I mean, forget about the obvious hypocrisy that this guy "Lolly" Jackson (South Africa) was caught speeding in his car supposedly on the "way to church." That's not even the irony, the hypocrisy that I'm going to point out.
No, his strip empire manager has asked "for privacy" during their time of mourning.
Privacy for a STRIP empire manager? That's rich. Strip is the opposite of privacy, no? He had controversial billboards, no? His employees live off of girls' lack of privacy, no?
So I think they ought to publish photos of his bullet ridden body. He'd approve, no?
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Money & power, crime and sin
This set of thoughts, which I hope everyone finds helpful, is more about human nature and God's relationship with humans, than a classic Bible study or commentary type of blogging.
Here's the problem. The Bible states that money is the root of all evil. First you need to understand there are two types of over fondness of money, and hence it's misuse. The first problem is to love money more than anything else, including believing in, fearing and obeying God. Thus many people love money for itself above all other relationships, both their human relationships and their relationship with God. The second problem is to love money for the power that it gives you over other people, or over elements of God's creation. For example, some people do not crave money and its luxuries, as do the first category of people, but they crave money because it buys power and control over others. So this is why St Paul and others trace just about every human evil back to its roots of money.
There is a third problem, whereby decent ordinary people do not love money, or crave its power, but will do evil things because they feel boxed into doing so in order to survive. This is a third category which is involuntary slavery to money or, rather, the people who control and dispense the money. People who dole out money to those who need it in return for making the people do unethical things are the second category of people (the money as power lovers) while those who accept the money out of either genuine or perceived need are this third category, those who are enslaved to money and its power.
Understanding that, you must recognize that there are three inevitabilities that each person with this unhealthy relationship (whether category 1, 2 or e) with money participate in. One is crime. Two is sin. Three is both crime and sin.
By the way, it is tempting to believe that all crime is also a sin. While that is usually true, I need to teach you all thoughtfulness, in order to see the shades of nuances correctly. It is not a sin, for example, to disobey a law or authority (and thus be branded a criminal) if that law or authority is not righteous toward God or fellow human beings. So one can be, like the early Christians, a "criminal" who breaks a "law" or "authority" when one refuses to worship idols. That, then, is a crime that is not a sin and, actually, in this example, a virtue.
The problem is that many people rationalize love of money as being kind of a "Robin Hood," and thus not criminal or sinful. They are wrong because the premise (love of money or its power) is not in service of God because one cannot use a human tool (money) to serve God, who is above and beyond all those things. God wants your attention and obedience; not your money, either to him or in his supposed "service." There is no way that a person can love money and then make rational decisions about "how God would 'want' the money spent." One has to be a good Christian, Jew or Muslim first, with a solid untarnished relationship with God, before one can even make baby steps in deciding "how Jesus" or "how God" would "want" money spent in his service. Remember, the Apostles observed first hand how Jesus taught them these things, yet one still fell, in part due to money, Judas Iscariot. If Judas Iscariot was troubled in deciding "how God would want the money spent," what makes any human alive think he or she is well equipped to know better? Especially a human who is far from being perfected in their relationship with God and God alone? Love of money and power (including the very seductive power to be a "do gooder") is by definition a BARRIER to understand God.
Now, here is something you need to understand about me personally. I have no interest in being a "crime buster," I never have and I never will. Part of my calling and my ministry is to tell everyone the same thing, which is the reality of God's word as it is in the Torah, in the Bible, and in the Qur'an. In other words, there is only one God, and His word is constant, the only truth, and irrefutable. So if I met the worst criminals in the world, I have no concern about their crimes or their sins. I have concern that they do not understand the consequences of those crimes and sins, the consequences that will be rendered by God, and not by human beings. I would sit down face to face with even the worst criminals and say, "Friend, you need more information before you continue, and that information is that God is real, judgment is real, and that hell is real and that, further, unlike jokes and cartoons, hell is un-endurable, and no one there is 'handling' it." I would not be interested in attempting to persuade them away from their crime or sin. I simply deliver God's truth and leave it up to them.
I hope that you have found this helpful.
Here's the problem. The Bible states that money is the root of all evil. First you need to understand there are two types of over fondness of money, and hence it's misuse. The first problem is to love money more than anything else, including believing in, fearing and obeying God. Thus many people love money for itself above all other relationships, both their human relationships and their relationship with God. The second problem is to love money for the power that it gives you over other people, or over elements of God's creation. For example, some people do not crave money and its luxuries, as do the first category of people, but they crave money because it buys power and control over others. So this is why St Paul and others trace just about every human evil back to its roots of money.
There is a third problem, whereby decent ordinary people do not love money, or crave its power, but will do evil things because they feel boxed into doing so in order to survive. This is a third category which is involuntary slavery to money or, rather, the people who control and dispense the money. People who dole out money to those who need it in return for making the people do unethical things are the second category of people (the money as power lovers) while those who accept the money out of either genuine or perceived need are this third category, those who are enslaved to money and its power.
Understanding that, you must recognize that there are three inevitabilities that each person with this unhealthy relationship (whether category 1, 2 or e) with money participate in. One is crime. Two is sin. Three is both crime and sin.
By the way, it is tempting to believe that all crime is also a sin. While that is usually true, I need to teach you all thoughtfulness, in order to see the shades of nuances correctly. It is not a sin, for example, to disobey a law or authority (and thus be branded a criminal) if that law or authority is not righteous toward God or fellow human beings. So one can be, like the early Christians, a "criminal" who breaks a "law" or "authority" when one refuses to worship idols. That, then, is a crime that is not a sin and, actually, in this example, a virtue.
The problem is that many people rationalize love of money as being kind of a "Robin Hood," and thus not criminal or sinful. They are wrong because the premise (love of money or its power) is not in service of God because one cannot use a human tool (money) to serve God, who is above and beyond all those things. God wants your attention and obedience; not your money, either to him or in his supposed "service." There is no way that a person can love money and then make rational decisions about "how God would 'want' the money spent." One has to be a good Christian, Jew or Muslim first, with a solid untarnished relationship with God, before one can even make baby steps in deciding "how Jesus" or "how God" would "want" money spent in his service. Remember, the Apostles observed first hand how Jesus taught them these things, yet one still fell, in part due to money, Judas Iscariot. If Judas Iscariot was troubled in deciding "how God would want the money spent," what makes any human alive think he or she is well equipped to know better? Especially a human who is far from being perfected in their relationship with God and God alone? Love of money and power (including the very seductive power to be a "do gooder") is by definition a BARRIER to understand God.
Now, here is something you need to understand about me personally. I have no interest in being a "crime buster," I never have and I never will. Part of my calling and my ministry is to tell everyone the same thing, which is the reality of God's word as it is in the Torah, in the Bible, and in the Qur'an. In other words, there is only one God, and His word is constant, the only truth, and irrefutable. So if I met the worst criminals in the world, I have no concern about their crimes or their sins. I have concern that they do not understand the consequences of those crimes and sins, the consequences that will be rendered by God, and not by human beings. I would sit down face to face with even the worst criminals and say, "Friend, you need more information before you continue, and that information is that God is real, judgment is real, and that hell is real and that, further, unlike jokes and cartoons, hell is un-endurable, and no one there is 'handling' it." I would not be interested in attempting to persuade them away from their crime or sin. I simply deliver God's truth and leave it up to them.
I hope that you have found this helpful.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Understanding God: how God "thinks"
I am going to give you an analogy and a case study that will help you to understand "how" God "thinks" (by that I mean his perspective on human actions). My purpose is not to help you to try to understand what cannot actually be understood by humans (or even by angels, who while they share God's vision they cannot comprehend how its perfection originates in God, which is why they constantly praise God in heaven). Rather, I am going to help you to look at a sad and unpleasant earthly issue and be better able to make just, righteous and virtuous choices and thus form your own opinions accordingly. I've thought of a few analogy and case studies so here is the first one.
As you know, many people who oppose abortion understand that even certain forms of birth control have shades of abortion, since they destroy the created embryo by not allowing it to implant, etc. While the Catholic Church and others of their belief oppose all forms of terminating preborn life, they recognize that there is a difference between contraception (preventing the embryo from even forming in the first place) and abortion (destroying or hindering the growth of an actual embryo). Thus the Catholic Church opposes both but for different reasons, though both rest on the reverence and valuing of all human life. Contraception is opposed because there is a Biblical prohibition of "spilling one's seed on the ground," which means that all sex acts should occur in a marital situation that is open to the possibility of a pregnancy occurring. So contraception is opposed because it appears that God has instructed that the raw material of pregnancy should not be discarded, wasted or hindered from combining into a pregnancy. Abortion is opposed because it is viewed as not only being devaluing of life and irreverential toward God's commission to be fruitful and multiple, but because it also violates the Commandment against killing. So that is the medical and spiritual background against which this case study takes place.
One way people promote both birth control and abortion is to accuse those who oppose either or both of those practices of being "insensitive" and "cruel" in certain situations. The usual situation is whereby a victim of rape seeks an abortion. Now, the specific case study I want to give to you is the situation regarding why some people oppose giving "morning after" so called "emergency contraception" pills to a rape victim. In other words, working in slightly different ways, these pills create an environment hostile toward a pregnancy either occurring (if it has not yet happened) or the embryo if it is in place being able to attach and grow. Many people, including those of good will and emotional thoughtfulness, wonder how people can be mean as to "condemn" a rape victim to a possible pregnancy.
