began replacing the traditional banjo. The Appalachian dulcimer, mandolin, and harmonica also turned up on the scene. The Great Depression forced many rural whites into industrial areas where the genre was influenced by modern Blues and Gospel music with the sub-genre Boogie Woogie which was Blues with a dance beat focus.

In the 1930’s Texas-Oklahoma region Country started developing an influence from Swing-Jazz and came to feature the steel guitar. In the 1940’s Honky-Tonk music developed including a steel guitar-fiddle combination with its roots in Western Swing and the Ranchera music of Mexico. Also during the 1940’s Bluegrass emerged out of a nostalgic yearning to bring Country music back to its roots. Nashville was established as Country music’s studio city with the help of Hank Williams. The term “Country and Western music” (later shortened to “Country music”) was adopted by the recording industry in 1949 to replace the derogatory label “Hillbilly music” that was coined in 1925.

By the 50’s and 60’s Country music was a full blown commercial success with the advancement of Rockabilly that some describe as a combination of Country and Rhythm and Blues as others describe it as a blend of Bluegrass and Rock-n-roll of which Elvis Presley is the most notorious example.

The 1970’s saw Outlaw music rise up with music recorded outside the corporate Nashville sound from such artists as Willy Nelson. Southern Rock also established during this period blending Bluegrass and Boogie with Rock producing such artists as Lynyrd Skynyrd.  The gap between Country music and Pop narrowed during this time as the electric guitar took prominence. By the 80’s and 90’s country went pop. Today there is a multi-genre diversity in Country music with inclusion of Pop, Rock, Hip hop, even Techno.

One can say Country music as it is today bares no resemblance to the Americana it evolved from but he would have to be intellectually honest about all genres of music as they stand today. Popular culture and commercial sales changed music. All music. Nothing is what it was but one could argue that the soul of the music still lingers in the unconscious backdrop of the Country song. What music more clearly shows its soul than Country in which you will still catch its artists singing of God, family, community, suffering, death and mourning, reverence and humility, and perseverance? And heck, modernity introduced into the music the luxury of fun, aint nothin’ wrong with that.

Play me that Mountain Music: out of many, one

Got Anxiety?

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Have you ever dreamed of a more peaceful existence? Leaving your life as you know it and moving to a beach island. Selling all your belongings and buying a boat to set sail at sea. Meeting that special someone that completes your life. Travel, beauty, status and love: the four pillars of Western culture upon which our economy is built. However, no matter where you go, there you are. Anxiety and all.

You have good reason to have anxiety. You are a vulnerable physical being, a complicated network of fragile organs all biding their time before eventually letting you down catastrophically at a moment of their own choosing. We have insufficient information upon which to make most major life decisions: we are steering more or less blind. We are saturated with media that convince us we are not satisfied. We live not far from the savage animal community and carry in our bones- into the suburbs- the fear of savagery encroaching on us. We rely for our self-esteem and sense of comfort on the love of people we cannot control and whose needs and hopes will never align seamlessly with our own. The world we live in is strife with wars, threats and instability and our fundamental biology tells us to procreate and bring more children into this.

Anxiety

But is it all futile?

viktor-franklViktor Frankl was a Jewish doctor, psychologist and philosopher. He lived from 1905-1997. He and his sister survived the Nazi concentration camp. His mother, father, brother and wife all died at the camp. He was prisoner 119,104. He was working on a manuscript that was his life’s work before he was arrested. He sewed it into the lining of his coat when he was arrested by Nazis only to lose it during his transfer to Auschwitz. His manuscript was titled The Doctor and the Soul. He watched those in the labor camps perish after they lost all hope in the future. But he kept busy recalling the text of his manuscript and rewriting it on secret bits of paper. It gave him purpose and meaning when his life was deteriorated and wickedly oppressed. The following is his theory on anxiety.

He called his form of therapy logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, which can mean study, word, spirit, God, or meaning.  I find logos to be personally meaningful since my mind immediately thinks of The Word and what more influential of a text is there when it comes to a person’s existential condition? It is the last sense Frankl focuses on, although the other definitions are never far off.  Comparing himself with the other great Viennese psychiatrists, Freud and Adler, he suggested that Freud essentially postulated a will to pleasure as the root of all human motivation, and Adler a will to power.  Logotherapy postulates a will to meaning.

Frankl also uses the Greek word noös, which means mind or spirit.  In traditional psychology we focus on “psychodynamics,” which sees people as trying to reduce psychological tension.  Instead, or in addition, Frankl says we should pay attention to noödynamics, wherein tension is necessary for health when it comes to meaning.  People, maybe even unknowingly, desire the tension involved in striving for some worthy goal! Perhaps one perverse interpretation of this yearning we see in popular culture is the ‘drama queen’, people who seek out drama but for vain purposes. It could be an unconscious desire for tension that if used in the affirmative would be for a higher purpose.

