Church and State

I strongly believe in the union of church and state.  I also believe equally in their separation.  I know that sounds impossible, but it’s not.  It’s based on the understanding that justice is a single concept.  Before we say it’s fair or unfair, human or divine, it has one definition.  That’s how I came to view justice as one rare and valuable coin. 

As the coin has two sides, the head and tail of justice is Church and State.  The two sides of a single coin never share perceptions. They both express themselves and participate in opposing isolated worlds. In this light you can say the two sides have nothing in common.

However the same two sides make up one body and constitute a single value, which means they also have everything in common. In debating the concept of nothing, nothing is achieved.  The concept of everything is also not subject to debate because it contains all perspectives and includes all sides of every argument as well.

What the two sides of one coin of justice will never have in common is something. Something is the substance of ideas that offer food for debate.  Something is an attempt to blend the oil of everything and the water of nothing.  Although the two can be defined, neither is qualifiable. Neither possesses number, shade or degree. Everything is simply all things and nothing is simply no thing.

Something possesses quality.  The list of “somethings” is endless.  It  is upon of the smorgasborg of “somethings” that partisan casseroles are seasoned to delight the argumentative appetites of partisan opinions.  It’s where ideologies feed and grow. Without a “something” to expound no conceptual ideology can manifest, but for every something that is brought into being, along with it comes its opposite. 

  “Somethings” are basically partial ideas extracted from the whole picture.  Divisive minds are highly prone to grab at these partialities and form opinions that match their personal partisanship.  They then use the rational thought process to masquerade opinion as the whole truth.  However, to rationalize is to think and there is no truth in thought or opinion.  Truth can only be unveiled.  It has to do with how you see, not how you think.  Pure reason is anti-divisive because it is to look upon all with equity. Pure reason alone can do the unveiling because it doesn’t distort and cloud the reading of the scales with partisanship.  Truth is read, it is observed, not thought.

The church state debate is merely a redundancy that results from excessive pride and faith given to thought.  It’s an illusory attempt to establish a relationship between what never was, is and never can be divided. If the very essence of debate is a face off, what point can there be in trying to debate what is never face-to-face? What can be resolved?  Is it not the attempt to qualify everything and nothing into a preferential tangible something the very fuel that is generating confusion?  In this light consider the coin of justice and see how it is debased and demeaned when its head and tail are dragged into the Church/State debate

Common sense tell us that despite our loving the head and hating the tail, the fact is we must keep both sides in pristine mint condition. If we protect the one side and batter the other, the whole coin suffers and is made worthless.

We know State’s court is eternally prone to error, that any degree of convincing evidence; eye witness, DNA match or even a signed confession, can send an innocent person to death row.  This says is absolute certainty is not ours, it never was and it never will be. 

Absolute uncertainty is real the depth and breadth of the States court. It’s our states court’s side of the coin of justice in mint condition.It is only in light of our ignorance that we judge in sight of the truth.  It is the realization of our inadequacies that keeps our mental faculties illuminated by the beacon of truth.

The very idea that we can judge with absolute certainty is like hitting our side of the coin with a sand blaster. It’s like setting our capacity to judge with fairness and equity on an anvil and pounding it with a hammer.  A pretense to judge with absolute certainty is man’s practice of judging in the manner and capacity of a god. What it does to justice’s mint value is itself a horrendous crime.

When I consider the many miscarriages of justice past and present, I always look for what they have in common. I found them unanimously seeded by the functionaries of state’s court who engendered in themselves the capacity to judge and punish with absolute certainty.  I could spot at their core, that very “god pretension”.  This is what I’ve come to believe is the very seed of injustice, the very attitude that corrupts states court in the first place. 

I also noticed that states court does its best work when it judges in full light of its uncertainty.  The very mindset of illuminating one’s uncertainty generates humility which in turn stifles false pretense.  It seems as if the attitude of humility, the very recognition of one’s unknowing, is the only state of mind that can yield true clarity.  It appears that to know what is just, I must know in the primary sense what is not just, that being My pretense to judge with absolute certainty. 

We know nothing about Divine and perfect justice.  We don’t know how it works, when it takes place, how it balances out, or what it’s agents are.  We don’t and can’t even know if it works.  However, it doesn’t matter one bit whether we accept or reject it. The most important thing to realize is we cannot control events. In the absolute sense circumstance is entirely outside our scope of understanding.