Before I move to the analogy, where I explain God's way of thinking in the matter, let me remind you that I am not an absolutist, as I have blogged before. I believe that a small child who is raped and pregnant and who is seeking an abortion for the good reasons of her extreme youth and her fragile health, should receive one, and the sin of abortion thus rests upon whoever allowed the rape to occur. I remind you that I blogged about the most recent case of this happening so that you are not distracted in reading my analogy by the thought that I am insensitive and inflexible, for I am not, obviously.
So let's go back to the case study, which is a teenage or adult woman (in other words, not a child as I outlined above) is raped and seeks immediate "after the rape" "emergency contraception," which is medicine that either aborts the newly formed embryo or prevents the sperm and egg from fertilizing, if they had not yet. So I am speaking of someone who could bear a child with the normal risks of pregnancy, but not the additional risk and trauma of a little child being raped.
Here is the analogy that helps shed some light on how God views this dilemma. Imagine there is a poor and primitive village of indigenous people in a remote area, where they barely eke out a living to support themselves, but are otherwise content. One day a man goes insane and kills a married couple, leaving their small child alive, but now with no one to provide for her. How would you feel if the village decided to kill the small child, because they could not support her in the place of her parents and, and this is the important point, the fact that she is now unsupported is the result of a crime.
So think this through. These well meaning villagers have now lost two pairs of hands and legs that used to raise food, build dwellings, haul water, etc due to the crime of murder, and now with that loss of sustenance providing married couple, the village is stuck with a burden, the little girl, that did not exist before, and all because of a crime.
I'll bet many of you have to haul yourself back from the slippery slope of "understanding" that the "poor indigenous" people just "might have to" make a "tough decision" and being "unable to support the little girl" "through no fault of their own" and "because of someone else's crime," they just "can't support the little girl due to this crime" and thus (how long can we delay saying it?)... they kill her, either outright or by allowing her to starve or perish due to wild beasts in the forest, or from exposure to the cold.
No, God would not "understand" that. God would think that the people who do have enough to eat and shelter don't deserve to have even the little they do have if they cannot raise, support and comfort the little girl whose parents, those two able bodied workers, were murdered. Odds are that God would hardly bless the future of the village who killed the child because "they could not support her." Indeed, these villagers would all have to answer to him when they receive on their inevitable death personal judgment.
Now that you understand "how God thinks" in the analogy, now look back to the case study. In both situations you have a helpless child due to a crime (in the case study, due to rape, in the analogy, due to the murder of the parents). God does not want to hear lame, selfish and craven excuses from a poor village who murders due to poverty, so how much less does God want to hear such excuses from a society that has health care, hospitals, welfare, parents and grandparents with salaries, and the potential for adoption?
It is a hard message to understand how God thinks because his thought is entirely based on love and justice. No human can ever live up to that, but they sure should not provoke the obvious because of greed and selfishness, or, and this is understandable, where shattered emotions and self pity due to the rape can lead, due to the weakness of human nature, of blaming the child for "ruining" their "plans." "My life has been ruined, I've been raped and if I have this child I have to pay money and lose a year of college before getting my high paid job and giving the baby away in adoption." Put in God's point of view, while he understands the broken, selfish weakness of humanity (after all, Eve had everything and she still wanted more in the Garden of Eden), it is hardly as noble and kind hearted as humans think they are being when they urge a rape victim to consider "emergency contraception" and/or abortion.
Back to the analogy. Maybe those lazy ass villagers ought to work a little harder to grow a few more crops, rather than just the bit they have, in order to not murder the child. Maybe their doing so would result in them discovering a vein of gold in a stream that they had not noticed before. Sometimes even those in extreme economic situations through genuine kindness can exert themselves even more to support a child, rather than say "We'd like to but we can't."
God is the ultimate democrat, because every life is equally precious in its creation and its potential in his eyes. Many people alive today exist because somewhere in their family tree someone did not abort a child due to rape in warfare or other circumstances.
I hope that this case study and the accompanying analogy has helped you understand one aspect-a very important one-of God's "thoughts." More so I hope this helps you to not have knee jerk reaction to even painful events when developing your own stance, attitudes, thoughts, feelings and ultimately policies and decisions, where you react to the obvious sympathy and empathy without considering all the routes that genuine mercy, virtue and righteous do take place.
As you know, many people who oppose abortion understand that even certain forms of birth control have shades of abortion, since they destroy the created embryo by not allowing it to implant, etc. While the Catholic Church and others of their belief oppose all forms of terminating preborn life, they recognize that there is a difference between contraception (preventing the embryo from even forming in the first place) and abortion (destroying or hindering the growth of an actual embryo). Thus the Catholic Church opposes both but for different reasons, though both rest on the reverence and valuing of all human life. Contraception is opposed because there is a Biblical prohibition of "spilling one's seed on the ground," which means that all sex acts should occur in a marital situation that is open to the possibility of a pregnancy occurring. So contraception is opposed because it appears that God has instructed that the raw material of pregnancy should not be discarded, wasted or hindered from combining into a pregnancy. Abortion is opposed because it is viewed as not only being devaluing of life and irreverential toward God's commission to be fruitful and multiple, but because it also violates the Commandment against killing. So that is the medical and spiritual background against which this case study takes place.
One way people promote both birth control and abortion is to accuse those who oppose either or both of those practices of being "insensitive" and "cruel" in certain situations. The usual situation is whereby a victim of rape seeks an abortion. Now, the specific case study I want to give to you is the situation regarding why some people oppose giving "morning after" so called "emergency contraception" pills to a rape victim. In other words, working in slightly different ways, these pills create an environment hostile toward a pregnancy either occurring (if it has not yet happened) or the embryo if it is in place being able to attach and grow. Many people, including those of good will and emotional thoughtfulness, wonder how people can be mean as to "condemn" a rape victim to a possible pregnancy.
Before I move to the analogy, where I explain God's way of thinking in the matter, let me remind you that I am not an absolutist, as I have blogged before. I believe that a small child who is raped and pregnant and who is seeking an abortion for the good reasons of her extreme youth and her fragile health, should receive one, and the sin of abortion thus rests upon whoever allowed the rape to occur. I remind you that I blogged about the most recent case of this happening so that you are not distracted in reading my analogy by the thought that I am insensitive and inflexible, for I am not, obviously.
So let's go back to the case study, which is a teenage or adult woman (in other words, not a child as I outlined above) is raped and seeks immediate "after the rape" "emergency contraception," which is medicine that either aborts the newly formed embryo or prevents the sperm and egg from fertilizing, if they had not yet. So I am speaking of someone who could bear a child with the normal risks of pregnancy, but not the additional risk and trauma of a little child being raped.
Here is the analogy that helps shed some light on how God views this dilemma. Imagine there is a poor and primitive village of indigenous people in a remote area, where they barely eke out a living to support themselves, but are otherwise content. One day a man goes insane and kills a married couple, leaving their small child alive, but now with no one to provide for her. How would you feel if the village decided to kill the small child, because they could not support her in the place of her parents and, and this is the important point, the fact that she is now unsupported is the result of a crime.
So think this through. These well meaning villagers have now lost two pairs of hands and legs that used to raise food, build dwellings, haul water, etc due to the crime of murder, and now with that loss of sustenance providing married couple, the village is stuck with a burden, the little girl, that did not exist before, and all because of a crime.
I'll bet many of you have to haul yourself back from the slippery slope of "understanding" that the "poor indigenous" people just "might have to" make a "tough decision" and being "unable to support the little girl" "through no fault of their own" and "because of someone else's crime," they just "can't support the little girl due to this crime" and thus (how long can we delay saying it?)... they kill her, either outright or by allowing her to starve or perish due to wild beasts in the forest, or from exposure to the cold.
No, God would not "understand" that. God would think that the people who do have enough to eat and shelter don't deserve to have even the little they do have if they cannot raise, support and comfort the little girl whose parents, those two able bodied workers, were murdered. Odds are that God would hardly bless the future of the village who killed the child because "they could not support her." Indeed, these villagers would all have to answer to him when they receive on their inevitable death personal judgment.
Now that you understand "how God thinks" in the analogy, now look back to the case study. In both situations you have a helpless child due to a crime (in the case study, due to rape, in the analogy, due to the murder of the parents). God does not want to hear lame, selfish and craven excuses from a poor village who murders due to poverty, so how much less does God want to hear such excuses from a society that has health care, hospitals, welfare, parents and grandparents with salaries, and the potential for adoption?
It is a hard message to understand how God thinks because his thought is entirely based on love and justice. No human can ever live up to that, but they sure should not provoke the obvious because of greed and selfishness, or, and this is understandable, where shattered emotions and self pity due to the rape can lead, due to the weakness of human nature, of blaming the child for "ruining" their "plans." "My life has been ruined, I've been raped and if I have this child I have to pay money and lose a year of college before getting my high paid job and giving the baby away in adoption." Put in God's point of view, while he understands the broken, selfish weakness of humanity (after all, Eve had everything and she still wanted more in the Garden of Eden), it is hardly as noble and kind hearted as humans think they are being when they urge a rape victim to consider "emergency contraception" and/or abortion.
Back to the analogy. Maybe those lazy ass villagers ought to work a little harder to grow a few more crops, rather than just the bit they have, in order to not murder the child. Maybe their doing so would result in them discovering a vein of gold in a stream that they had not noticed before. Sometimes even those in extreme economic situations through genuine kindness can exert themselves even more to support a child, rather than say "We'd like to but we can't."