“Being human is being responsible — existentially responsible, responsible for one’s own existence.” –Viktor Frankl

Animals have instincts that guide them thus reducing the burden of ‘choice’. In traditional societies we have replaced instincts with traditions that guide us thus still reducing choice.  Today, we hardly even have that.  Most people attempt to find guidance in conformity and conventionality but it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid facing the fact that we now have the freedom and the responsibility to make our own choices in life, to find our own meaning. And because of this choice we are afflicted with anxiety.

manderlay_ver3I am reminded of Lars Von Trier’s film Manderlay in which there is a fictional town in 1930’s Alabama where slavery still reigns. A progressive young woman comes into town trying to transform it from slavery to free democracy only to ultimately find out that the slaves wish to keep the status quo and persist in following ‘mam’s’ code of conduct manual, which the eldest slave enforces. This mental discussion from the movie always stuck with me. Could it be that the people would rather have an easy totalitarianism than a burdened freedom? So that one doesn’t have to face the anxiety of existential responsibility.

Frankl suggests that one of the most conspicuous signs of anxiety in our society is boredom and because of this boredom we fill our lives with stuff. Pleasures, power, conformity, OCD’s, hatred, anger, etc. There is anticipatory anxiety:  Someone may be so afraid of getting certain anxiety-related symptoms that getting those symptoms becomes inevitable.  The anticipatory anxiety causes the very thing that is feared!  Test anxiety is an obvious example:  If you are afraid of doing poorly on tests, the anxiety will prevent you from doing well on the test, leading you to be afraid of tests, and so on. The converse but similar symptom of anxiety is hyperintention.  This is a matter of trying too hard, which itself prevents you from succeeding at something.  One of the most common examples is insomnia:  Many people, when they can’t sleep, continue to try to fall asleep, using every method in the book.  Of course, trying to sleep itself prevents sleep, so the cycle continues.  A third is hyperreflection. In other words the self fulfilling prophecy. An example would be someone who learns that they should view themselves as a victim thus starts behaving like a victim such as a woman who is sexually abused as a child but nevertheless grows up to be a healthy functioning adult but upon reading literature that tells her people with this experience often have sexual dysfunction as adults she starts suddenly being dysfunctional in that area.

Frankl attributes anxiety to man’s attitude to his surroundings, how he let’s his surroundings affect himself. It is the obsession with oneself that leads to anxiety and in extreme conditions ultimately leads to loss of hope or futility. Could it be a coincidence that anxiety is developing more rapidly in our modern Western culture in which we are told ever so increasingly to ‘look inward’ for meaning, to love yourself before you can love someone else, to admire our own beauty through selfies, to take quizzes that compare us to our Facebook friends, find self worth from the amount of Instagram followers we have, etc? We live in an age of narcissism. ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ really is accurate these days.

In the labor camps Frankl witnessed people die upon losing all hope but he also witnessed people find meaning despite their suffering. That is one thing your captor, oppressor, authority can never take from you: the spark in your soul and the attitude with which you process your experience.

How to find meaning?

Experiential values. This is by experiencing something we value such as great art or natural wonders or showing love to a beloved, beyond just loving them as objects but loving them meaningfully.

Creative values. This is doing a deed. Becoming involved in one’s creative project such as art, writing, invention, music, so on.

Attitudinal values. This is finding meaning through such virtues as compassion, bravery, a good sense of humor and believe it or not; suffering.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing:  the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” –Viktor Frankl

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Ultimately, however, experiential, creative, and attitudinal values are merely surface manifestations of something much more fundamental, which he calls supra-meaning or transcendence.  Suprameaning is the idea that there is, in fact, ultimate meaning in life, meaning that is not dependent on others, on our projects, or even on our dignity.  It is a reference to God and spiritual meaning.

This sets Frankl’s existentialism apart from the existentialism of someone like Jean Paul Sartre.  Sartre and other atheistic existentialists suggest that life is ultimately meaningless, and we must find the courage to face that meaninglessness.  Sartre says we must learn to endure ultimate meaninglessness; Frankl instead says that we need to learn to endure our inability to fully comprehend ultimate meaningfulness, for “Logos is deeper than logic.”

A relief is that meaning is there to be discovered. It doesn’t have to be invented it is already written into the complex and amazing fabric of the universe and we free-willed consciously reflecting persons need only discover it.

Got Anxiety?

