Note: I wrote this quickly one morning in the Fall of 2018 while the supreme court nomination of justice Bret Kavanaugh was being played out like a drama all over social media and the news. Certainly, I would advise to always take any allegation of sexual assault seriously and seek to believe the claim. However, the appalling matter was that with zero evidence and zero corroboration, people were libeling and defaming Mr. Kavanaugh, even Christians. I was deeply saddened and discouraged by the matter and wrote this down. I came across it recently and decided it may be helpful to share it still.
Just like nobody wants to live in a land where people can’t speak up about abuse, nobody wants to live in a land where you are guilty until proven innocent. I’m appalled by how many have judged the destruction of a person’s life based on who has the most emotional appeal.
We can claim, as I’ve seen claimed, that it’s all some sort of noble “balance of power”—”making up for the past of patriarchal power”—but justice is not based on power and who has or doesn’t have it. Justice especially isn’t based on emotional power of persuasion. Justice is based on truth.
Truth should always have the power. Only then can we ever have justice.
It is not in-compassionate to demand evidence beyond reasonable doubt. It is however in-compassionate and wrong to decry and destroy a person’s reputation and life because of wanting to seemingly show empathy to those who have been hurt. It reveals we are not feeling empathy and compassion, we are feeling pride and prejudice.
The pride is obviously us wanting to be esteemed and admired for our nobility, brought on by rushing to solidarity with the alleged victim and decrying the alleged perpetrator without proof. The prejudice is more sneaky. It’s a selective prejudice based on those who may be seeming to get away with their pride—in this case, the alleged perpetrator. We don’t hate their manifestations of arrogance; we hate that they may be getting away with exactly what we want to get away with—being arrogant and powerful.
But, again, remember, safety and justice, and all things of goodness, are not based on power; they are based on truth.
What we see in this time is the consequence of a nation of individuals who think we can each define “our own truth” instead of living according to an unchanging moral truth as defined by someone outside of and higher than us.
Thus, fools on all sides will devour each other for the same reason: each wants the prideful power to define their own reality, without consequence, void of objective truth, changeable as their whims desire. This foolishness will certainly destroy this nation (and others with it).
So as racist statements such as “I’m sick of old white guys” circulate, we’d do good to remember that some deeply flawed old white guys once had the wisdom to create a nation based on objective truth having the power, defined by a deity far beyond man in all ways, and we each have been undoubtedly advantaged and blessed in this nation because of it.
Mostly, we’d do good to repent of our sneaky pride, thinly disguised in social posturing and virtue signaling, and avoid condemning others we don’t even know, with zero corroborative evidence for the condemnation.
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