God is the ultimate democrat, because every life is equally precious in its creation and its potential in his eyes. Many people alive today exist because somewhere in their family tree someone did not abort a child due to rape in warfare or other circumstances.
I hope that this case study and the accompanying analogy has helped you understand one aspect-a very important one-of God's "thoughts." More so I hope this helps you to not have knee jerk reaction to even painful events when developing your own stance, attitudes, thoughts, feelings and ultimately policies and decisions, where you react to the obvious sympathy and empathy without considering all the routes that genuine mercy, virtue and righteous do take place.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Simple logic about God & human scandal/sin
I'm not sure why everyone misses the point so much these days. I guess it is the increasingly egocentric (and even ego maniacal) focus of even the average person these days. So here is a simple observation to keep in mind.
The more that crime, scandal, sin and bad behavior are exposed in each and every religious organization:
the more it simply proves that humans are broken and imperfect individuals who need awareness and belief in God more than ever.
Have you noticed the lack of logic so many have? Whenever there is a scandal in a church, mosque, synagogue or any other place of faith, the more people say "Ah ha, this is why I question that there is a God."
Yet when the same scandals appear in secular settings (home, places of business) they are called "crimes" or "unethical behavior." Hmm.
So a parent who uses their child in porn, for example, is "sick," "unethical" and "a criminal," while if a religious community member does it, it's somehow "justification" to ''doubt God."
Um, news flash. People have been weak, broken and corrupt since the Garden of Eden. Duh. All humans are unworthy by nature. However, being created in the image of God they have the opportunity to find God and become, again, his child. Whether a person sins/commits crime/is unethical within a religious community or outside a religious community, all it demonstrates is how very far humans remain from God. People need to recognize God and allow him to guide and lead one's life, not jump on falls by religious people or institutions (which will always occur and I promise you, even if you replaced flawed humans with perfect robots, robots will break down and run amok too).
So yes, investigate scandals and hold the faithful accountable for their hypocrisy, but beware, because as you do so, you are excusing the same behavior in those with little or no faith. And you are missing the entire point, which is made clear in the Gospel, which is that humans need to be CONSTANTLY REPENTING AND SEEKING FORGIVENESS OF THEIR ONGOING AND CONTINUAL SINS UNTIL THE MOMENT OF EACH PERSON'S DEATH.
The only perfect person lived two thousand years ago. Everyone else needs continual grace and forgiveness every moment of their life, believer or not, in secular setting or religious.
The more that crime, scandal, sin and bad behavior are exposed in each and every religious organization:
the more it simply proves that humans are broken and imperfect individuals who need awareness and belief in God more than ever.
Have you noticed the lack of logic so many have? Whenever there is a scandal in a church, mosque, synagogue or any other place of faith, the more people say "Ah ha, this is why I question that there is a God."
Yet when the same scandals appear in secular settings (home, places of business) they are called "crimes" or "unethical behavior." Hmm.
So a parent who uses their child in porn, for example, is "sick," "unethical" and "a criminal," while if a religious community member does it, it's somehow "justification" to ''doubt God."
Um, news flash. People have been weak, broken and corrupt since the Garden of Eden. Duh. All humans are unworthy by nature. However, being created in the image of God they have the opportunity to find God and become, again, his child. Whether a person sins/commits crime/is unethical within a religious community or outside a religious community, all it demonstrates is how very far humans remain from God. People need to recognize God and allow him to guide and lead one's life, not jump on falls by religious people or institutions (which will always occur and I promise you, even if you replaced flawed humans with perfect robots, robots will break down and run amok too).
So yes, investigate scandals and hold the faithful accountable for their hypocrisy, but beware, because as you do so, you are excusing the same behavior in those with little or no faith. And you are missing the entire point, which is made clear in the Gospel, which is that humans need to be CONSTANTLY REPENTING AND SEEKING FORGIVENESS OF THEIR ONGOING AND CONTINUAL SINS UNTIL THE MOMENT OF EACH PERSON'S DEATH.
The only perfect person lived two thousand years ago. Everyone else needs continual grace and forgiveness every moment of their life, believer or not, in secular setting or religious.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Urgent case study: rights definitions
I'm signed on and writing this before doing anything else because I just heard something on a talk show that helped me to realize a huge confusion that I can clear up right here and now. Hi young people, because this is especially for you, you'll see why in a moment. The previous two generations have become so mentally illiterate and sloppy that they no longer understand the definitions of the words they use in everyday speech but, most alarmingly, in politics and the search for social justice. It is no wonder that people are arguing over the correct way to solve huge problems because not only are they not discussing the same thing, defined the same way, they don't even understand what they are arguing for, on behalf of.
The first word I want to clarify, since that is what the talk show mentioned, is "rights." The talk show hosts played a sound byte from a politician where the politician claimed that they (politicians) "create" or "give" rights to people. No, that is incorrect, and the talk show hosts were quick to point this out. Yet I know that many of you would think that rights are created. They are not created; rights are in existence, continual existence. It is the depriving of rights that is the problem in society, so that is the first part of what I want to explain.
Every human being, just by virtue of existing, has certain absolute rights. They are not "rights" conferred by other human beings. To calm those social justice people (and believe me, I am on your side, I am coaching you though in a grave error) let me start with an obvious example. When you are born, no one had to give you a piece of paper saying you had the right to breathe the air. I mean, duh. If someone smothers you, though, they have deprived you of your rights. Do you understand that? When a human being is born they have rights already in existence, the complete set of rights all humans need and are born into, not given to them. Now you can understand the wording of the Founding Fathers better, where they recognize these inherent pre-existing eternal rights, not confer them. Believers understand that these rights are given by God when humans were created in the first place. Ethical non-believers understand that even if they deny a God, those rights are already in place, and don't have to be spelled out by a set of human beings, because it it "natural law" (believers use that term too), or "the right thing to do," or the "ethics of human rights" or other God-neutral but ethic phrases and philosophies. Both believers and non-believers who are ethical understand that genuine rights are eternal, inborn, and already in existence.
That is the first part of what the past two generations have warped and misunderstood. They have taken the eternal and inborn existence of rights and forgotten what that really means. When did this happen? Pretty much in the 1960's when people started saying "I want my rights." Yes, they were correct to perceive that those who suffered injustice were being deprived of rights. But "rights" became shorthand for remedies. Rights are not remedies. Rights cannot be created. They are already in existence. Rights exist and every thinking human, whether a believer or not, needs to protect the language in order to maintain clarity that all people have certainty of the rights that are inborn of being human.
So whether you believe in God or not you must understand that in the USA the Founding Fathers recognized that certain rights are in pre-existence. Go back to the example of the baby being born having the right to breathe air, even though no one wrote a piece of paper saying that that this baby has a license or permit under the law to breathe air upon birth. Anyone who is not insane or an idiot understands that. Thus it is really easy to understand that the right to be alive (including being able to breathe) is automatic upon coming alive (being born), duh. If someone takes a pillow and smothers the baby on birth, two things have happened. The baby's right to life was violated and so the baby was, to use the correct language "deprived of his or her rights." So you have "rights" and their opposite, which is not the "lack of rights" but the "deprivation of rights." And here is where it had become naturally confusing: not only was the smothered baby deprived of his or her rights (to life), but a civil crime was committed, assault, battery and murder. This is where the thinking became blurry during the 1960's and got worse and worse until now when it seems no one understands simple basic concepts and definitions anymore.
Just a pause, this is not going to turn into an abortion argument, so put that aside and let us work together for clarity about human rights. I am using the baby, full term, born in a wanted situation (presumably) for its universal ease in understanding, not for agenda. Keep that in mind when I start to also discuss in this case study civil (racial) deprivation of rights.
The Founding Fathers recognized every human being already has three basic "rights:" life (the right to be alive and not to have life truncated, such as in the smothering), liberty (the right to be free and not in bondage to another human being) and the pursuit of happiness (the right to lead one's life in search of sustaining and satisfaction). If you think about this, this is such a profound insight. In a pithy way the Founding Fathers summarized, using three simple words and phrases, these universal God given (or natural law/ethics) rights and pre-exist.
So you say, well, why was slavery and so forth legal when one has the right to liberty? Now you are getting it. Notice to ask me that question you said slavery was "legal?" It was not, correctly speaking, a right; many laws and social customs are violation of and deprivation of inherent rights. The civil rights movement started out using the verbiage correctly, but society started eroding their understanding of the fact that it happens every day throughout human society, this problem:
1. All humans have inherent rights not created by humans but eternal and already in place.
2. Some humans deprive other human beings of those rights.
3. Some deprivation of rights are actually legal under human made laws, but they are always wrong as they are deprivation of rights.
4. Human rights must always trump laws that deprive of human rights, but in reality we see that often the opposite takes place.
5. Rights cannot be created; rights already exist. What humans can do is restore those who have been deprived of their rights to no longer be deprived.
So now let me tackle the second core area of confusion about rights and the law. We now understand that rights already exist, totally without human creation or control. We also recognize that the problem is humans who deprive other humans of their rights. Thus slavery, while legal, was not "a right," (even if in the lingo people used that word) but slavery was, instead, a legal but unrighteous deprivation of human rights. Remember there is worldwide slavery still going on, both of servitude and sexual, and thus we must urgently understand that there is no "right," either legal or for "free market" reasons, for slavery in any form at all. Period. When slaves are freed they have not "gained" a right; their inherent rights have been restored.
