Put another way: rage, blame projection and self-justified revenge -- as opposed to justice and reconciliation -- are seductively sweet and addictive, but often carry a bitter aftertaste of consequences indeed.
Unfortunately, in today's world, rage and self-justifying blame projection are too often in the driving seat of our thinking, speaking and acting. (A point, sadly, brought home to me as I looked at comments by Ms Johnson I had to analyse yesterday, and as I saw her attempted, predictably distractive and dismissive retort.)
That means, however, that if we are going about the cure of souls, we must be able to give a good answer that allows the willing to lance and drain the abscess of rage before it induces spiritual blood poisoning.
To do so, we will need to refer to the planks and sawdust in eyes, saw-pit principle:
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| A saw-pit in action, making planks |
Matt 7: 1 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye. [ESV]The idea here is that it is all too easy to lose sight of what it is like to be down in the saw-pit, with sawdust raining down. Especially, if the job is being done on your clock. But, to fail to put oneself down in the saw-pit is to get the whole log in one's eye.
So, the lesson here is that of empathy, learning to see things the way they appear to the other. (The same, that is exploited in the statement of the Golden Rule that would follow a few verses further on: "whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." v. 12.)
Once we have empathy, an awareness of the logs in our own eyes and some practice in moral eye-surgery on ourselves, we are in a very different position, in respect of helping others with their own challenges.
How does that relate to our world today, beyond the obvious, personal level?
A good place to begin is the global level, where it is now commonplace to think we live in a wicked white man's world and that almost anything in response to these blue- eyed- devils in the guise of human flesh is justified. After all, they are to blame for slavery and colonialism, apartheid and the plight of the Palestinians. Not to mention, our own troubles.
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| A man is not a bird to be driven to jump from a building as the alternative to being burned alive |
Something is wrong.
Seriously wrong, when we find ourselves applauding mass murder based on taking ordinary people going about the ordinary business of life hostage in civil aircraft and using these planes as cruise missiles to target other ordinary people going about their work in office buildings. Murdering thousands, and putting tens of thousands at risk. Not to mention, nearly crashing the global economy, potentially putting billions at hardship.
Soberingly wrong.
Especially, when it can be shown (cf details here and here) that the IslamIST terrorists involved are actually themselves serving a totalitarian global conquest agenda that would reduce us under a subjugation as dhimmis that would actually be worse than Apartheid.
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| A 100-year global conquest IslamIST agenda |
Now, about twenty years ago, the Jewish historian -- it's important to know that -- Bernard Lewis, in his epochal essay, The Roots of Muslim Rage, tellingly noted:
. . . The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty -- not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet . . . .
In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy these historic diseases. And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr. Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they diagnosed and to which they gave their names.These playing-field levelling words are at once balancing and sobering. For, indeed, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God . . . "
Consequently, the underlying theme for this blog post is that under God we must face our common guilt, repent, seek renewal, revival and reformation, make moral progress across time, stumbling though it will be at any given point. So also, we must expect a mixed bag of moral achievement at any point in the past, and in our present.
As the reformers of half a millennium ago said of their work, the people of God are always under reformation -- and so (if we are wise) we must carefully build in an openness to correction and growth in light of firmly established core principles into our lives, institutions and the wider civilisation we are a part of.
The slavery case that Lewis highlighted is particularly significant, as it is the one that leads ever so many to think that once the issue of race is injected, they need pay no further attention, they can dismiss those they disagree with as blue-eyed devils, or else as race-traitors. And, who needs to listen to devils in the flesh or race traitors serving devils in the flesh?
This brings out, of course, the deceptive power of the trifecta combination fallacy:
STEP 1: drag a smelly, distractive red herring across a track of thought headed in an inconvenient direction, leading it out toBut they are blue-eyed devils!
STEP 2: a conveniently set up strawman distortion of persons and issues, then
STEP 3: soak in ad hominems [--> attacks to the man] and ignite with snide or outright incendiary attacks, creating a confusing, choking, toxic and polarising cloud of rhetorical smoke that triggers a blind fight and allows one to escape behind the cover of the smoke.
Moreso than we ourselves can be, though our eyes are usually brown?
In short, let us realise that we too can go wrong and can justify ourselves in wickedness beyond belief that serves our perceived interests. For instance, how else can we explain a situation where in the Caribbean we now have several territories with murder rates that are among the highest in the world?
Let us think again.
And in so doing, we may find it helpful to ponder (and yes, I held back the link yesterday) what
________
>>. . . we may read in The Oxford History of the Roman World, [a work that is in other contexts not particularly sympathetic to the Christian view or claims; even by contrast with, say, sympathy to the rampant homosexuality in the ancient pagan Mediterranean world], under the sub-heading "The Church and the End of the Ancient World," on p. 471, that:
.