The metamorphosis of Shia LaBeouf

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'Nymphomaniac Volume I (long version)' Premiere - 64th Berlinale International Film Festival

“When seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”   -Eric Cantona (French soccer player and actor, following a media frenzy over an assault on a fan) and later repeated by Shia LaBeouf as he walked out of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac press conference

There is an antagonizing duality that comes with celebrity. Being innovative, creative and heroic like the first celebrities, the ancient Greek athletes, and being a mere human being with all its fallibility. There are two curiosities about Shia LaBeouf. Who does he hope to be and who is he? Does he even know himself? Should anyone care? One thing that’s clear… he’s fumbling… groping for something.

Shia was inducted into Hollywood when he was 14 years old in the tv show Even Stevens on the Disney Channel. At 21 he starred in the film Disturbia that is a moderately well done run-of-the-mill teenage thriller and the widely circulated big budget film Transformers. If one is keeping track they’re coming to the conclusion at this point that Shia is not interested in anything more than becoming famous and making lots of money. For years I discounted him as another manufactured star churned out by the Disney machine. Certainly he’s not interested in quality let alone anything avante garde.

He had a seemingly predictable Hollywood upbringing of partying and alcohol consumption. In 2007 he had a DUI arrest and was kicked out of Walgreens for misdemeanor criminal trespassing while heavily intoxicated. In 2011 he had an altercation while drunk at a bar in which he threatened to assault a guy who called him a name and instead he himself got punched in the face. There was another bar fight in Vancouver in 2011 and one more in London in 2014. This all reads very ordinary and very predictable of a well financed 20 something maturing in front of the paparazzi eye.

He was in an Indiana Jones and two more Transformers before it seems that something ignited in his brain.

In 2012 he started to disembark from the Hollywood studio.

He became meta.

He started pursuing more creative endeavors. He released 3 graphic novels, was cast in the cerebral and eclectic band Sigur Ros’ controversial music video about desire and addiction in which he is in the nude. He was cast in a Broadway play in Feb. 2013 but was fired for feuding with Alec Baldwin.

By the end of 2013 his semi-divorce from Hollywood seems to have reached an apex. Two of the graphic novels he wrote were revealed in 2013 to have been plagiarized. Then his short film HowardCantour.com was revealed to have been plagiarized and his apology for plagiarizing was plagiarized. What follows is either a conciliatory attempt at humility, a rebranding for the sake of hubris or a frenetic effort to become the artist he always wanted to be but was typecast out of.

A spiral of what to some seems downward is to Shia the beginning of a meta-modernist art installation.

  • Jan 2014 Shia takes to Twitter and says it’s his outlet for ‘meta-modernist performance art’
  • 2014, Shia walked out of the Berlin Film Festival press conference for the provocateur Director Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac quoting “When seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”   Later at the red carpet showing of Nymphomaniac he showed up wearing a paper bag over his head that read ‘I am not famous anymore’
  • 2014, two days after the red carpet showing Shia performs an art installation called #IAMSORRY in which he sat in a room with a paper bag on his head wearing a tuxedo. Attendees were invited to select an object (symbolic of moments from Shia’s past) and enter the room one at a time to do as they wish. Some of the implements were a Transformers toy, an Indiana Jones whip, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a pair of pliers, a ukulele, a bowl full of hateful tweets directed at LaBeouf, and a copy of Clowes‘s book (that Shia plagiarized) The Death-Ray
  • 2014 Following the art installation Shia had skywriting done that said #startcreating that was the converse of his skywriting a month earlier (in response to Crowe’s cease and desist letter) that said #stopcreating
  • May 2014 he took part in a performance called “meditations for narcissists” in which he and attendees jumped rope for an hour
  • June 2014, Shia is kicked out of a Caberet performance on Broadway for drunken disorderly conduct and arrested. He stood up and screamed out at the actors and was later seen crying outside the venue and had spat at arresting officers
  • In 2014 he gave a lecture on ‘metamodernism’. He and a collaborator define metamodernism as “the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons,” and concluding with a call to “go forth and oscillate!

Check out the manifesto. Does it make sense to you?  http://www.metamodernism.org 

  • 2014 it was revealed that a woman “raped” Shia during his #IAMSORRY art installation

When the old gods withdraw, the empty thrones cry out for a successor, and with good management, or even without management, almost any perishable bag of bones may be hoisted into the vacant seat.   -E.R. Dodds, “The Greeks and the Irrational”

This art installation is sounding eerily familiar to Joaquin Phoenix’s stunt five years earlier in Casey Affleck’s mockumentary I’m Still Here. Is this the new Millennial quarter life crisis for celebrities or is this a rebirth? Are these the artistic ideas of someone shattering boundaries, expanding horizons, and embracing chaos in an effort to reach truth? Or is this someone that has been weaned from a very American, very affluent idea of what ‘soul searching’ is? Is meta soul searching a bunch of nonsense that allows belligerence and excuses immaturity? What does it mean to be both naïve and knowing, ironic and sincere? I have a feeling that his adaptation of the paradox is not the kind Mother Teresa was talking about when she spoke of love and loss. It must be a strange thing to try to be a famous artist yet a human being in the ‘meta-modern’ world of American pop culture.