So the second area of confusion exists around the terms "entitlement" and "reparation." Let's roll up sleeves and clear that up so we can actually get something done in this world before it is too late.
Remember that no one has a right to tax; taxing is a law, a mechanism, not a right. An entitlement is an expenditure of money gained by taxes, but it is a specific form of expenditure as a group is designated by "title" to receive funds. Thus that group is "entitled" because the name of the group segregates them from others so they receive special tax money. Let's use an obvious example.
The baby has been born and was not smothered, and so mother and father now have a person with a new title in their family "a child." Under USA tax law anyone who has the title "child" is entitled to being a tax deduction on the government tax forms. The baby was born with rights, but not with an entitlement. Entitlements are political, social, monarch or other human based decisions to confer or not, and has nothing to do with "rights." Too many people, both conservatives and liberals, think that they have a "right" to "entitlements." They may have a legal right, but we are speaking of human rights here. Human rights have become blurred by those who most advocate them by mixing them up with the concept of legal remedies and legal rights such as entitlements. Humans pass and enact entitlements for their own perceived fairness or merit agendas; humans do not create "rights" because human rights already exist.
So one must maintain clarity of thought and language, when one is debating or problem solving the giving of human laws/legal entitlements versus the problem of restoring deprived human rights. Too many well meaning people have ferocious arguments that are bull crap because they are not even speaking about either rights or entitlements/remedies/deprivation of rights (three different things). Do not "look" to law for "your rights," unless you mean "legal rights". In other words, no law states that a baby has the obvious human right to breathe the air. A law does say you can't smother a baby. If you look to human law for God given (natural, ethical) rights, you are lost from the very beginning, as human rights are in pre-existence, not conferred by law.
Human rights are like gold in a mine that is as yet undiscovered. The gold is already there and it's not there because some human "created gold" and then "injected it into a mountain," duh. Yet people can pass laws about who can own or explore the land. Those laws have nothing to do with the fact that the gold already exists, without the will or workings of mere human hands. Human rights exist and are eternal, no matter what a human being says or does. The problem is that many people deprive others of their human rights. It would be as if people told each other, "Well, the unmined gold in that mountain only exists if you have brown eyes, while if you have blue eyes that gold does not exist." We are not even speaking of the legality of pursuing the mining, we are speaking of a lack of reality of people who deprive others of their human rights, saying those human rights do not exist when they do, obviously, just as the gold exists whether you have brown eyes or blue.
This, young people, is one reason why faith in God gives, not takes away, strength, logic and clarity to human actions. Those who believe in God have a better comprehension of God given human rights. This is not because they necessarily "do better" or "behave better" or are "more moral" or "more ethical" than a well meaning atheist, for example. I'm not saying that at all. Rather, what I am saying is that non-believing human rights advocates live entirely within the framework of human created laws, and often they are caught and limited by the snares of human nature and laws. They say "you don't need to believe in God to be good," and that is true, but if they do not believe in God, then they believe only in the goodness of man, and that can only be understood, as a consequence, via deeds and laws. They inadvertently take their eyes off of the inherent truth of eternal inborn human rights (since they don't believe it is God given and inborn) and thus they think of rights as good behavior and laws. They put their own well meaning aim too low and too limited.
Like abortion, I am not making this about black/white slavery (notice I am speaking much of modern slavery, which is commercial/sexual and labor servitude) so do not try to discern agenda: I'm on everyone's side here. But I will now deliberately discuss the black/white slavery legacy in order to build upon the clarity of definitions by now tackling "remedy" and "reparations." I'm not using USA Native Americans in the case study because I need to keep this a global example.
First, to recap:
1. Human rights are inborn and pre-exist.
2. Human rights can be deprived, and often are, but are not created by humans.
3. Deprived human rights must be addressed and restored. In other words the depriving of rights must cease.
4. Entitlements are a special legal monetary consideration given to a designated group, which reflects the priorities of society.
5. Remedies are the means by which an injustice is corrected and rights restored, not "given."
Let's start with an easy example. Someone breaks into your house and steals your television. The police catch the person and give you back your television. The police "restore" your goods, your television, they do not need to write a law "giving you a right to own a television." You already had the right to the television.
Human rights are the same thing. The rights already exist, but some humans deprive others. Those humans need to be stopped from depriving others. When someone is stopped from depriving a person of their rights, all is automatically good again. The rights were always there, but someone blocked you from them. Now the rights are restored when the person stops depriving you of them.
But hold on, you say, damage is done when rights were deprived. I agree. But you must be clear in your mind what you are working on in a given moment: 1) restoring access to deprived rights and/or 2) compensating for the damage.
Let's say the thief smashed a window to get into your house to take the TV. If, in our silly but usefully clear example, TV represents a human right you already had, when the police remove the deprivation of your right as a problem (someone else had your TV) that concludes their role in this matter. Part of society must focus on ensuring that no one's rights are deprived. That is not the same as the part of society that now helps you to inventory the damage and get you back on your feet. The police do not fix your window, or give you money to have it fixed. They also do not take a window out of the thief's house and give it to you. Human rights campaigners must focus, like the TV recovering police, on removing obstacles to other people's access to their pre-existing human rights. Human rights should not at all complicate their essential first priority with issues of remedy and reparations, since those require human created processes, rules, law, procedures and logic. For example the homeowner may have an insurance policy and pursues remedy based not on human rights but the commercial agreement he or she has in place for insurance reimbursement.
Now, here's where we need to clear up the whole "slavery reparations" language. You might, being an attentive reader, now put two and two together and say, "Well, suppose the culture gives an entitlement that all people who had TV's stolen from them gets a $100 tax credit or payment to remedy that their rights were violated." Now you are talking! See? Now you are getting somewhere. You have separated the restoration of deprived human rights from the "picking up the mess left behind" process. That would be a logical use of the entitlement human made process, not right to address lingering damage from a now corrected deprivation of human rights. An entitlement is the creating of a group of people based on their title (titles such as senior citizens, social security recipients, children, people who had their TV's stolen) who now receive goods, services or usually monatary special consideration. Remember, a human baby has the pre-existing universal inborn right to be born and to breathe the air, a crime is committed (and that right was deprived) if the baby is smothered, but the decision to give a tax deduction to the successfully born baby is an entitlement based on the title "child."
Suppose someone tried to smother the baby in the hospital and while they did not succeed they did some real damage to the baby. This is now the area of remedy and it is entirely dealt with by human laws and processes. This is where morality must be one's compass and this is what the Bible means about being "righteous" and "just." Here's what I mean.
Righteousness and justice must be immediate and focused on the actual people involved in the problem. You go after the guy who stole the TV for remedy and damages, not anyone who ever stole a TV. You go after whoever tried to smother your baby (and perhaps the bad procedures of where this crime took place), but you don't sue every hospital and every person who ever wronged a child. In other words, remedy is targeted and immediate. Too many in society have drifted away from that understanding in their attempts to "recover" what is they are "entitled to." See? That's wrong language. No one is "entitled" to "remedy" unless an entitlement law exists that all people who had stolen TV sets (title) receive $100. Remedy is the attempt to provide justice and righteousness after a wrong has been committed, and there is a wide range of possible valid avenues for remedy, all based on human law, process and free will regarding goodness, charity and virtue.
Two people each had a TV stolen via smashed windows. One gets reimbursement from their insurance company. The other does not have insurance, but has a friend who owns a window business and the friend, through charity, rebuilds and replaces the window for free.
The term "reparations" is best understood as the financial punishment levied onto the combatant who is defeated in a war. So now, build on the foundation I have given to you about entitlements and remedy. If one country is attacked unjustly by another, yet defeats the aggressor at great cost, the aggrieved victorious country may well indeed impose reparations onto the aggressor losing nation. The most obvious example of that is World War I when huge, back breaking reparations were placed upon Germany, the aggressor and loser of the war. (And put aside all the nuance around who did what to whom and stick to the basic facts). In reparations you clobber the entire country because they are the unit by which the injustice occurred. So even the peace movement in the aggressor country would get clobbered by reparations, as no distinction is made. That's not entirely bad because we all understand enablers, whether willing or against their will. It's the theory that a country could not war if people such as farmers did not keep growing food and thus enable the war machine, even if the farmers themselves were against the war in the first place.
That is the slippery slope of reparations. They are strictly speaking logical but in reality there is a huge problem. The first problem is that it must be immediate. In other words, the second generation should not pay for the war of the first generation. The second problem is, as I stated, reparations are the largest and broadest of all entitlements. The title thus becomes "an entire country."
Those are the problems in logic and justice that even well meaning black/white slave reparations face, which is why it is a waste of time to discuss it, really. I am not at all marganizing what has been done, but I am trying to be your friend and your coach and teach you how to be alive and have your rights today. So bear with me as we use this sensitive subject in this case study.
