Innocents or Cowards?

In a discussion with my sister over the weekend, about freedom, morality and responsibility, we came to the conclusion that people create their own hell, and that much of what happens to us is self-determined...even though we protest our victimhood.

This won't come as a surprise to any of the many fans of The Secret...a time honored concept, presented in a new way, that what you focus on, you draw to you.

It's been offered as Psycho-Cybernetics, Positive Thinking, and Sympathetic Magic in the past.

The connection my sister made was the same. As we talked about how evils get punished (we are not believers in a literal Hell), she spoke of a neighbor of hers whose house looks like one of those crazy-man houses in the movies where nothing has been thrown away in 30 years...newpapers and magazines and mail and accumulated junk is literally in stacks all over the house. The sort of place you have to create paths through the garbage to get to the bathroom, or the bed.

She used him as an metaphor for the sort of lives evil people have. They might seem to us to be "getting over"...getting "away" with evil. But inside, they are like the crazy-man house. A horrid place to be in...yet, self-created, inescapable. It's home. Nowhere else to go.

Petty, poor criminals, like those on COPS, (yes, an occasional guilty pleasure) illustrate what she means. Their lives and houses, friends and environments are all disgusting, dysfunctional, dirty, unkempt. In short...a miserable place to be, and only miserable drunken, stupid people to be there with.

What must it have been like to BE Jeffery Dalmer? Can you imagine what living inside his head must have been like. As my sister says, we only see from the outside, and cannot conceive the horror on the inside. She believes that being Evil brings its own curse and punishment.

I think I agree. Every miserable person I know, is always focused on all the bad stuff that happens in his life, all the ways that people try to "get" him...and almost always, is trying to "get" them first. A former friend of mine almost NEVER had a good word to say about anyone. A lo, she found herself constantly surrounded by people about which she could not find a good word to say. She was angry all the time by the behavior of all those horrible people she somehow constantly had to deal with. She was not, and I'm sure is still not, a happy person.

We, of course, are not talking about society's responsibility to punish people for crimes...only the Cosmic dimension of justice and punishment.

My sister brought up another example. A woman she knows, who is always trying to get "something for nothing" had a problem with her TV. The repairman came and took it away leaving a loaner. When he delivered their TV, he forgot to remove the loaner. The woman did not mention it, and has never returned it. She thought it was cool that she got a free TV.

Very shortly afterward, this woman bought a suite of front-room furniture. Almost immediately, the big lounge chair broke so badly it could not be used. Due to a series of odd circumstances, she has not been able to get the chair fixed, for over a year! The guarantor of the warranty has gone out of business...and the manufacturer is not providing adequate customer service. She has no chair...(to watch her ill-gotten TV?) and she is angry and frustrated.

I only point these out as interesting metaphors for Cosmic Justice.

We moved on to larger issues of entire peoples whose lives are made Hell by evil leaders, and we considered how Cosmic Justice was working in those circumstances. At first it seems just rotten luck to be born in Burma instead of California. But as we talked it through, it became clear that we are so used to thinking in terms of "innocent victims" of dictators, we forget that dictators have to be tolerated by many people for them to retain power. Dictators seek to instill fear to gain or maintain power, but the fearfulness of the people is their own responsibility. Their lack of courage is their own sin. Their unwillingness to challenge evil results in their living with evil.

If I allow the government secret police to take my neighbor away to prison or execution without saying anything for fear they'll take me too, when they do take me, how can I cry about being an "innocent victim"? By not challenging evil, I become an accessory to it, and reap the rewards of my sin.

Claiming that millions of people were held captive or hostage by hundred of thousands is an untenable moral argument. No matter how many guns and prisons and wood chippers the bad guys have, millions can overwhelm hundred of thousands. It requires courage, the willingness to die for The Good, for others, for the welfare of their nation, for the hope of the future, for the betterment of the world.

But most put their own lives above all these things and define themselves as victims of mean and terrible men.

But they are not. They are sinful cowards. And Cosmic Justice requires retribution. The punishment: Being ruled by the very mean and terrible men they refuse to challenge.

Evil must be tolerated as well as committed to gain a strong hold over an entire people. Tolerance of evil is evil itself. And Justice is inexorable.

There are no excuses. There is nowhere to hide.

We will stand and fight; die if necessary; or live like serfs and deserve it.

The Gunslinger