I, for one, found Shia’s performance art in Sigur Ros’ and Sia’s videos to be a breath of fresh air for an actor I discounted as a clone. I hope he keeps questioning for the sake of truth and doesn’t get lost in the meaningless gibberish that is the pop culture idea of art or, likewise, the pop culture idea of truth. Eventually the journey should lead to something productive, objective and timeless otherwise it’s a lot of time wasted on ones vanity. And God, keep him from his transgressions that are broadcast to the world. Or at the very least grant him privacy in this digital age so that when he reaches out through the landscape of life he may arrive at something eternal.

The metamorphosis of Shia LaBeouf

What Does God Really Want From You?

Teresa, , , , 3 Comments

Matisyahu-rollingstone

Does God want discomfort and suffering in your life? Does God want limitations on your life through such avenues as law, morality, traditions, covenants? Does the story of Abraham show that God changes his mind or that God fulfills his promises?

Matisyahu, the observant Hasidic Jewish reggae singer has abandoned the observances and taken on a quasi-religious, spiritual, customized faith. The article below reads : “Matisyahu’s relationship with Judaism: It’s complicated.” Indeed.

http://www.haaretz.com/life/music-theater/1.646213

Are you unbound when you abandon the doctrine of God or lost?

The subheading of the Haaretz article says: “divested of his beard, his wife and his ultra-Orthodox trappings.” Matisyahu has become unbound. He says, “This stage of my life is about what you would consider the unbinding. Getting out of the religion, getting out of the marriage, the relationships.” He compares it to God bringing the Jews out of the bondage of the Egyptians. It seems he feels he’s going directly to God by abandoning the dictates and customs of the Hebrew bible.

Notice, though, that God told Moses to tell Pharaoh “Let my people go so that they may serve Me.” It wasn’t simply secular freedom that God wanted for his people but rather freedom to serve God. Matisyahu also compares his new unbinding to the story of Abraham binding and offering as sacrifice his son Isaac and then being stopped by an angel. It seems he misses the point. God promised that through Isaac Abraham’s offspring would be named. If it were God’s will that Isaac have died He would have found another way for Isaac to live and have offspring because God fulfills his promises. God wanted to know that Abraham trusted him so when Abraham brought Isaac up the mountain and was willing to sacrifice him while not fulling understanding why but because he trusted God that was all God needed to know and God fulfilled his promise. In Matisyahu’s view God changed his mind for the sake of Isaac’s freedom. This would be the secular view. But God always knew what He would do even if Abraham and Isaac didn’t and the point is He was trusted. So I don’t know if Matisyahu’s unbinding is for religious transcendence. It seems, rather, that it’s for secular pursuits.

In another article he says his new album, produced under his new irreligious image, is “dealing with more real-life issues and less ideology.” By “real-life” it would, again, seem to mean secular pursuits and it’s telling that he considers biblical doctrine to be “ideology”. What’s more real in a religious person’s life than one’s standing in God’s eyes through the observance of God’s will as outlined in the bible?

Some are saying this new stripping of the observances “is some kind of weakness.” Even in the comments section of the Facebook linked article people are saying these are all excuses for selling out to the comforts of fame. I don’t know what’s in Matisyahu’s heart and mind nor do I know how he stands in God’s favor but all of this sparks interest for me into the important question of what does God want from us, how can it be known and is it absolute?

The British short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote in The Elephant’s Child:

I keep six honest serving men

(they taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

It does seem that a lot of what Matisyahu didn’t like about being a practicing Jew is that it came from a place of blind obligation. Conversely now, as he remarks on the law: “I don’t do it because I have to, otherwise I’m sinning. I do it because I love it. I do certain things and other things I don’t do. So it’s not so black-and-white as to whether I’m observant.” But what if his love (for certain observances) is fleeting as it was with his wife? The heart is fickle.

We know who gave the law (God), we know how (the bible) but why? Paul, in the New Testament Romans 9:32 says that the reason Israel stumbled into destruction was not that they didn’t pursue the law, but that they pursued it in the wrong way: from works and not from faith; in the effort of the flesh instead of the power of the Spirit. In other words, moral effort can be a mortal sin.

