We hear a great deal about ‘hate crimes.’ Without getting into a tirade on criminalizing thought, I got to thinking about something. Wouldn’t crimes of love be the more dangerous of the two? I am not writing about crimes of passion. My stand up philosophy concerns crimes committed against people for their own good.

God’s law is now written on our hearts and minds. Most, but not all, of us would feel guilty about committing a brutal crime. Getting caught brings these feelings to the surface where we call this feeling our conscience. I write that this is just most people because Satan has his own saints. That is enough on this subject.

Even the most brutal of tyrants eventually has to rest. Brutalizing for your own desires will eventually get tiring. When the tyrant sleeps, his brutality is restrained for a time. He can never be placated for all time; however, there will be moments of peace in the tyrant’s reign.

Louis Dembitz Brandeis wrote that, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.” If this is true on the grand scale, would it not also be a threat to the small, personal scale? Could you justify genocide to ease suffering? What if the victims value their lives? There are places where people are killed to eliminate the expense of caring for them.

It would not be fair to focus on the big crimes. How easy is it to justify theft? The feeling of caring about one group of people makes it easy enough to wrong another group of people. Politicians, except for Girdy, rely heavily on the jealousy of the electorate. Some of these people honestly believe that they are doing a good thing when they are doing things that, done to them, would be a recognizable crime.

The standard of justice was once, “did you act in a way that a reasonable man would act in your place?” This makes sense in terms of jury trial. A collection of ordinary people can tell you how they would have reacted under the circumstances and determine if you are guilty of a crime. Law is written in our hearts and minds. Paper does not even know what is written on its surface.

Yet, if justice is written in the heart, could not injustice also live there? If I am passionate, do I have to be right? Stand up philosophy takes you into the meaning of things that are meaningless. Is not my love a stronger incentive to do wrong than all the resentment on this planet?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.