#i HATE punitive justice on so many levels even if i know that's sometimes what the story calls for

[sunfoxfic]

I finally got to Touya's backstory (I've known for a while the big thing about it but I didn't know the details) and I'm actually going certifiably insane over the thematic implications of the Touya versus Shouto stuff (and we can throw Hawks in there for funsies) but I don't think I can say it succinctly so here's a Discord message I sent.

[rotationalsymmetry]

At the risk of losing all my (probably pretty limited) anarchist cred, I just gotta go off about what the American ideals are.

(There’s a certain amount of “America is the best” that goes around among Americans (especially conservatives) and I don’t really want to come across like that? An analogy: at some point we got this idea that apple pie is this really classically super American thing but it’s not like other places don’t have apple pie; when I say freedom and equality are American values I don’t mean that other places don’t have those values or for that matter that America is especially good at embodying values of equality and freedom. Just that they are values that we nominally aspire to and that they are good values to aspire to. Anyways.)

(Individual) freedom. Rights. Liberties. To say what you want, believe what you want, hang out with who you want to hang out with, and tell the government off when it’s messing up without being punished (at least by the government) for it. And the US is pretty hard core on free speech: there’s not a lot that the government is allowed to censor, including for instance Nazi stuff. Whether that’s the right call there is an open question. (And…in practice people do get in trouble for specifically their political views, it’s just the government has to break its own rules to do that and it doesn’t really have popular buy-in. For instance, when San Francisco Food Not Bombs was facing mass arrests, the police were pretty open about it being because FNB is an anarchist group, but it did make them look bad and they eventually stopped doing it. (Legally it was “not having a permit”, but uh, that wasn’t the actual reason.)

One place the US both fails to live up to that ideal, specifically on the “believe what you want” front, is that Christmas is a national holiday and US Christians and social Christians (people who aren’t Christian but do celebrate secularized versions of Christian holidays and aren’t strongly tied to a tradition with different holidays and practices) tend to be massively in denial about how that privileges Christianity over other religions. For instance, Jewish people tend to have to specifically ask for Yom Kippur off from work or school and aren’t necessarily able to travel to spend Passover with family. Whereas, apart from people who have jobs that have to be done all the time like nurses, Christians generally don’t have a problem with getting Christmas off, not even having to ask, just automatically. Sure, we don’t have an official religion, technically, but in practice there are things the government (not to mention society as a whole) does to make it easier for Christians than non-Christians.

Still, that’s better than where we started. In the decades around American independence, many states switched from having an official Protestant religion that got government funding, while other denominations had to scramble for funding from congregants who were supporting a religion they didn’t belong to with their taxes, to not having that.

Legal protections against unfair convictions and cruel punishments. Now, if you’ve been following along you know the US has a criminal justice system problem. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I strongly recommend reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Also great as an audiobook.) So, we’re not putting this one into practice well, because racism. But in theory, trial by a jury of one’s peers is a good thing, due process is a good thing, not having to testify against yourself is a good thing, legally not being allowed to torture people is a good thing (again, theory vs practice), and innocent until proven guilty if you have to have a punitive justice system is better than not having an “innocent until proven guilty” approach. All this is super corrupted and we fail to live up to this ideal hard and there should be more about giving people a fresh start after they’ve served their time. But, it’s still good stuff, we just need to live it out better.

Speaking of racism, we value equality. In theory. And some things have gotten better over time. Certainly rules about who can vote have gotten a lot more inclusive.

Maybe if we keep believing that we should treat everyone equally hard enough one day we’ll actually get there. Maybe we get there one piece at a time. One teacher who calls on girls as often as boys, one real estate agent who treats the same sex couples the same as the opposite sex couples, one college admissions person who doesn’t mark down the essays that talk about participation in race based school clubs. Maybe it’s always going to be a process.

(Representative) democracy. It’s possible to overplay this, but yeah, it’s a value we got. That decisions should ultimately be in the hands of people collectively. That legislators etc should be accountable to the people.

Federalism: so, there’s a hierarchy where the national government can overrule state and local decisions. But, this is important, it’s a limited hierarchy in that the people higher up the hierarchy don’t pick and can’t replace people farther down the hierarchy. The state governor gets elected by the people. The city mayor gets elected by the people. So do the legislative branches at all levels. If the President of the US hates the guts of the governor of California, too bad, he’s just gotta deal with it. People higher up in government don’t appoint people at a lower level of government.