. . there were questions about [Christian] compromise with the
political and social system. Gregory
of Nyssa boldly attacked the institution of slavery. Augustine
thought the domination of man over his neighbour an inherent
wrong, but saw no way of ending it and concluded that, since the
ordering of society prevented the misery of anarchic
disintegration, slavery was both a consequence of the fall of man
and at the same time a wrong that providence prevented from being
wholly harmful. Slaves were not a very large proportion of the
ancient labour force, since the cost of a slave to his owner
exceeded that of employing free wage-labourers. Slaves in a good
household with a reasonable master enjoyed a security and standard
of living that seldom came the way of free wage labourers. But not
all slaves had good masters, and in special cases the bishops used
the church chest to pay the cost of emancipation. Refusal on moral
grounds to own slaves became a rule for monasteries. [Henry
Chadwick, "Envoi: On taking Leave of Antiquity," in The
Oxford History of the Roman World,
Eds. Boardman, Griffin & Murray, (Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press paperback, 1991), p. 471. Links added. NB:
In the very next paragraph, the contributor goes on to discuss how
the church also deeply disapproved of capital punishment [which in
many cases of course would be by the utterly degrading death on
the cross, and which would thus sharply contrast with Paul's
remarks on the magistrates' power of the sword in Rom 13:1 - 7]
and judicial torture. Indeed, he notes that "[a] Roman
church-order of about 200 forbids a Christian magistrate to order
an execution on pain of excommunication. No Christian layman could
tolerably bring a charge against anyone if the penalty might be
execution or a beating with lead-weighted leather thongs . . .
Torture forced so many innocent people to confess to crimes they
had not committed that the Christian hatred of it commanded wide
assent . . ." In short, the picture is far more complex
than we might have thought.]
Thus,
plainly, there is a longstanding serious question about the basic
morality of slavery and similar institutions in the Biblical and
historical contexts of the church from the C1 on, and the response
to the status quo across the ages reflected an uneasy compromise
with severe reservations by leading Christian thinkers, including
no less a light than Augustine of Hippo.
Then,
in recent centuries, once democratising and reforming forces
gained enough momentum to make a difference in the balance of
power in relevant societies, a powerful [--> and eventually successful, but we must never fool ourselves that he success was easy or predictable . . . ], Christian-based
antislavery movement emerged.
The
case of the American Founding is very important, for both negative
and positive reasons; as Stephen McDowell (2003) aptly observes
here:
America's
Founding Fathers are seen by some people today as unjust and
hypocrites, for while they talked of liberty and equality, they at
the same time were enslaving hundreds of thousands of Africans.
Some allege that the Founders bear most of the blame for the evils
of slavery. Consequently, many today have little respect for the
Founders and turn their ear from listening to anything they may
have to say. And, in their view, to speak of America as founded as
a Christian nation is unthinkable (for how could a Christian
nation tolerate slavery?) . . . .
America's
Founders were predominantly Christians and had a Biblical
worldview. If that was so, some say, how could they allow slavery,
for isn't slavery sin? As the Bible reveals to man what is sin, we
need to examine what it has to say about slavery . . . .
The
Bible teaches that slavery, in one form or another (including
spiritual, mental, and physical), is always the fruit of
disobedience to God and His law/word. (This is not to say that the
enslavement of any one person, or group of people, is due to their
sin, for many have been enslaved unjustly, like Joseph and
numerous Christians throughout history.) Personal and civil
liberty is the result of applying the truth of the Scriptures. As
a person or nation more fully applies the principles of
Christianity, there will be increasing freedom in every realm of
life. Sanctification for a person, or nation, is a gradual
process. The fruit of changed thinking and action, which comes
from rooting sin out of our lives, may take time to see. This
certainly applies historically in removing slavery from the
Christian world . . . .
Some
people suggest today that all early Americans must have been
despicable to allow such an evil as slavery. They say early
America should be judged as evil and sinful, and anything they
have to say should be discounted. But if we were to judge modern
America by this same standard, it would be far more wicked - we
are not merely enslaving people, but we are murdering tens of
millions of innocent unborn children through abortion. These
people claim that they would not have allowed slavery if they were
alive then. They would speak out and take any measures necessary.
But where is their outcry and action to end slavery in the Sudan
today? (And slavery there is much worse than that in early
America.)
Some
say we should not listen to the Founders of America because they
owned slaves, or at least allowed slavery to exist in the society.