Galatians Chapter 3 describes why the law was given. Even though the law as it was given is good, the flesh corrupted the law. Because of corrupt flesh the law reveals sin and intensifies sin; and second, the law sees to it that the inheritance will come to and through the promised seed. The purpose of the law was not to make people alive but to hold them in sin until the promise was made in a final sense to the seed of Abraham, with Jesus Christ. The reason the law compounded sin instead of giving life was that the recipients of the law were ruled by the flesh and devoid of the Holy Spirit. Romans 8:7 describes the kind of mind which the law met with when it came: “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed, it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” The law requires proud and independent people to humble themselves and depend on God’s transforming mercy. What a person does (works) will never be enough. Half the observances, all the observances? No matter. It is by grace through faith, the New Testament faith in He who fulfills Abraham’s seed that brings one to God.

Matisyahu is right that the law (the observances) is a trapping that cannot free him but freedom is not found by abandoning the law either. It is promised through He who fulfills the law. Could it be that he is abandoning salvation by works and depending on grace through faith? Could it be that he’s stepping into the New Testament? Or is he stepping into the flesh? Only God knows for sure.

What Does God Really Want From You?

Civil Asset Forfeiture: The encroachment of the State

Teresa, , , , , 1 Comment

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A question that’s always in the back of my mind is will there be a day in America’s future that private property no longer exists? Ultimately, will the state so encroach on our freedoms that we forfeit our inalienable right to free will and become property of the State?

Asset forfeiture has been on my mind since I saw it happen locally and I’ve been doing some research into the matter. Recently there was a case in the news in which a Pennsylvania family lost their $350,000 home to civil forfeiture when the police caught their teenage son selling $40 worth of heroin at a separate location not on their property. For months they fought it, back and forth. They had no knowledge of their son’s activities let alone any participation in illegal activity and yet the police had the authority to come and take their private property. Not until they contacted the Institute for Justice did they finally get their property back. If you find yourself involved with civil forfeiture keep the Institute for Justice in mind!

There was also a neighbor of ours that was forced to evacuate his home while police went in and destroyed his property making it uninhabitable even though they never found any evidence of illegal activity. They had no evidence, they had no charges, they had no conviction and before the passage of SF 874 in Minnesota they didn’t have to. There was also an acquaintance that was followed by the Metro Gang Strike Force of Minnesota, disbanded in 2009 for corruption including counting on seized drug dealer money to fund the force after legislators slimmed down state funding, sloppy record keeping and lax financial controls pointing towards fraud and embezzlement. Ultimately a settlement awarded 96 victims $840,000 and returned some of their property. The outrage spurred lawmakers to pass a law requiring forfeiture reporting. The resulting data was later used by IJ in its “Stacked Deck” report. In turn, that research helped catalyze the passage of SF 874. The acquaintance I know had half a million dollars seized and ended up only getting back $5,000.

asset-forfeiture

Here’s how civil asset forfeiture works. It’s a legal tool that allows law enforcement officials to seize property that they assert has been involved in certain criminal activity. In fact, the owner of the property doesn’t even need to be guilty of a crime: Civil asset forfeiture proceedings charge the property itself with involvement in a crime. This means that police can seize your car, home, money, or valuables without ever having to charge you with a crime. It came into more feverish use with the institution of the ‘war on drugs’. There are many stories of innocent people being stripped of their money and property by law enforcement. Also, if an owner wants to get their property back, they have to prove their property was not the instrument or proceeds of the charged drug crime.  Owners have to prove a negative in civil court. Being acquitted of the drug charge in criminal court does not matter to the forfeiture case in civil court. In other words, your property is guilty until proven innocent even if you’ve been proven innocent in criminal court. It is disconcerting that a person has more legal right and protection in a criminal case than a civil case after all in a criminal case you are innocent until proven guilty and you’re provided with an attorney if you cannot afford one.

In Minnesota, not only was there an appalling lack of due process for civil forfeiture proceedings, law enforcement can keep up to 90 percent of the proceeds from forfeited property. That clearly creates a perverse incentive to police for profit. A report by the Institute for Justice found that forfeiture revenue grew by 75 percent from 2003 to 2010, earning police almost $30 million. In 2012 alone, there were 6,851 property seizures that amounted to $6.7 million according to the state auditor’s office. This growth occurred despite the fact that the crime rate was actually dropping in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Last fall, 2014, Governor Dayton of Minnesota signed into law bill SF 874 that rewrites civil forfeiture law so that now the government can only take property if it obtains a criminal conviction or its equivalent, like if a property owner pleads guilty to a crime or becomes an informant. The bill also shifts the burden of proof onto the government, where it rightfully belongs.

