LAW vs VIRTUE

Cover them all you want by law.
It's what's inside that counts.

These days we have been hearing a lot about "Social Issues" as the central topic of interesting the in political skirmishes in the United States.  We all know that "Social Issues" mean that our august statesmen and women are talking about sex, women, religion and song.  They are not confronting the hard governmental issues of war, peace, domestic and international economics and perhaps maybe even a word or two about how to treat the threat of failure of the United States Postal Service.  These are things that the government should be doing.  It is not the place of the government to attempt at legislating morality.  Here's why.
When I was younger I discovered a disturbing trend in this country.  It is the attitude that a proliferation of laws, rules and regulations can solve all behavior problems.  I was in my early teens and I could see that all the laws in the world were not going to be able to make the world a morally better place in which to live.  The proof of that was even in my own personal behavior.  I did not obey the speed laws.  I was under 21, yet I was allowed to have a glass of wine at the meals when wine was available.  Despite the death penalty people still were committing murder; banks were being robbed; young people were "ditching" classes and wandering the streets; hunters and sports fishermen would bring home illegal game and over-the-limit catches.  The minor breeches of the law were fodder for family gathering stories of bravado and humorous scoff-law braggadocio.
I could never figure out why we had government because I wondered how they could spend all their time at the capitol making laws that no one would obey.  I'm serious.  I was 16, 17, 18 and I couldn't figure it out.  I still can't.
I have to admit that I have come a long way since then.  I now know that we need government.  We need someplace for all these ne'er-do-wells to go.  No matter what they do, they are not going to make anyone's life better, nor worse.  They are just going to take up space and spend time gathering more and more mug shots of George Washington for their own welfare.  Here's how I came to know this.
Start with God.  He creates people.  He gave people the Law.  The people that He makes, break His law constantly.  Have been for centuries.  I could even say, "millennia."   So what are we here trying to do?  Out-perform God?  Think about it for a minute.  PLUS, God gives us the tools we all need to not even need the law if only we would use them properly.  He endows us with a thing called "virtue."  You know what that is.  Stuff like patience, love, honesty, generosity, understanding one another, humility, justice, hope, meekness, kindness and some others that I don't have to enumerate.  With all of that inner ammunition, humans still find a way to do nasty things to one another and to themselves.  So, God went out of His way to give us external guidelines, over and above virtue, for good behavior.  God gave us these things out of the goodness of His heart.  He is the source of all goodness and sacredness.  Now, if He has a hard time with us, how are the money grubbing, arrogant, self centered, self-aggrandizing politicians ever going to be able to make things better for anybody by providing and improvising an infinity of  external rules and regulations?  If God, Who is all good and all sacred can't do it for everybody, how can we, well-practiced law breakers that we are,  pretend to be able to change our fellow humans through an infinite proliferation of more and more external guidelines?  It is insane.  
Only VIRTUE, the internal fortitude to always choose the right thing, can make things better in this world.
I finish by saying that to think that we humans can get by with virtue alone is also insane.  There is no such thing as an absolute and pure unity that is able to solve this conundrum.  It is only through judiciously applied wisdom that we can hope to make life here below better, happier and more peaceful.  Sadly, the application of that wisdom also includes the judicious use of fear.  Oh, boy, this topic can really get to you.  So I leave you with a quote on fear:  "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom."  Some how I wish that our politicians would take that to heart.
Finally.  You now know that I haven't solved the problem I started to have at 17 years old.  I know that I will find the answer in heaven.  For that to happen, I have to die.  So, keep that in mind at my funeral and you won't cry because you'll know that I finally have an answer to this mighty tough question.