Plus, see “freedom” above, there’s limitations on what the national government can actually do. (These limitations are somewhat weakened because the national government can regulate interstate trade and that covers a lot these days, but there’s still lines it’s not allowed to cross.)

Similarly the “checks and balances” concept — the President has a lot of power but he’s not a dictator, and he can’t just do anything. Most things require Congress’s approval. And the Supreme Court can rule on what’s constitutional, this is how we got nation-wide legal same sex marriage and nation-wide abortion protection. Far from a perfect system and one of the big holes is how only Congress can declare war so we just haven’t “declared war” since WWII. So clearly the US hasn’t been in a war since then. Anyways.

Anyways this is why I’m not actually that thrilled about the “but Biden can just executive order everything” approach. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. If you don’t want the President to have dictatorial power, you have to accept limitations on the President’s power even when he’s Team Blue. And the more power the president has, the more wild swings we see on things like immigration policy which is not actually a good thing.

We initially had a “no political parties” concept. That worked out abysmally. Probably if we’d actually allowed for political parties we’d have rules about them that actually made sense and might limit the amount of fuckery that goes on.

Now some ideals that I’m less happy about. These are things I don’t endorse or approve of, but I’m mentioning them because they are common American values. Meritocracy: the idea that sure there’s wealth and power inequality but that’s ok as long as the people with more earned it. Fuck that.

(Well, in theory it’s got some advantages over “powerful people pass that power on to their kids no matter how incompetent,” except in practice meritocracy is often a cover for just that.) (Anyways, in theory we like people to succeed based on merit, which is better than a belief system that some types of people are naturally superior to and more capable than other types of people. So there’s worse ideals. There’s better ones too.)

Capitalism.

Hard work. Grind culture baby. Work all the time. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Puritan bullshit. You don’t need contraception. Just keep your legs closed. If we don’t teach kids about sex they won’t have sex. Also, don’t do drugs. Also, religious people are better than atheists. (Also, specifically Christians are better than everyone else. Real Christians. Not like those (other denomination).)

Melting pot/assimilation: sometime multiculturalism gets into the value stew and I’m all for respecting multiple cultures and recognizing that America is made up of people from a wide variety of different backgrounds, not just people from England/northern and western Europe/Europe. And that we do in fact get our values from a wide variety of cultures (including Native American cultures) and not just Greco-Roman Whatever. (Like seriously: US democracy is as much a child of the Iroquois Confederacy as Athens.) Other times the value is “you’re here now, forget where you’re from and blend in.” And part of that is about not judging people by where they’re from and that’s good! But it shouldn’t be tied to “ew, you’re having that for lunch?”

Manifest Destiny. Yeah. Fuck that.

I’m probably leaving stuff out. Whatever. I’m tired. I’m just going to post. If I want to clean it up later I can make a new post.

[bishopkenneth]

A God Like Old Ben Weaver

“But nothing can be good in Him, Which evil is in me.” - John Greenleaf Whittier, The Eternal Goodness, 1865.

There was an aged man in town who reminded everyone of old Ben Weaver from the Andy Griffith Show. He always kept score and never let a slight against him slide. He was a stickler for doing things right, and the smallest deviation from doing things his way, the right way, was duly noted and registered in his little book that he might well have titled, The Misdeeds of Others. If anyone ever got on his wrong side - which was pretty easy to do - it wasn’t good enough to go have a talk with him, honestly tell him you were sorry, and ask for his forgiveness. He always demanded recompense, and a little extra in the payback. Did your child break his window with a baseball? Apologies be damned, you had to fix the window, which I suppose is understandable, but the way he figured, that wasn’t enough. I mean, the window was perfectly fine before your kid played Nolan Ryan with it and his life was disrupted with all the bother and the mess and the broken glass and the temporary patch job and the loss of peace of mind and house. Your boy saying he was sorry wasn’t enough. Your saying you were also sorry wasn’t enough. Your fixing the broken window wasn’t enough. That didn’t “even things up.” You still owed him because of the, what is it the lawsuits call it - “punitive damages.” And, I mean, he wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t much loved by his neighbors either.

Have you ever known someone like old Ben Weaver? Did you like them? Did you think they embodied goodness? Would you consider them Christlike? Honestly, would you even want to be around them?

I’m assuming by now you know where I’m taking this - why are these qualities considered less than good in old Ben, but perfectly fine and dandy when we speak of the person of God? Why are the qualities we find reprehensible in fellow humans somehow considered “good,” “just,” and “right” when applied to God? God keeps track of our misdoings - but that’s OK, he’s God. God demands payment for our wrongdoings - but that’s OK, he’s God. God has to be “satisfied,” not only with recompense, but even with punitive damages - but that’s OK, he’s God.