This is good news right? Partially. Federal law can do an end run around good state law. A process called equitable sharing allows local law enforcement officials to team up with federal law enforcement agents to seize property under federal forfeiture law that could not be seized under applicable state forfeiture law. Through equitable sharing, local law enforcement agencies pocket a portion of the proceeds from the seizure and the feds keep the rest. This is a way for local law enforcement to circumvent state law and continue to profit from civil asset forfeitures.

You may think this only happens to guilty people who deserve it, right? After all, this is America and if the police are seizing property it must be for good reason, right? While, for any good society to work we must depend on the police force to maintain justice the police force is not immune to corruption and checks and balances must be in place to monitor their activities. Anywhere there are people there is a temptation for corruption. Civil asset forfeiture profoundly affects the poor since their livelihood desperately depends on the assets that are taken and they can’t afford to be tied up in legal proceedings.

I am personally thankful for the passage of this bill, for the Institute for Justice, and for the whistle blowers that chose not to abet further corruption. I thoroughly stand by the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as the tenet of our justice system especially if the person in question is cooperative with the investigation.

What does this say about encroachment of the State? If you’re a person that believes in freedom, the pursuit of private property, due process, innocence until proof of guilt you should have a HUGE problem with this. Loss of freedom always happens slowly and often under the good intention of social justice and security. Your material property is only the beginning, soon it’s your ability to make choices; your free will.  I am suggesting a renewed interest in checks and balances and a strengthening of our foundational principles. If we forget our inception we’re bound to regress.

The government was once an institute that protected your freedom against the trespassing of other people. More and more it seems that the government is taking your freedoms for ‘your own good’. This is defined as Hard Paternalism (there is also Soft Paternalism which is the passive-aggressive little sister of Hard Paternalism, be wary of both). For example, seat belt and helmet laws negotiated by insurance companies, seizing your earned income for redistribution programs such as welfare, mandatory retirement savings, swim restriction in public waters because there is no life guard on duty, mandatory curfews, etc. Paternalism is objectionable because it violates what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the equal “dignity” of all human beings. Respect for human dignity implies respect for people’s ability to think and choose for themselves. Paternalism, however, imposes choices based on what someone else thinks is good for a person.

People who are interfered with are not treated as equals capable of making their own choices, Kant claims, but are treated as means to someone else’s view of what their choices should be, “like immature children unable to distinguish between what is truly useful or harmful to them.”

John Stuart Mill’s warns in his essay “On Liberty”: “He who lets the world . . . choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” By contrast, the free individual must possess reason and judgment to make his own decisions, “and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.”

When we forfeit our individual freedoms for ‘our own good’, it soon follows that the State and all it’s agencies will spread their authority further seizing your property and your freedoms under an ever expanding definition of what’s for our good. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. Will the citizen, someday, be so small they vanish?

Civil Asset Forfeiture: The encroachment of the State

Suicide: Existentialism and the Absurd

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Rust: “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. A secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody. When in fact, everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand-in-hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

Cohl: “So why wake up in the morning?”

Rust: “I tell myself that I bear witness, but the obvious reason is my programming. I lack the constitution for suicide.”

-True Detectives

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

-Albert Camus

Like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill just to watch it fall down the other side and then begin pushing again what is the point of life and human consciousness if we never find our ultimate purpose? Is life meaningless? If life is meaningless does that imply that life isn’t worth living? Why is our instinct for living stronger than our reason for suicide? Does scientific contingency explain the purpose of life? If God (the programmer) is the purpose of life then why subject us to the program?

The organized yet absurd universe; Is God a tease

By scientific contingency things can be explained according to the agency they’re contingent on.   For example an apple falling from a tree is contingent on gravity, planets are contingent on the propulsion and collection of gases and matter, etc. Everything within time can be explained this way since we know time is forward moving and everything progresses from a previous state all the way back to the beginning. Even if there were one equation that explained the theory of everything we would still be left with the question of why this theory? Because we live ‘in the program’ (Matrix style) we can never know truths outside the program so what is the point of our knowing anything? Why is nature organized in such a harmonious way as to provide us with the intellectual capacity to understand the laws of nature with laws that are intelligently and rationally organized? The laws of nature could be unintelligible, they could be randomly unordered. The human mind could be primitively conscious, like dogs. That could be a more reasonable existence; pushing the rock up the hill, never asking why, valuing nothing outside of time, hoping for nothing outside of time, just mortally being. As Stephen Hawking asked: “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”

We search for meaning but we live in chaos. There are hurricanes, that humans take no part in creating, have no control in stemming, that annihilate entire regions. There is cancer that decimates entire families. Murder can be blamed on human behavior but what about natural disaster? What about all the biological effort that goes into creating a beautiful, complex, and absolutely unique baby only to see them die from SIDS or some other infant mortality condition. How is it even reasonable for people to live until 80 and then die? Why, if you think about it, is that comforting? Death at any age makes the self conscious life absurd if there is no transcendent purpose.  How many quantitative seconds must a life acquire to make it ‘long’ and ‘lived’ and ready for its inevitable death?

