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My wife and I had a lively debate about the previous essay regarding the criminal mind. She has always felt that my approach to the issue is much too harsh. While I admit that in life there is rarely any kind of incident where the facts are all black and white, I still bristle at the endless permutations of an event spun by lawyers who are merely trying to win 'the game.'
During our conversation at our favorite burger place, she pointed out some questionable behavior by police officers (documented by FBI investigation, I'm told) during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. We tossed that subject back and forth for a bit, and it did make me realize that there are situations where the usual measurements of virtue are 'adjusted' by an unfortunate change in rules. Simply stated, due to the intrinsically selfish nature of human beings, it is often the case that when a segment of society breaks down during a time of emergency, many previously 'law abiding' citizens seize the opportunity to act out. Looting is one of the more common behaviors witnessed. However, according to the Frontline program my wife had watched, many of the rumors regarding citizens assaulting, raping or killing during the Katrina aftermath were merely that only: rumors. These dark suppositions were spoken by people on the street, picked up by media, and then reacted to by local government. So where does that leave someone who would like some sort of consistent way to mentally deal with criminal behavior? When one is being forthright and exercising the best intentions, it becomes difficult to obtain accurate answers, one hundred percent of the time. The truth of the matter is that despite legal arguments and pleas of innocence, the genuine facts of any incident (that we aren't personally involved in) are rarely known with certainty. I would take this moment to suggest that without an absolute arbiter of justice (God), human beings must resign themselves to lives of good fortune or bad fortune alone, as that becomes the only form of moral resolution available. Without God, there's no point in shaking a fist or crying out that something is unfair. I think when people view God as either Invisible Santa or Cosmic Bully, they miss the mark in both cases. God would be neither, in the case of meting out true justice. Many of us tend to presume that only the individual has any true idea of what he or she deserves; unfortunately, too many of us suffer from the occasional or permanent delusion that the universally understood, yet unwritten (or written, depending on your beliefs), rules of acceptable behavior don't apply to us personally. We're not even the best judges of our own behavior, much less anyone else's. If ever there was an argument for the existence of God, out of pure necessity, that would be a significant one. The alternative, being merely a random string of events of apparently good fortune and suffering, is enough to drive a reasonable person insane if examined too closely. Without some form of ultimate justice, all the most humane accomplishments and evil deeds in history are both members of the same ill-fated group, consigned to be lost forever in the black hole of forgotten memories, reducing life itself to nothing more than a meaningless collection of pointless interactions. Just the fact that almost all human beings instinctively recognize the difference between good and evil should be enough evidence that there is a difference, and that hopefully there is a reason to choose good over evil in one's own life. I know some people insist that human beings need nothing more than their own moral compasses to attain virtue for all of humanity, but the atrocious historical record of humanity's attempts at justice is a pathetic display of navigation, as far as I can tell. |