So many times when I bring up this incongruity, people respond with, “Well, the Bible says God’s ways are not our ways.” What does that even mean? Better yet, “What even does that mean?” We can’t throw that line out as some kind of defense of God every time we run across him being attributed qualities which are reprehensible in every other living thing. The truth of the matter is that when God says that of himself (in Isaiah 55.8 and surrounding verses), he is specifically referring to his extraordinary level of mercy, not his “just demands,” or his wrath.

In point of fact, in Amos 1.11, God condemns Edom for these very faults. Edom “cast off all pity,” his “anger tore perpetually,” and he, “kept his wrath forever.”

For the love of God, let’s all please stop saying that something is good when it is in God, but terrible when it is in creatures created in his image. God is not like the sins he condemns. Let me say that again in bold, God is not like the sins he condemns.

“But,” folk respond to me sometimes, “God is so majestic that even a slight sin against him demands justice. He is a great king, and a crime against a king is greater than a crime against a commoner.” Seriously, I’ve been told this, because this is kind of a classic argument from medieval days that has hung around till now. But I say hogwash. If a king has an orchard with 10,000 apples and I steal one, that isn’t a greater crime than me stealing an apple from my neighbor who has only one apple. In fact, the deed done against my neighbor is worse (remember Nathan’s parable to King David). God’s greater majesty doesn’t mean he is more exacting in dealing with offenses. It means precisely the opposite: “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, but not into the hands of men; for as His majesty is, so also His mercy.” (Sirach 2.18)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, oftentimes when I teach or write about God’s love, his mercy, his forgiveness, I am met with, “Yes, but…” and what follows is a demand that I balance it out with focusing on his justice, and wrath, and righteous punishment. Laying aside for a moment (actually for this whole article) that I believe good, solid, orthodox theology does deal with these issues without abrogating the mercy and love of God, what I find intriguing is that these very same folk, when they hear a sermon or read an article about God’s just demands, his wrath, his punishments, never bring up the, “Yes, but” remark then!

It is almost as if something within our spiritual framework can’t handle the idea of a God who really and truly forgives without demanding payment; that there is something in our spiritual condition that can’t abide a God who acts toward others the way he teaches us to act toward others. I suspect that maybe way down at the bottom of our hearts the reason we don’t want to see God in this light is because it would demand that we who follow him also really and truly live the same way. That “something” in our spiritual framework, that certain je ne sais quoi as the French say with such flair, is what St. Paul would call, “the flesh,” and it isn’t from God, and it isn’t like God.

John Greenleaf Whittier, whom I quoted at the beginning of this article, was a 19th century American poet, and a devout Quaker. When you read the whole of his poem, The Eternal Goodness, you discover that it is a conversation between Whittier and a friend who keeps bringing up the, “Yes, but.”

I walk with bare, hushed feet the ground Ye tread with boldness shod; I dare not fix with mete and bound The love and power of God.

Ye praise His justice; even such His pitying love I deem: Ye seek a king; I fain would touch The robe that hath no seam.

Ye see the curse which overbroods A world of pain and loss; I hear our Lord's beatitudes And prayer upon the cross.

I have a dear pastor friend who was discussing theology and the Bible with me one day, and jokingly said, “I’m going to go home and look it up in Greek, and make it say what I want it to say!” We both laughed, because he wasn’t serious, but he was onto something. Folk can make the Bible say whatever they want it to say. They can find verses here and connect them with verses there, and paint a very Ben Weaver portrait of God. I would suggest, instead, that we look at Jesus. “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” he told Philip (John 14.9). The Old Testament saw God, but only in shadows (Colossians 2.17), “but the substance is of Christ.” Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets - they saw God, “in many parts and in many ways…,” the writer of Hebrews tells us (1.1), “in bits and pieces” (Phillips), BUT, “…but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (1.2). If you really want to know what God is like, he is like Jesus.

I really wrote this whole long article to make a single point, which I guess I could have just come right out and said and saved everyone a lot of time and trouble: enough of this seeing something as good in God, but as evil in others. If it isn’t good in old Ben Weaver, it isn’t good in the Almighty either.

Not mine to look where cherubim And seraphs may not see, But nothing can be good in Him Which evil is in me.

The wrong that pains my soul below I dare not throne above, I know not of his hate - I know His goodness and His love.