Ironically in Genesis we are told by God not to eat of the tree of knowledge yet we are created with the agency of knowing. Is this to teach us a lesson? Of what mortal purpose? Of an immortal purpose, that of the afterlife? Why bother with the physical world, why not place us directly in the afterlife? If God created people not out of necessity but out of an abundance of love, in order to share that love, why bother with the theatrics of this intelligible yet unintelligible cosmos?   Perhaps the only real practice of human free will and self consciousness is suicide, right away. The philosopher Pliny the Elder said “God cannot commit suicide even if he wished to but man can do so anytime he chooses.” God cannot commit suicide because it’s against his nature. God is and can never not be. What if humanity as a collective committed suicide, wielded death as the only force it has control of and thus humanity snuffed out it’s own existence which it is endowed with the power to do?  Not only refusing to digest the knowledge of the cosmos as it is provided impotently but freely removing the human mind from creation especially in the Christian model of the ultimate purpose to be with God.  Would there have been a purpose for our wondering mind on this mortal universe? This would be the only revolt the program could take against and for the programmer. But the programmer traps us yet by denying us ‘the constitution for suicide’, instilling the instinct for living and a natural fear of death. Interestingly, even Jesus Christ with his divine purpose known to him feared his own death and cried out “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Perhaps we’re the carnival set in motion for entertainment. But God is benevolent, right? We are made in the image of God with faculties that search for the transcendent. In the bible we are told we see through a glass darkly in this universe hinting at a higher purpose for our race. Can the program transcend the hardware? Is the code (the laws of nature) the window into this transcendence? Why, then, are we told not to pursue transcendent knowledge, knowledge that only God knows (and thus becoming Gods ourselves)? Is it to see if we really love him? He himself allowed the premise in which we naturally don’t and only by his grace can we love him. If our ultimate purpose is to one day live with God in the Christian model where his kingdom would be on earth as it is in heaven, death conquered and with it time, what does that mean? C.S. Lewis describes this ultimate destination as rather than being with the effects of what ‘goodness’ is or what ‘justice’ is or what ‘beauty’ is we will be with Goodness itself, with Justice itself, with Beauty itself.  As creatures in creation we cannot understand the fullness of being in Goodness.  We only know what goodness is like. If the Christian goal is to be with God how does our mortal universe merge with God’s immortality and how is suicide not the best solution to break free of the likeness and be one with the reality?

Of course, biblically, suicide is wrong because life is sacred and one’s life is the property of God’s and thus to commit suicide is to deride God’s prerogatives but the counterargument as the philosopher David Hume said is that, if such is the case, then to save someone’s life is also to deride God’s prerogatives. Furthermore, prayer derides God’s prerogatives.

So we have God insisting on the laws of physics the way they are and engendering us with free will to ask why. Perhaps the definition of insanity is instead of asking the same question and expecting a different answer asking the same question and expecting any answer.

If life is meaningless then suicide makes sense but I refuse to accept that the universe would be arranged so methodically with meaningful patterns and the human race designed with such mental capacity to decode the program and wonder about the programmer if it’s all for naught. I refuse to accept that life is absurd. I believe in a reason and I believe the reason is benevolent. I think I’ll keep living and anyone that marvels at the patterns of the universe should too. Though, in the program, we’ll never know why; siri has no knowledge, either, of this magnificent universe that exists outside her program or the reason for her existence so too we have no idea what magnificence exists outside our program and the reason for our existence but just because we don’t know doesn’t mean it’s not there and if our program is so beautifully designed to allow for extrospection (that no other creature, even poor siri, has) then what is outside our program must be divine.