However, if we were to cut ourselves off from the history of
nations that had slavery in the past we would have to have nothing
to do with any people because almost every society has had
slavery, including African Americans, for many African societies
sold slaves to the Europeans; and up to ten percent of blacks in
America owned slaves . . . . [Moreover] after independence the
American Founders actually took steps to end slavery. Some could
have done more, but as a whole they probably did more than any
group of national leaders up until that time in history to deal
with the evil of slavery. They took steps toward liberty for the
enslaved and believed that the gradual march of liberty would
continue, ultimately resulting in the complete death of slavery.
The ideas they infused in the foundational civil documents upon
which America was founded - such as Creator endowed rights and the
equality of all men before the law - eventually prevailed and
slavery was abolished. But not without great difficulty because
the generations that followed failed to carry out the gradual
abolition of slavery in America.
[Kindly,
read
the whole article . . . ]
As
can be seen from the relevant history -- including the text of the
US Constitution [Art
I Sect 9 parag. 1] -- the first effective target of that
movement was the Atlantic Slave trade, then (especially in
Britain) amelioration of terms and conditions of slavery, then
finally when it became clear that the abuses and corruption
inherent to the system were incorrigible and utterly at war with
the Christian conscience, the struggle moved on to the difficult
and perhaps impossible agenda: abolition.
(We should not ever make the mistake of looking back and reading
from the fact of eventual success, that this was foreseeable as an
inevitable and obvious outcome of the mere balance of forces at
work at the time! Also, given how deeply blind we can be to moral
objections to our interests, we should also remember how hard it
is to learn
how to see what is now "obvious" to those who are not so
blinded.)
Moreover,
we can see that the modern antislavery movement started from the
logical first point of attack -- the utterly indefensible practice
of kidnapping and transporting human beings into servitude under
horrendous conditions. For, such a target had some prospects
of success, even in the teeth of how strongly Naval and
commercial power were tied to that horrible trade. The reason was
simple: there is simply no biblical or moral defense for "Those
pirates, yes, they rob I. Sold I to the merchant ships . . ."
and the resulting utterly corrupting and abusive chattel slavery
imposed on our ancestors by the Europeans (who had the merchant
ships) and the Africans, Berbers and Arabs who carried out so much
of the kidnapping and selling in Africa.
These
insights in turn easily explain the reluctance of the British West
Indian planters to encourage missionary work, literacy and Bible
reading among their slaves; and also their hostility and suspicion
towards the dissenter missionaries who pursued just these
objectives. But, greed for super-profits plainly blinded the
traders to the serious moral and biblical issues at stake. So,
instead of creating an indentured labour system, which the OT
tolerates and regulates (and which was how for instance the
Pilgrims settled in Massachusetts), the Europeans resorted to
plantation chattel slavery and racism, backed up by unjust laws
passed in the interests of the powerful. Then, they suppressed,
ignored or twisted the scriptures and persecuted those who
protested, to silence their uneasy consciences.
Though,
it should be noted that many who found themselves trapped as
owners of slaves, had the integrity to still object to the
system; in particular including the hopelessly indebted Jefferson,
author of the US DOI of 1776. As McDowell notes, abolitionist and
sixth US President John
Quincy Adams observed
on July 4th 1837:
The inconsistency of the
institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the
Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the
southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and
more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration
himself. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid
to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of
attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally
considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural
step-mother country and they saw that before the principles of the
Declaration of Independence, slavery, in common with every other
mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be banished
from the earth. Such was the undoubting conviction of Jefferson to
his dying day. In the Memoir of His Life, written at the age of
seventy-seven, he gave to his countrymen the solemn and emphatic
warning that the day was not distant when they must hear and adopt
the general emancipation of their slaves. “Nothing is more
certainly written,” said he, “in the book of fate,
than that these people are to be free.”
Thank
God, many dissenting
Christians dared to stand up stoutly for the liberating truths of
the gospel in England, in America and -- starting with black
American Missionary George Liele, who came to Jamaica in 1783 as a
refugee fleeing re-enslavement -- here in the Caribbean. Fifty-one
years after that date, "the Monster" was dead. Then
through an endowment from the people of God in Britain, a network
of free villages was formed, starting the process of economic
liberation. And, within five years of "full free" in
1838, a hundred Caribbean Missionaries went to West Africa -- the
land of our ancestors -- with the gospel.>>
_________
Clearly, professor Lewis -- a member of a minority that has repeatedly suffered brutally at the hands of the West's power brokers for more than 2,000 years -- has a sobering point. Perhaps, we can now begin to find the maturity to respond as he has done.
I think we also need to begin to heed the counsel of Jesus about planks and sawdust in eyes, and we may find it useful to look at rage and self-justifying projection as addictive, destructive attitudinal habits that need the twelve-step recovery process treatment. END
