Wednesday, March 23, 2016

So what are you going to do? Crucify him?

People say "If God wanted to forgive he could just do it by saying "I forgive you" and it's done." And that's true for your sins against God, but what about your sins against other people? Is it just for God to forgive you of those too? What about your victim? Where is justice for them? The truth is that in this act of mercy God does something unjust, and in extending mercy unjustly he takes responsibility for the offense upon himself. And those who cry that justice was taken from them have a legitimate claim, especially in a human sense. In a very real moral sense, by offering effective mercy to those who have harmed others, God is acting unjustly, he is in fact guilty. It was Christ who was given authority to be the judge of all correct? And as judge he offers mercy, unjustly. It's true that God is God and he can do whatever he wants, but what if he actually cares about our perceived claims against Him? What if he realizes that these claims are a barrier to our reconciliation? He could simply say "Get over it an accept my mercy for yourself as well as for your victimizer", but he doesn't leave it at that. What about the claims that God was unjust in his interventions throughout human history? How often have you heard him brought up on charges for killing the first born in Egypt, or even simply for NOT intervening in other horrific events? At the end of the day we bring charges against him for a) being God but not living up to our expectations of Him and b) forgiving not our own sin, but the sins of those we think he should instead execute judgement. God's response though isn't to withhold mercy, instead it is to take upon himself the responsibility for his own mercy. We accuse him of "a" and "b" above, and he accepts our condemnation of him for it, even unto the cross. So now as we approach reconciliation with him, the only claim we can make is to despise our own existence, as all other charges are acknowledged and dealt with through his own death, and once again overcome through his own resurrection. In this light, hell is simply the rejection of this and the choice to live in bitterness of our own existence. What was it Christ was accused of? Wasn't it the crime of claiming to be God as well as claiming to forgive sin? His response? Guilty as charged. So when people blame God for being unjust I often simply respond, "Well what are you going to do? Crucify him?"

Social Media Matters

I quite often hear this criticism of libertarians that we should "get out from behind our keyboards and go do stuff that matters."
It irks me. First of all, it simply shows that the people making that criticism likely have little interaction with activism outside of social media. If this wasn't true then they would clearly see Libertarians actively and physically involved in many things from lobbying at the capitol, to organizing campaigns, helping out with causes, etc.
But secondly is this idea that somehow having conversations on social media is meaningless and fruitless. I believe that our ability to reason together afforded by the means of social media is one of the greatest change agents of our time. To dismiss this is to dismiss the importance of human reason all together.
We are having conversations and people are being exposed to thoughts and ideas that they were previously well insulated from.
Take for instance the seemingly silly and simple "Taxation is theft" campaign currently rounding the meme-dom. Do you realize that this simple phrase is something that many people have never even considered before? They've simply blindly, by no fault of their own mind you, accepted the premise that the state has a prior claim to all property.

Regardless of how they respond to the presentation of the idea, the fact of the matter is that a powerful message conveying some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance has made its way past the mental firewall inculcated by their cultural upbringing, and it's all because of the ease of communication that internet technology has opened up to us.
The human mind, absent mental illness or willful ignorance, will simply not allow cognitive dissonance to persist, it is hard wired to resolve it. Any challenging of an idea with a weak premise is effective in eventually changing the public perception of the idea and social media as well as similar technology is only causing this to happen on an exponentially increasing scale for many different issues.
It is anything but meaningless and fruitless to be able to converse and reason and argue with one another in a way that affords physical safety and a large degree of freedom, in fact it may be the most important thing happening to humanity in quite some time.