You no doubt agree with me that reparations must be 1) immediate and 2) appropriately targeted. I bet you think I'm going to say it's "too late" for reparations, since legal slavery ended over one hundred years ago. Nope, I'm not going to say that. I'm going to help you get reparations. Here is what you need to do. You need to determine who took your TV or, rather, your ancestors' TV, and you have suffered as a result. Thus you need to research in Africa which tribes first captured your ancestors and name them as the first liable group for reparations. In general many Africans were captured and sold into slavery by rival African tribes. So you need to identify which ones were involved and proportion responsibility. Then you need to identify the European countries/monarchies that funded the slave capturing and transport. Your rights were first deprived by those who captured your ancestors, those who stole your TV, and by those who provided the capturing and transportation facilities. Your rights were then secondly in time sequence deprived by the slave owners who purchased and kept the slaves. Thus you must outline the shape of your "war reparations country" in order to appropriately target them. But in your case it is a virtual country, to use the computer term, who owe you reparations. Not to be political I will make up names, except for the USA.
Virtual reparations country: 30% the African tribes X, Y, Z who captured and sold slaves, 30% the European countries O, P, Q who seized slaves, provided men and ships to transport them, 40% the actual white people in the USA who sold, owned and profited from slaves.
You see the problem? Genuine reparations have one of two possiblities: 1) designate a country as being "guilty" such as was done in WWI or 2) identify those who actually conducted the wrong and apportion blame according to their actual participation.
So without taking sides, dear friends, I am simply teaching you the difference between genuine reparations and entitlements. A society could take the stance that every person who had an almost smothered child, or a stolen TV (and I'm not trivializing, but using the case study materials) gets an entitlement based on that title as a remedy. A society could try to designate that those who descended from an almost smothered child also receives an entitlement. The problem is that entitlement comes from your own participatory tax dollars, by definition. Reparations comes from "the other guy" the one who "actually did it." In order to do just reparations you have to research and apportion (wow, would that keep lawyers busy!) guilt and blame and then trace the descendants and apportion the cost of the reparations aka entitlement to them. You know that makes very little sense because the rule of reparations is that if done against a group you are indeed charging those who were innocent and against the war in the first place, and also their subsequent generations.
I don't want to get too far into transforming this into a slavery reparations case study since this is a case study about rights, and how rights are inborn and eternal, compared to human devices such as deprivation of rights, entitlements, remedy, crime and reparations.
But you see that many in public office, and privately, have their definitions all backwards and blurry and ultimately ineffective. As a result humans are farther from understanding their inherent God (or natural/ethical) given rights, rather than closer. So when I listen to political or legal debate I really find it so pointless because people are not even sure what they are arguing about factually and clearly, in truth. This is a problem of rights, entitlement and remedy policy in all parts of life in all societies and governments, where people have lost actual understanding of the ultimate motivation which is inborn rights of all humans and the removal of the means of depriving rights in the here and now. Without that first everything else is futile and even counterproductive fail. What good will it be if two hundred years from now people are arguing how to remedy the legacy of child sexual slavery and abuse, for example, if they allowed it to happen in the here and now? People, it's only one lived human life apiece, and one earth, and the consequences (and thus remedies) must happen in the here and now, based on universal recognition of authentic inborn human rights and removal of real deprivations of those human rights.
I hope that you have understood this and find it helpful.
The first word I want to clarify, since that is what the talk show mentioned, is "rights." The talk show hosts played a sound byte from a politician where the politician claimed that they (politicians) "create" or "give" rights to people. No, that is incorrect, and the talk show hosts were quick to point this out. Yet I know that many of you would think that rights are created. They are not created; rights are in existence, continual existence. It is the depriving of rights that is the problem in society, so that is the first part of what I want to explain.
Every human being, just by virtue of existing, has certain absolute rights. They are not "rights" conferred by other human beings. To calm those social justice people (and believe me, I am on your side, I am coaching you though in a grave error) let me start with an obvious example. When you are born, no one had to give you a piece of paper saying you had the right to breathe the air. I mean, duh. If someone smothers you, though, they have deprived you of your rights. Do you understand that? When a human being is born they have rights already in existence, the complete set of rights all humans need and are born into, not given to them. Now you can understand the wording of the Founding Fathers better, where they recognize these inherent pre-existing eternal rights, not confer them. Believers understand that these rights are given by God when humans were created in the first place. Ethical non-believers understand that even if they deny a God, those rights are already in place, and don't have to be spelled out by a set of human beings, because it it "natural law" (believers use that term too), or "the right thing to do," or the "ethics of human rights" or other God-neutral but ethic phrases and philosophies. Both believers and non-believers who are ethical understand that genuine rights are eternal, inborn, and already in existence.
That is the first part of what the past two generations have warped and misunderstood. They have taken the eternal and inborn existence of rights and forgotten what that really means. When did this happen? Pretty much in the 1960's when people started saying "I want my rights." Yes, they were correct to perceive that those who suffered injustice were being deprived of rights. But "rights" became shorthand for remedies. Rights are not remedies. Rights cannot be created. They are already in existence. Rights exist and every thinking human, whether a believer or not, needs to protect the language in order to maintain clarity that all people have certainty of the rights that are inborn of being human.
So whether you believe in God or not you must understand that in the USA the Founding Fathers recognized that certain rights are in pre-existence. Go back to the example of the baby being born having the right to breathe air, even though no one wrote a piece of paper saying that that this baby has a license or permit under the law to breathe air upon birth. Anyone who is not insane or an idiot understands that. Thus it is really easy to understand that the right to be alive (including being able to breathe) is automatic upon coming alive (being born), duh. If someone takes a pillow and smothers the baby on birth, two things have happened. The baby's right to life was violated and so the baby was, to use the correct language "deprived of his or her rights." So you have "rights" and their opposite, which is not the "lack of rights" but the "deprivation of rights." And here is where it had become naturally confusing: not only was the smothered baby deprived of his or her rights (to life), but a civil crime was committed, assault, battery and murder. This is where the thinking became blurry during the 1960's and got worse and worse until now when it seems no one understands simple basic concepts and definitions anymore.
Just a pause, this is not going to turn into an abortion argument, so put that aside and let us work together for clarity about human rights. I am using the baby, full term, born in a wanted situation (presumably) for its universal ease in understanding, not for agenda. Keep that in mind when I start to also discuss in this case study civil (racial) deprivation of rights.
The Founding Fathers recognized every human being already has three basic "rights:" life (the right to be alive and not to have life truncated, such as in the smothering), liberty (the right to be free and not in bondage to another human being) and the pursuit of happiness (the right to lead one's life in search of sustaining and satisfaction). If you think about this, this is such a profound insight. In a pithy way the Founding Fathers summarized, using three simple words and phrases, these universal God given (or natural law/ethics) rights and pre-exist.
So you say, well, why was slavery and so forth legal when one has the right to liberty? Now you are getting it. Notice to ask me that question you said slavery was "legal?" It was not, correctly speaking, a right; many laws and social customs are violation of and deprivation of inherent rights. The civil rights movement started out using the verbiage correctly, but society started eroding their understanding of the fact that it happens every day throughout human society, this problem:
1. All humans have inherent rights not created by humans but eternal and already in place.
2. Some humans deprive other human beings of those rights.
3. Some deprivation of rights are actually legal under human made laws, but they are always wrong as they are deprivation of rights.
4. Human rights must always trump laws that deprive of human rights, but in reality we see that often the opposite takes place.
5. Rights cannot be created; rights already exist. What humans can do is restore those who have been deprived of their rights to no longer be deprived.
So now let me tackle the second core area of confusion about rights and the law. We now understand that rights already exist, totally without human creation or control. We also recognize that the problem is humans who deprive other humans of their rights. Thus slavery, while legal, was not "a right," (even if in the lingo people used that word) but slavery was, instead, a legal but unrighteous deprivation of human rights. Remember there is worldwide slavery still going on, both of servitude and sexual, and thus we must urgently understand that there is no "right," either legal or for "free market" reasons, for slavery in any form at all. Period. When slaves are freed they have not "gained" a right; their inherent rights have been restored.
So the second area of confusion exists around the terms "entitlement" and "reparation." Let's roll up sleeves and clear that up so we can actually get something done in this world before it is too late.
Remember that no one has a right to tax; taxing is a law, a mechanism, not a right. An entitlement is an expenditure of money gained by taxes, but it is a specific form of expenditure as a group is designated by "title" to receive funds. Thus that group is "entitled" because the name of the group segregates them from others so they receive special tax money. Let's use an obvious example.
The baby has been born and was not smothered, and so mother and father now have a person with a new title in their family "a child." Under USA tax law anyone who has the title "child" is entitled to being a tax deduction on the government tax forms. The baby was born with rights, but not with an entitlement. Entitlements are political, social, monarch or other human based decisions to confer or not, and has nothing to do with "rights." Too many people, both conservatives and liberals, think that they have a "right" to "entitlements." They may have a legal right, but we are speaking of human rights here. Human rights have become blurred by those who most advocate them by mixing them up with the concept of legal remedies and legal rights such as entitlements. Humans pass and enact entitlements for their own perceived fairness or merit agendas; humans do not create "rights" because human rights already exist.
So one must maintain clarity of thought and language, when one is debating or problem solving the giving of human laws/legal entitlements versus the problem of restoring deprived human rights. Too many well meaning people have ferocious arguments that are bull crap because they are not even speaking about either rights or entitlements/remedies/deprivation of rights (three different things). Do not "look" to law for "your rights," unless you mean "legal rights". In other words, no law states that a baby has the obvious human right to breathe the air. A law does say you can't smother a baby. If you look to human law for God given (natural, ethical) rights, you are lost from the very beginning, as human rights are in pre-existence, not conferred by law.