My only source of amusement in watching politics is counting “Absolutely-s”.  All I hear is “Blah Blah Blah, Blah Blah Blah, Absolutely” (#34).  Knowing it’s a complete and utter blasphemy I love to watch the faces.  Then I love to watch the crowds shout back “Absolutely, Absolutely” (#35, #36).  To me it’s like a cold splash of insanity on my face awaking me to what is sane.  It shows me what I need to avoid like the plague. It clarifies it.

Church is merely “the whole story”, known by, who else but? “The all knowing”.  The role of Church is merely to give light to fact that we don’t, can’t and never will know the whole story, so we won’t go about judging like we do. The actual existence of God or the proof that divine and perfect justice takes place is totally irrelevant.  That’s His side of the coin. We are bound to it as one but we are totally oblivious to His vision and expression.  We are the other side.  We are humanity.  Our sole concern is to realize the true depth and texture of human justice in order to eradicate the original cause of all unjust rulings.

Church is like a mirror in which we view our total reflection, our humanity.  Divine and perfect justice as a mere concept has the power to reflect our inadequacies and incapacities with perfect clarity.  In that clarity we receive direction.

Church is a formula, (the only formula) capable of removing rust and corrosion thus restoring states court to its mint condition. It reveals the presumptions we need to shed in order to perfect human justice to its highest potential.

This is why I believe there is no reason to either enhance the union of Church and State or to accent their separation. In their essential form they are as a coin whose two sides cannot be more united nor can they be made more separate.  Both their union and their separation are absolute and unqualified in the first place.  They merely coincide.  In fact, it is their coincidental union that insures their coincidental separation just as it is their separation that guarantees their perfect union.

I believe the absolute coincidence of church and state is the first and the last truth. I believe the debate between relative “something” opinions can have no true and final victor.  I believe that any victory claimed is but an imagination manifesting in a mind ridden with partisan conceit.  For no matter how reasonable and lofty either side of the argument is made to appear, it merely dresses a half truth to look the whole truth.

Intellectuals who found reason upon rational thought are drawn to debate like a magnet. To those who found rational thought upon the singularity of pure reason, both sides of partisan political debate are talking like drunkards.

This is why I believe the Church/State debate will only be settled when both sides take to heart this one famous saying.  While chatting with the Pharisees and the keepers of the law regarding truth and perfect justice, at one point he said to them; “Because you think you see you are blind, whereas if you knew your blindness you would see”.

 

I believe it is the role of (Church) to illuminate (state’s court) with Indirect lighting.  If all can see and use this light, yet none can claim to know its source, what is there to seed confusion and give substance to debate?

In order to restore the coin of justice to mint condition we need only become understudies to our own inadequacies.  The realization of our limited capacity will move us beyond this retaliatory vindictive paradigm of punitive justice to a new paradigm of compassion, prevention, therapy and healing. 

I believe in an extremely firm rehabilitation guided by humility, recompense, repentance and a willingness to forgive.  I believe it’s the job of the functionaries of states court to heal a single undivided humanity.

Our presuming to both judge good and evil in the manner of a god has only served to divide humanity into more isolated categories of good and evil. It has fueled the endless building of prisons and it both creates and feeds the monster of evil that grows out of our suspicions and sneaks out at night to consume our innocence.

It’s a mistake for man to pass absolute judgment.  It’s a mistake to judge according to specific religious doctrine, A Big Mistake.  That “judgment is mine saith the Lord”. It’s His business and His alone.  Divine and perfect justice is codified in the five major faiths and their sects, but none possesses direct knowledge of it.

We are but the children of doctrine, whereas perfect justice is the mother of all doctrine.  She alone has the power to resolve all conflict between her children, but she must first be recognized as one mother to us all.

I believe perfect justice has no part in dogmatic claims of divine dispensation that give birth to “avenging angels” “ethnic cleansers” and super lawyers who bend truth with no remorse.  The absolute claim to know how God thinks or What God would do in this or that case is no more than the result of delusion. 

I believe when states court achieves a shift in paradigm that evil will assume its proper constructive role.  It will move to establish evil as a recessive gene, an unpronounced existence; the very un-manifest substance by which we know manifest good.  That is achieved only through rehabilitation.  I believe we will come realize that the power to discriminate between good and evil is like a unique and personal tool that has a single job and purpose.  When applied and directed inwardly in the very moment one takes breath, one’s clarity is honed to perfection. Taken out of that specific context, projected outward upon others and the world, all becomes distorted and injustice spreads like wildfire.  True discrimination need not be taught.  It is a state of being that spreads by osmosis.