Suicide: Existentialism and the Absurd

Death Penalty Response Part II

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How man, in the image of God, meets appropriate justice in the abhorrent case of murder

I gathered this interpretation from the wise John Piper:

The covenant with Noah in Genesis chapter 9: Whoever sheds mans blood, by man his blood should be shed. For in the image of God he made man. The principle of capital punishment is the only fitting response to anybody who murders a human being. Human beings are so incredibly unique and significant that when there is a high handed crime to take another human beings life, the only way to settle accounts and uphold the dignity of life is to take that persons life. The image of God is the key in this covenant. The principle of capital punishment is biblical and right. What about Mercy? To want mercy is good. But that mercy would take form in a social setting where you don’t release criminals on the world. It would take the form of wanting him to be forgiven, praying for him, perhaps even visiting him in prison and offering to forgive him. But that forgiveness does not say, “I think it would be a good idea if he got let go or let up,” if he got a miscarriage of justice in the form of a lesser sentence of life in prison or pardoned. He will be let go in heaven, but here society won’t work. Romans 13 sets it up so that the government carries the sword to reward the good and to punish the evil, because society won’t work if governments don’t carry swords, prisons, fines, death penalties. So yes, it’s right to want mercy for criminals—to forgive them, not to hold grudges against them—and to want them to be punished.

Death Penalty Response Part II

Death Penalty

Teresa, , , 1 Comment

Death Penalty: should we believe in it? Reasons one wouldn’t: belief in rehabilitation, belief that the death penalty doesn’t deter crime, belief in God as the ultimate arbiter, belief in Christian or sentimental mercy/forgiveness, equating justice as revenge.

  1. Jesus Christ is the ultimate case of the death penalty. He became a man and was put to death to justify and acquit our egregious sins. Would it have been justice if our infinite sins against our infinitely good God were punished by Jesus sitting in a prison for life (the mere 60 more years on his 33 years of age an average human would live)? The crime: infinite sins, the punishment life in prison/60 years.   Justice is the death of God’s son (infinite goodness) who became man for our infinite sins. An infinite for an infinite.
  1. C.S. Lewis explains that treating criminals not with a view to punishment, but only with a view to remediation and deterrence is the end of justice and the seedbed of tyranny. It is dehumanization with a gentle face. Here is his quote: “Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case.’” If a criminal’s sentence does not have to accord with what he deserves, it does not have to be just. At that point we are all at the mercy of those who are in power to call anything we do a crime and give it any therapeutic or remedial solution they choose, including gas chambers and medical alterations.
  1. What about Christian mercy? If the concept of what a criminal deserves, and with it the concept of justice, is lost, mercy ceases to be. It is replaced by sentiment and caprice. As Lewis observes, “The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and deserved punishment in the recipient. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being “kind” to people before you have even considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindlinesses which they in fact had a right to refuse, and finally kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed.”
  1. God is the ultimate judge but God has given license to mankind to conduct societies and governments and to carry out justice in this life. He will be the final judge of our souls in the next life but in this life there are governmental bodies and manifestations of justice that we, men, are the arbiters of. Romans 13 sets it up so that the government carries the sword to reward the good and to punish the evil, because society won’t work if governments don’t carry swords, prisons, fines, death penalties.
  1. Revenge is the exact opposite of justice. Revenge is brazen and chaotic. It is emotional instead of retributional. Revenge cares not whether the harm inflicted on someone for the wrong suffered at their hands is equal in scope to the wrong committed. Justice, on the other hand, is methodical and rational. It is the exact degree of punishment a crime deserves regardless of any one persons wanton feelings about it. Justice by definition is the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.

 

  1. Here is a hypothetical for the case that the death penalty does deter crime if it is equally implemented. Say on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays anyone that commits 1st degree murder gets the death penalty and on Sundays, Tuesdays , Thursdays and Saturdays everyone who commits 1st degree murder gets life in prison with the option of appeals and a lesser sentence on good behavior. Which days would 1st degree murders happen?

Remember this story? Anders Breivik’s sentence for killing 77 people at a youth camp in Norway on July 22, 2011 is outrageous. He was deemed sane and sentenced to serve 21 years in prison “in a three-cell suite of rooms equipped with exercise equipment, a television and a laptop.” That’s 100 days of posh prison time for each person he murdered, with a legal release possible at age 53. Life is cheap in Norway. The news agencies explained that such a sentence “is consistent with Norway’s general approach to criminal justice. Like the rest of Europe . . . Norway no longer has the death penalty and considers prison more a means for rehabilitation than retribution.”

They explained that “many Europeans” consider America’s criminal justice system to be “cruelly punitive.”

In fact, the news story explains that, after his 21-year smack-on-the-hand for killing 77 people, Breivik “could be kept there indefinitely by judges adding a succession of five-year extensions.” There it is. The issue is not what he deserves. The issue is not justice. The issue is power in the hands of judges who will decide if he has been “rehabilitated” sufficiently, and if his detainment has served the community to a suitable degree rather than serving his objectively just punishment which would be death.

Do you see the error in this? C. S. Lewis did.

Death Penalty