Human rights are like gold in a mine that is as yet undiscovered. The gold is already there and it's not there because some human "created gold" and then "injected it into a mountain," duh. Yet people can pass laws about who can own or explore the land. Those laws have nothing to do with the fact that the gold already exists, without the will or workings of mere human hands. Human rights exist and are eternal, no matter what a human being says or does. The problem is that many people deprive others of their human rights. It would be as if people told each other, "Well, the unmined gold in that mountain only exists if you have brown eyes, while if you have blue eyes that gold does not exist." We are not even speaking of the legality of pursuing the mining, we are speaking of a lack of reality of people who deprive others of their human rights, saying those human rights do not exist when they do, obviously, just as the gold exists whether you have brown eyes or blue.
This, young people, is one reason why faith in God gives, not takes away, strength, logic and clarity to human actions. Those who believe in God have a better comprehension of God given human rights. This is not because they necessarily "do better" or "behave better" or are "more moral" or "more ethical" than a well meaning atheist, for example. I'm not saying that at all. Rather, what I am saying is that non-believing human rights advocates live entirely within the framework of human created laws, and often they are caught and limited by the snares of human nature and laws. They say "you don't need to believe in God to be good," and that is true, but if they do not believe in God, then they believe only in the goodness of man, and that can only be understood, as a consequence, via deeds and laws. They inadvertently take their eyes off of the inherent truth of eternal inborn human rights (since they don't believe it is God given and inborn) and thus they think of rights as good behavior and laws. They put their own well meaning aim too low and too limited.
Like abortion, I am not making this about black/white slavery (notice I am speaking much of modern slavery, which is commercial/sexual and labor servitude) so do not try to discern agenda: I'm on everyone's side here. But I will now deliberately discuss the black/white slavery legacy in order to build upon the clarity of definitions by now tackling "remedy" and "reparations." I'm not using USA Native Americans in the case study because I need to keep this a global example.
First, to recap:
1. Human rights are inborn and pre-exist.
2. Human rights can be deprived, and often are, but are not created by humans.
3. Deprived human rights must be addressed and restored. In other words the depriving of rights must cease.
4. Entitlements are a special legal monetary consideration given to a designated group, which reflects the priorities of society.
5. Remedies are the means by which an injustice is corrected and rights restored, not "given."
Let's start with an easy example. Someone breaks into your house and steals your television. The police catch the person and give you back your television. The police "restore" your goods, your television, they do not need to write a law "giving you a right to own a television." You already had the right to the television.
Human rights are the same thing. The rights already exist, but some humans deprive others. Those humans need to be stopped from depriving others. When someone is stopped from depriving a person of their rights, all is automatically good again. The rights were always there, but someone blocked you from them. Now the rights are restored when the person stops depriving you of them.
But hold on, you say, damage is done when rights were deprived. I agree. But you must be clear in your mind what you are working on in a given moment: 1) restoring access to deprived rights and/or 2) compensating for the damage.
Let's say the thief smashed a window to get into your house to take the TV. If, in our silly but usefully clear example, TV represents a human right you already had, when the police remove the deprivation of your right as a problem (someone else had your TV) that concludes their role in this matter. Part of society must focus on ensuring that no one's rights are deprived. That is not the same as the part of society that now helps you to inventory the damage and get you back on your feet. The police do not fix your window, or give you money to have it fixed. They also do not take a window out of the thief's house and give it to you. Human rights campaigners must focus, like the TV recovering police, on removing obstacles to other people's access to their pre-existing human rights. Human rights should not at all complicate their essential first priority with issues of remedy and reparations, since those require human created processes, rules, law, procedures and logic. For example the homeowner may have an insurance policy and pursues remedy based not on human rights but the commercial agreement he or she has in place for insurance reimbursement.
Now, here's where we need to clear up the whole "slavery reparations" language. You might, being an attentive reader, now put two and two together and say, "Well, suppose the culture gives an entitlement that all people who had TV's stolen from them gets a $100 tax credit or payment to remedy that their rights were violated." Now you are talking! See? Now you are getting somewhere. You have separated the restoration of deprived human rights from the "picking up the mess left behind" process. That would be a logical use of the entitlement human made process, not right to address lingering damage from a now corrected deprivation of human rights. An entitlement is the creating of a group of people based on their title (titles such as senior citizens, social security recipients, children, people who had their TV's stolen) who now receive goods, services or usually monatary special consideration. Remember, a human baby has the pre-existing universal inborn right to be born and to breathe the air, a crime is committed (and that right was deprived) if the baby is smothered, but the decision to give a tax deduction to the successfully born baby is an entitlement based on the title "child."
Suppose someone tried to smother the baby in the hospital and while they did not succeed they did some real damage to the baby. This is now the area of remedy and it is entirely dealt with by human laws and processes. This is where morality must be one's compass and this is what the Bible means about being "righteous" and "just." Here's what I mean.
Righteousness and justice must be immediate and focused on the actual people involved in the problem. You go after the guy who stole the TV for remedy and damages, not anyone who ever stole a TV. You go after whoever tried to smother your baby (and perhaps the bad procedures of where this crime took place), but you don't sue every hospital and every person who ever wronged a child. In other words, remedy is targeted and immediate. Too many in society have drifted away from that understanding in their attempts to "recover" what is they are "entitled to." See? That's wrong language. No one is "entitled" to "remedy" unless an entitlement law exists that all people who had stolen TV sets (title) receive $100. Remedy is the attempt to provide justice and righteousness after a wrong has been committed, and there is a wide range of possible valid avenues for remedy, all based on human law, process and free will regarding goodness, charity and virtue.
Two people each had a TV stolen via smashed windows. One gets reimbursement from their insurance company. The other does not have insurance, but has a friend who owns a window business and the friend, through charity, rebuilds and replaces the window for free.
The term "reparations" is best understood as the financial punishment levied onto the combatant who is defeated in a war. So now, build on the foundation I have given to you about entitlements and remedy. If one country is attacked unjustly by another, yet defeats the aggressor at great cost, the aggrieved victorious country may well indeed impose reparations onto the aggressor losing nation. The most obvious example of that is World War I when huge, back breaking reparations were placed upon Germany, the aggressor and loser of the war. (And put aside all the nuance around who did what to whom and stick to the basic facts). In reparations you clobber the entire country because they are the unit by which the injustice occurred. So even the peace movement in the aggressor country would get clobbered by reparations, as no distinction is made. That's not entirely bad because we all understand enablers, whether willing or against their will. It's the theory that a country could not war if people such as farmers did not keep growing food and thus enable the war machine, even if the farmers themselves were against the war in the first place.
That is the slippery slope of reparations. They are strictly speaking logical but in reality there is a huge problem. The first problem is that it must be immediate. In other words, the second generation should not pay for the war of the first generation. The second problem is, as I stated, reparations are the largest and broadest of all entitlements. The title thus becomes "an entire country."
Those are the problems in logic and justice that even well meaning black/white slave reparations face, which is why it is a waste of time to discuss it, really. I am not at all marganizing what has been done, but I am trying to be your friend and your coach and teach you how to be alive and have your rights today. So bear with me as we use this sensitive subject in this case study.
You no doubt agree with me that reparations must be 1) immediate and 2) appropriately targeted. I bet you think I'm going to say it's "too late" for reparations, since legal slavery ended over one hundred years ago. Nope, I'm not going to say that. I'm going to help you get reparations. Here is what you need to do. You need to determine who took your TV or, rather, your ancestors' TV, and you have suffered as a result. Thus you need to research in Africa which tribes first captured your ancestors and name them as the first liable group for reparations. In general many Africans were captured and sold into slavery by rival African tribes. So you need to identify which ones were involved and proportion responsibility. Then you need to identify the European countries/monarchies that funded the slave capturing and transport. Your rights were first deprived by those who captured your ancestors, those who stole your TV, and by those who provided the capturing and transportation facilities. Your rights were then secondly in time sequence deprived by the slave owners who purchased and kept the slaves. Thus you must outline the shape of your "war reparations country" in order to appropriately target them. But in your case it is a virtual country, to use the computer term, who owe you reparations. Not to be political I will make up names, except for the USA.
Virtual reparations country: 30% the African tribes X, Y, Z who captured and sold slaves, 30% the European countries O, P, Q who seized slaves, provided men and ships to transport them, 40% the actual white people in the USA who sold, owned and profited from slaves.
You see the problem? Genuine reparations have one of two possiblities: 1) designate a country as being "guilty" such as was done in WWI or 2) identify those who actually conducted the wrong and apportion blame according to their actual participation.
So without taking sides, dear friends, I am simply teaching you the difference between genuine reparations and entitlements. A society could take the stance that every person who had an almost smothered child, or a stolen TV (and I'm not trivializing, but using the case study materials) gets an entitlement based on that title as a remedy. A society could try to designate that those who descended from an almost smothered child also receives an entitlement. The problem is that entitlement comes from your own participatory tax dollars, by definition. Reparations comes from "the other guy" the one who "actually did it." In order to do just reparations you have to research and apportion (wow, would that keep lawyers busy!) guilt and blame and then trace the descendants and apportion the cost of the reparations aka entitlement to them. You know that makes very little sense because the rule of reparations is that if done against a group you are indeed charging those who were innocent and against the war in the first place, and also their subsequent generations.
