Healthcare, Hypocrites and History

Let me get this out of the way first. I am glad the Supreme Court ruled as it did on healthcare reform. I think it is good for the country to move in a direction that covers more people and I still support single-payer healthcare. Now, on to what I REALLY want to talk about.

There can be little argument that Jesus dislikes hypocrites. I cannot think of a time when his words about them were anything but damning and condemning. Hypocrisy is something that we must all be careful of and be watchful of in our institutions. Today, it is difficult not to see it all around.

In the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions (really starting with Citizens United in 2010), pundits and activists on the political left have been calling for Justice Scalia to resign. The charges against him are:

1.      Rampant partisanism to the point that his jurisprudence no longer makes sense philosophically. It is just a series of policy statements for one political party.

2.      His behavior out of the court bring the office disrepute as he increasingly politicizes the role of the judge.

3.      His willingness to ignore the law, the constitution and consequences in order to render the decision he wants shows that he has his own political ideals and not the American people in mind.

Serious charges all of them. For my part, the only thing that would make me happier than Justice Scalia leaving the Court would be if Justice Alito was leaving with him. That would be a great moment for the American people and the rule of law.

So as far as the hoped for outcome, I agree with the liberal and progressive pundits in wanting to be see Scalia taking another vocational track away from the Supreme Court. What I cannot agree with is their criticism of him noted above.

Yes, Scalia is partisan, much of his behavior is beneath the role of a justice and he seems more concerned with getting his way than getting the law right. But so was William O Douglas! For nearly four decades, Douglas was the liberal Scalia. He was partisan to the point of openly campaigning for the presidency while still a justice, his matrimonial record speaks to his less than stellar moral makeup, and his propensity for penumbras and wild flights of fancy led to opinions based less in reasoned judicial thought and more in one man's determination to get his way and impose his vision on the nation. One thing Scalia and Douglas have in common is a long string of solo concurrences and dissents articulating their take on an issue in a way that not a single colleague could join.

I wonder how many of the voices baying for Scalia's head on a pike would do the same for Douglas? We know what some of his defenders said. Some of Scalia's staunches defenders in the Congress were there when Gerald Ford tried, unsuccessfully, to get Douglas impeached. These conservatives who were so willing to rid themselves of the liberal Douglas for his politicking and questionable ethics are stunned that anyone would attack a Supreme Court Justice like this! Something tells me that, were they around today, many of Douglas's staunch supporters would be taking up their pitch forks and joining the crowd after Scalia.

It is one of the troubling symptoms of our political times that the sort of hypocrisy inherent in these events goes unnoticed. One of the things Jesus spoke harshly about has become as common as air and as tolerated as traffic.

Justice Scalia is certainly an embarrassment to the Court and the country and he should resign for the good of the institution he claims to hold in such high regard. But let's can the moral outrage. The left is no more concerned with the dignity of the court now than the right was in the early 1970's when they went after Douglas.

It is the height of hypocrisy to tolerate behavior in the one who does as you like while condemning it in the one who does not. It might be a good idea to check your own hypocrisy before going after someone else's. Didn't Jesus say something about dealing with the splinter in your own eye, etc?

God Is More Than a Particle

I am about as far as you can get from being a physicist. Yet I am fascinated by the search for the Higgs Bosson. Commonly called the God Particle, the Higgs is expected to explain why matter has mass. This is evidently important and many scientists are excited about it. My interest is more about the whole solving a mystery of the universe. There is something appealing about cosmic questions.

So what happens if, at the press conference called for July 4, the Higgs exponent scientists declare that they have found the Higgs and it goes from theory to reality? What happens if they find the God Particle?

To be fair to the scientists who have spent years on this experiment, they do not like the moniker "God Particle" to describe the Higgs. It overstates the importance and implies that there will be no more questions after it is discovered. They assure that this is not the case. So finding the Higgs does not mean finding God. But that very fact might just teach us something.

The name "God Particle" took off so easily in part because the Higgs represents what God is to many people in Western society; a mystery that seems far off yet ultimately possible to prove or disprove in the end. We lack a vocabulary for the divine in mainstream society. For those of us who embrace as valuable such ideals such as independent thought, critical thinking and the compatibility of faith and reason in the same mind, the rigid orthodoxy of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism provides little help.

And, to be fair, the silence of mainstream theology has contributed little either.  For the last half century mainstream religion has allowed its vocabulary of faith to be supplanted by the vocabulary of scientific method and proof. For my part, I have no trouble with the scientific vocabulary of contemporary society. It is what keeps science science. However, this one vocabulary is not enough for a full life that includes both belief in God and confidence in science. If faith and reason are to co-exist in one life, we need to learn to be bilingual. We need to learn the language of both.

When the only language you have is uncritical faith and you try to explain the physical world, you end up with creationism and so-called "young earth theory."

When the only language you have is that of scientific proof, you end up with a "God Particle" that cannot live up to its name or the hype.

The world needs both. We need to learn again to hold in our lives the language that empowers humanity's ability to look beyond the atom and understand even more fundamental elements of the universe AND the language that lends the ability to look beyond the horizon of our own imaginations to a reality in the divine that cannot be proven because it cannot be replicated, isolated or controlled.
I was asked in a bible study today, in reference to the idea that we need to be as children to enter the kingdom of heaven, why God would give is critically thinking minds if what God wants is for us to be simple like a newborn. I wish, in retrospect, I had the presence of mind then to say tht what God wants is less about not being critical and more about being humble. In other words, I think God wants us to be bilingual- speaking both the language of faith and wonder and the language of science and reason.

The God Particle is not going to prove or disprove God to us any more than the Bible can prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs. What the Higgs may do is give us an even deeper understanding of the universe and ourselves. As someone who believes that we are all wonderfully made by the hands of God, I can't imagine how that knowledge can be a bad thing.