I don't want to get too far into transforming this into a slavery reparations case study since this is a case study about rights, and how rights are inborn and eternal, compared to human devices such as deprivation of rights, entitlements, remedy, crime and reparations.
But you see that many in public office, and privately, have their definitions all backwards and blurry and ultimately ineffective. As a result humans are farther from understanding their inherent God (or natural/ethical) given rights, rather than closer. So when I listen to political or legal debate I really find it so pointless because people are not even sure what they are arguing about factually and clearly, in truth. This is a problem of rights, entitlement and remedy policy in all parts of life in all societies and governments, where people have lost actual understanding of the ultimate motivation which is inborn rights of all humans and the removal of the means of depriving rights in the here and now. Without that first everything else is futile and even counterproductive fail. What good will it be if two hundred years from now people are arguing how to remedy the legacy of child sexual slavery and abuse, for example, if they allowed it to happen in the here and now? People, it's only one lived human life apiece, and one earth, and the consequences (and thus remedies) must happen in the here and now, based on universal recognition of authentic inborn human rights and removal of real deprivations of those human rights.
I hope that you have understood this and find it helpful.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
I think Philadelphia PA just might be cursed
It's been open season on cops for a while, with one killing after the other (and many are Catholic, by the way). Also, it is well known that Philadelphia is a horrendous crime and despair pit. However, it seems to get worse each year and I'm beginning to think that like Sodom it's just been kind of cursed, due to its own corruption, greed, drugs and prejudices. Here is why I wonder, as a new low seems to be found.
By the way, maybe if Hollywood profiled Philadelphia not so much for Rocky or for gay oppression in the movies, but more about reality, they would be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. They pat themselves on the back tonight with their "Oscar" awards as the country, who has consumed their violent decadence for years, descends into self made hell.
Notice this happened at the "Nicetown" section. I'd hate to see the "Meantown" section. Oh wait, I think I have, and it's nationwide.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=6671513
snip
Son sees pregnant mother shot 10 times
Sunday, February 22, 2009 11:09 AM
TIOGA-NICETOWN - February 22, 2009 (WPVI) -- Gunfire ripped through the night air in the Nicetown-Tioga section of Philadelphia Saturday night.
Police are investigating a fatal shooting in the 1700 block of West Hunting Park Avenue near Clarissa Street.
The homicide happened just before 9:00 p.m. in a parking lot of a fast food restaurant.
Police sources have identified the victim as 29-year-old Larosa Gonzales of the 3400 block of N. 19th Street in Philadelphia.
She was 5-months pregnant.
Gonzales was shot ten times and the shooting was witnessed by her 6-year-old son. She was taken to Temple University Hospital where she was pronounced dead a short time later.
Police are now questioning her boyfriend, 30-year-old Willie Scott, as a person of interest. Scott was picked up a short time after the shooting in the Sunoco gas station at Broad and Hunting Park Avenue.
Scott has not been charged with the shooting.
There is no word on what prompted the violence.
***
No word on what prompted the violence, huh? She probably "dissed" him, or maybe was too fat for him while being preggers.
OH WAIT! There's "mor" news from the City of Brotherly Love.
http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20090222_Fighting_couple_dead_in_city_fire.html
snip
Posted on Sun, Feb. 22, 2009
Fighting couple dead in city fire
By Anthony R. Wood
Inquirer Staff Writer
Kenida James heard loud kicking at the front door and a desperate voice calling through the mail slot: "My mom's in there! My mom's in there!"
She opened the door to find two young girls, with a 1-year-old boy in tow, who had just fled a horror scene: a burning house where two adults would be found dead. The girls were a niece and a daughter of the woman.
Outside, James said, she found a fourth child, a badly injured and bleeding 11-year-old girl on the North Philadelphia sidewalk.
Late yesterday, investigators still were trying to piece together precisely what had happened, and had not yet released the identity of the victims.
They did know that shortly after 10 a.m., police responded to a domestic dispute in the 2300 block of North 13th Street at one of four attached low-rise public-housing units.
Inside, they found the bodies of a 30-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman.
It appeared that the man had stabbed his girlfriend, and then stabbed her 11-year-old daughter as she tried to intervene, Fire Capt. James Clark said. The girl was in critical condition at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, Clark said.
The man then spread gasoline about the premises, set a fire, and in the process set himself ablaze, Clark said.
He speculated that the man initially had planned to "cover his tracks" and said it was unclear whether he had taken his own life intentionally.
Three children - including the 1-year-old, believed to be the victims' son - escaped. The boy was rescued by the slain woman's niece and daughter, who were also in the home, said James, who had been visiting her sister, Kimberly Sexton, in an adjoining unit.
Stunned neighbors along the tidy street of two-story, four-unit buildings owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority said they had not detected signs of trouble at the fire-damaged unit.
"She was a good mother," Sexton said. "She was very nice." Dwayne Robinson, a neighbor on the other side, had no inkling of problems during the five years she had lived there, he said.
Asked if any other instances of domestic violence had been reported at the home, Clark said, "Not that I know of."
He said the man had visited the home occasionally. Yesterday, the silver Hyundai with a New Jersey license plate that he had driven was parked in front of the unit, cordoned off by police tape.
The 11-year-old was stabbed as she tried to go to her mother's aid, Clark said. It was unclear how she had gotten out of the house.
"She fought for her mother," James said. "She was lying there, going in and out of consciousness" and bleeding profusely from her side, she added.
Sexton provided a blanket to cover her, and James said that she had tried to get help from passing motorists but that "no one would stop." Eventually, the 11-year-old was transported to the hospital.
"I cried so hard," James said. "I don't know what I'm going to do tonight."
By the way, maybe if Hollywood profiled Philadelphia not so much for Rocky or for gay oppression in the movies, but more about reality, they would be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. They pat themselves on the back tonight with their "Oscar" awards as the country, who has consumed their violent decadence for years, descends into self made hell.
Notice this happened at the "Nicetown" section. I'd hate to see the "Meantown" section. Oh wait, I think I have, and it's nationwide.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=6671513
snip
Son sees pregnant mother shot 10 times
Sunday, February 22, 2009 11:09 AM
TIOGA-NICETOWN - February 22, 2009 (WPVI) -- Gunfire ripped through the night air in the Nicetown-Tioga section of Philadelphia Saturday night.
Police are investigating a fatal shooting in the 1700 block of West Hunting Park Avenue near Clarissa Street.
The homicide happened just before 9:00 p.m. in a parking lot of a fast food restaurant.
Police sources have identified the victim as 29-year-old Larosa Gonzales of the 3400 block of N. 19th Street in Philadelphia.
She was 5-months pregnant.
Gonzales was shot ten times and the shooting was witnessed by her 6-year-old son. She was taken to Temple University Hospital where she was pronounced dead a short time later.
Police are now questioning her boyfriend, 30-year-old Willie Scott, as a person of interest. Scott was picked up a short time after the shooting in the Sunoco gas station at Broad and Hunting Park Avenue.
Scott has not been charged with the shooting.
There is no word on what prompted the violence.
***
No word on what prompted the violence, huh? She probably "dissed" him, or maybe was too fat for him while being preggers.
OH WAIT! There's "mor" news from the City of Brotherly Love.
http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20090222_Fighting_couple_dead_in_city_fire.html
snip
Posted on Sun, Feb. 22, 2009
Fighting couple dead in city fire
By Anthony R. Wood
Inquirer Staff Writer
Kenida James heard loud kicking at the front door and a desperate voice calling through the mail slot: "My mom's in there! My mom's in there!"
She opened the door to find two young girls, with a 1-year-old boy in tow, who had just fled a horror scene: a burning house where two adults would be found dead. The girls were a niece and a daughter of the woman.
Outside, James said, she found a fourth child, a badly injured and bleeding 11-year-old girl on the North Philadelphia sidewalk.
Late yesterday, investigators still were trying to piece together precisely what had happened, and had not yet released the identity of the victims.
They did know that shortly after 10 a.m., police responded to a domestic dispute in the 2300 block of North 13th Street at one of four attached low-rise public-housing units.
Inside, they found the bodies of a 30-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman.
It appeared that the man had stabbed his girlfriend, and then stabbed her 11-year-old daughter as she tried to intervene, Fire Capt. James Clark said. The girl was in critical condition at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, Clark said.
The man then spread gasoline about the premises, set a fire, and in the process set himself ablaze, Clark said.
He speculated that the man initially had planned to "cover his tracks" and said it was unclear whether he had taken his own life intentionally.
Three children - including the 1-year-old, believed to be the victims' son - escaped. The boy was rescued by the slain woman's niece and daughter, who were also in the home, said James, who had been visiting her sister, Kimberly Sexton, in an adjoining unit.
Stunned neighbors along the tidy street of two-story, four-unit buildings owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority said they had not detected signs of trouble at the fire-damaged unit.
"She was a good mother," Sexton said. "She was very nice." Dwayne Robinson, a neighbor on the other side, had no inkling of problems during the five years she had lived there, he said.
Asked if any other instances of domestic violence had been reported at the home, Clark said, "Not that I know of."
He said the man had visited the home occasionally. Yesterday, the silver Hyundai with a New Jersey license plate that he had driven was parked in front of the unit, cordoned off by police tape.
The 11-year-old was stabbed as she tried to go to her mother's aid, Clark said. It was unclear how she had gotten out of the house.
"She fought for her mother," James said. "She was lying there, going in and out of consciousness" and bleeding profusely from her side, she added.
Sexton provided a blanket to cover her, and James said that she had tried to get help from passing motorists but that "no one would stop." Eventually, the 11-year-old was transported to the hospital.
"I cried so hard," James said. "I don't know what I'm going to do tonight."
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The "insanity" defense
While I am on the subject, here is my stance about the "insanity defense" for egregious crimes. I am not inclined to believe any insanity defense if the person planned the crime beforehand and/or if the person hid the crime's commission to any extent.
Let's be all grown up and smart about this. If someone "hides" that they did a crime, since they know that it was either a wrong thing to do or at least understand that people will be angry and punish them, they are NOT innocent due to insanity. How difficult is that to understand? If someone sneaks around doing a crime, then the mere fact of them sneaking around means that they know that it is wrong to do. It is the same with planning a crime. To have the faculties to plan a crime means that the person is not in the grip of insanity.
Yes, I view true insanity as the total unbalancing of the mind so that the person cannot tell right from wrong and has no concept of the consequences. If they "know" that it is wrong and they "do it anyway," that is not an insanity defense, no matter how mentally or emotionally damaged that person may be in a diagnostic context.
What many of you confuse is "mitigating circumstances." If someone is totally raving messed up because they were abused as a child, etc etc that is a mitigating circumstance during the punishment phase of the trial, not an insanity defense. If they are still sitting there and planning and conducting a crime that they know is wrong, it is not an insanity defense. But when they are found guilty of the crime, one who is wise and merciful will then factor in their mental and emotional disorders, and personal history, as "mitigating circumstances" regarding the type of punishment and/or treatment that they receive.
I am not sympathetic at all toward, for example, criminals who feel that "God," "the devil" or "aliens" etc. "told them" to commit a crime, and who then sneak around to do the crime knowing full well that it is against the law. A truly insane person would shout from the rooftop and run down the street announcing their "special message" and run like a bat out of you know where to do the crime, since they would not comprehend that it was a crime. So just because someone has a mental illness or a very traumatic personal history does not mean they have an "insanity defense."
During my internship in psychiatric outpatient services I've talked to some pretty crazy people. All of them have much more self restraint potential than they would ever admit. You can see this regarding addiction relapses, just to use a common example. Many of them are very mindful and decisive about their relapses, though they would later claim they "could not help it." I'm not minimizing the power of addiction, far from it. I am maximizing how people are much more in control than they let on, and the need for society to once again emphasize self control and discipline rather than "Oh dear, tut, tut, he had such a bad life and he's bipolar, he can't help it" or "Oh, she hears voices, she could not help it, because they 'told' her to do it." Um, if they are fully functional enough to plan and hide their activities, don't be a dumb stooge, recognize that they are not legitimate claimants to the "insanity defense."
Let's be all grown up and smart about this. If someone "hides" that they did a crime, since they know that it was either a wrong thing to do or at least understand that people will be angry and punish them, they are NOT innocent due to insanity. How difficult is that to understand? If someone sneaks around doing a crime, then the mere fact of them sneaking around means that they know that it is wrong to do. It is the same with planning a crime. To have the faculties to plan a crime means that the person is not in the grip of insanity.
Yes, I view true insanity as the total unbalancing of the mind so that the person cannot tell right from wrong and has no concept of the consequences. If they "know" that it is wrong and they "do it anyway," that is not an insanity defense, no matter how mentally or emotionally damaged that person may be in a diagnostic context.
What many of you confuse is "mitigating circumstances." If someone is totally raving messed up because they were abused as a child, etc etc that is a mitigating circumstance during the punishment phase of the trial, not an insanity defense. If they are still sitting there and planning and conducting a crime that they know is wrong, it is not an insanity defense. But when they are found guilty of the crime, one who is wise and merciful will then factor in their mental and emotional disorders, and personal history, as "mitigating circumstances" regarding the type of punishment and/or treatment that they receive.
I am not sympathetic at all toward, for example, criminals who feel that "God," "the devil" or "aliens" etc. "told them" to commit a crime, and who then sneak around to do the crime knowing full well that it is against the law. A truly insane person would shout from the rooftop and run down the street announcing their "special message" and run like a bat out of you know where to do the crime, since they would not comprehend that it was a crime. So just because someone has a mental illness or a very traumatic personal history does not mean they have an "insanity defense."
During my internship in psychiatric outpatient services I've talked to some pretty crazy people. All of them have much more self restraint potential than they would ever admit. You can see this regarding addiction relapses, just to use a common example. Many of them are very mindful and decisive about their relapses, though they would later claim they "could not help it." I'm not minimizing the power of addiction, far from it. I am maximizing how people are much more in control than they let on, and the need for society to once again emphasize self control and discipline rather than "Oh dear, tut, tut, he had such a bad life and he's bipolar, he can't help it" or "Oh, she hears voices, she could not help it, because they 'told' her to do it." Um, if they are fully functional enough to plan and hide their activities, don't be a dumb stooge, recognize that they are not legitimate claimants to the "insanity defense."
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Woe to Philadelphia
When will people care? That city has been a dangerous pit ever since I was a child and it has only got worse and worse, a hell hole on earth. And today it has sunk to a depths that astonishes even me. Maybe the "city of brotherly love" better get its GD act together. Read what an outrage is this latest robbery of the innocent (using an AK-47 assault rifle at a Shop Rite) and murder of a family man cop. Maybe Tom Hanks ought to be starring in a film about bringing human rights, safety and decency to this city instead of well, you know, the Hollywood delusion of reality.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=6120000
snip
PORT RICHMOND - May 3, 2008 (WPVI) -- A gunman shot and killed a police officer during a bank robbery this morning.
According to Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, at least two armed men robbed the Bank of America branch inside the Shop Rite located at 3547 Aramingo Avenue around 11:26 a.m. Ramsey says there may have been a third suspect involved in the hold up.
The suspects fled in a vehicle described as a black or blue Jeep.
One suspect was shot in the 500 block of E. Louden Street and later died at Einstein Medical Center.
The second suspect, and a possible third, are still at large. Police are conducting an extensive search for the suspects and interviewing possible witnesses.
Police say they are looking for three suspects. They are described as follows:
Suspect 1-A tall black male with a medium build. -During the robbery he wore sunglasses, female Muslim garb from head to toe, and carried a shoulder-type bag.
Suspect 2 -Possibly a female, standing 5'6"-5'7" and was wearing light brown Muslim garb. -Her race has not been determined.
Suspect 3-Male with a stock build, standing 6'2"-6'3", with a medium brown complexion. -Shoulder-length dreadlocks, which may or may not be a wig. -He was wearing a white hospital or construction-type mask. -He was wearing blue jeans a light-colored shirt, possibly flannel.
Sergeant Liczbinski, a 12-year veteran of the department, was recently promoted to the rank of sergeant. He would have celebrated his 40th birthday this coming Tuesday, May 6th. Liczbinski is survived by his wife Michele, sons Matt and Stephen, and daughter Amber.
***
Read the comments by the people also. It's just so out of control; the people have been living in fear for decades and it's a disgraceful blot upon this country how it only worsens and does not improve. Read the description of the suspects. If true they dressed as WOMEN while carrying an AK-47 to terrorize innocent people they were robbing and to kill an officer. Or at the very least trying to present a Muslim image. It's just a DISGRACE in every way that God or mankind can measure this situation.
Prayers for the slain officer and his family. It really makes me wonder how they can work at all in such thankless positions.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=6120000
snip
PORT RICHMOND - May 3, 2008 (WPVI) -- A gunman shot and killed a police officer during a bank robbery this morning.
According to Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, at least two armed men robbed the Bank of America branch inside the Shop Rite located at 3547 Aramingo Avenue around 11:26 a.m. Ramsey says there may have been a third suspect involved in the hold up.
The suspects fled in a vehicle described as a black or blue Jeep.
One suspect was shot in the 500 block of E. Louden Street and later died at Einstein Medical Center.
The second suspect, and a possible third, are still at large. Police are conducting an extensive search for the suspects and interviewing possible witnesses.
Police say they are looking for three suspects. They are described as follows:
Suspect 1-A tall black male with a medium build. -During the robbery he wore sunglasses, female Muslim garb from head to toe, and carried a shoulder-type bag.
Suspect 2 -Possibly a female, standing 5'6"-5'7" and was wearing light brown Muslim garb. -Her race has not been determined.
Suspect 3-Male with a stock build, standing 6'2"-6'3", with a medium brown complexion. -Shoulder-length dreadlocks, which may or may not be a wig. -He was wearing a white hospital or construction-type mask. -He was wearing blue jeans a light-colored shirt, possibly flannel.
Sergeant Liczbinski, a 12-year veteran of the department, was recently promoted to the rank of sergeant. He would have celebrated his 40th birthday this coming Tuesday, May 6th. Liczbinski is survived by his wife Michele, sons Matt and Stephen, and daughter Amber.
***
Read the comments by the people also. It's just so out of control; the people have been living in fear for decades and it's a disgraceful blot upon this country how it only worsens and does not improve. Read the description of the suspects. If true they dressed as WOMEN while carrying an AK-47 to terrorize innocent people they were robbing and to kill an officer. Or at the very least trying to present a Muslim image. It's just a DISGRACE in every way that God or mankind can measure this situation.
Prayers for the slain officer and his family. It really makes me wonder how they can work at all in such thankless positions.
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