OBL -- 2 REACTIONS -- [1] POLITICAL [2] MORAL

[1] All hat. No cattle.  
I suspect that ol' George had good intentions.  After all, he did describe himself as the "decision maker." He did intend to "smoke him out" and to "bring him back, dead or alive."  You wouldn't suppose that his close relationships to the Imperial Wahabi Muslims in Saudi Arabia would have made him just a little gun shy when it came to bringing their kin back on a slab, do you?  
I know that this is a more complex reality than my question indicates.   Therefore, I am moving on to 
[2] the moral considerations that formed the second part of my reaction to the news about the slaying of Osama bin Laden.
Is there anyone among you who would like to stand on a street corner and interview pro-lifers about their moral reaction to the taking of bin Laden's life?
Is there a "pro-lifer" among you who would be willing to admit that sparing bin Laden's life would have been the morally better thing to do?
I am on record as being "pro-choice" and having the opinion that "pro-lifers" are single issue activists who do not appreciate the profound meaning of "choice."  The kernel of my thesis is that if we take "choice" away from ourselves, we deviate from the Will of God who created us with the freedom of choice.  In so doing, we make ourselves less than human.  Therefore, I have always said, and still do, that I am "anti-abortion."  Furthermore, I have, over the years, become "anti-capital punishment."  Yes, even for bin Laden.  Why?  In very few words, here's why.
It makes the world poorer by his absence.  The evil that he represented is after all, not absolute evil.  That means that he did have something good to offer to the rest of humanity, not matter how little.  I am of the opinion that someone, somewhere and at some time could have gotten something valuable from his continued existence in life, even behind bars.  I am so sure of that that I dare say, that it is undeniable that that is true
It diminishes our ability to feel secure in our own virtue.  We now have given ourselves a taste of what it feels like to take the life of another human, for whatever reason.   By participating in that corporate action, from the safety of our comfortable abode, we have participated in a act of revenge, not an act of justice.  An act of justice would be a virtuous act.  True virtue would dictate otherwise. True virtue would make us grow in the Spirit.  Revenge makes us more comfortable in our humanity standing alone, not in relationship with the God that we love and to Whom Jesus introduced us by His Passion, Death and Resurrection.
Finally, it does nothing to diminish the power of evil in the world.  By taking bin Laden's life, we did nothing to cleanse the world of evil.  In fact, we participated in the evil ways of the world by answering cruelty with cruelty.  We all know that there will be more evil engendered by our act of so-called "virtue."  In our post Jesus Christ life, the lex talionis (law of equal retaliation) has been replaced by the law of forgiveness and restitution.  True that bin Laden owes us restitution, but we do not practice virtue by exacting our form of "restitution" on him by violently taking his life.  Besides, his is but one against 3,000.  On top of all this, let's not forget that there are lieutenants of his who will visit us and others with evil acts in return for our vengeful behavior.
I end this altogether too short essay by reminding you once again that you now know why there is to be No Crying at my Funeral.

BEFORE THE 5TH COMMANDMENT THERE WAS THIS

CLEAN SLATE

Here's what God told Noah. "

 from man in regard to his fellow man I will demand an accounting for human life.

6            If anyone sheds the blood of man, by man shall his             blood be shed; For in the image of God has man been made.

7   Be fertile, then, and multiply; abound on earth and subdue it."  (Genesis, 9)
I like gems like this.  Stuff that happened way before the ten commandments.  So much is said about the ten commandments that after a while the power seems to have leaked out of them.  It is probably because  they are thrown at the world without any "back story" support.

We learn in the early chapters of the Bible that murder is a crime that cries out to God for vengeance.  This even before the Law that was given to Moses.  Look at those two clean slates.  Adam ands Eve found a way to screw up even before these two tables were inscribed on Sinai.  I think about this often.  I think about how the life of humans regulates itself from within and, at the same time, has to be regulated from the outside.  Way before the Law was promulgated, Adam and Eve had the order to refrain from a certain act, to not eat of such and such plant.  They couldn't control themselves and they allowed themselves be scammed into doing something that they had been told not to do.  Going forward after that, humans knew that they had a side to them that could be deviated into wrong behavior.  Somehow, internal direction and focus needed to be supported by direction and focus from the outside.  So now we have it.  The interesting part of it all is that now that we have the Law, we have not only the evil itself that we complain about but the Law that is there to help us steer clear of the evil also. Now, what is all that about?  I think I have to go back to my first glimmer of thought, it is because we don't know the "back story."
Along the same line of thought, but coming forward to our day.  We have sometimes heard that the ten commandments are not all that important.  What the heck, didn't Saint Augustine say, "Love and do what you will."  Oh, yeah?  Ha!  Have you given that a try around your house these days?  I'll bet you two Jacksons and a Hamilton that you don't dare.  And, by the way, neither does the Voice from your Kitchen dare.  Yet, we love deeply, but we also know that even if we don't have the Law, we have RULES.  You bet we do.  They are so sacred that we don't even name them out loud.  We just follow them.  Domestic tranquility depends on it.  Mutual respect is encased in "them thar rules."  So, we live within the bounds of two railings, the inner virtue railing and the outer legal railing.  It doesn't matter how much we love.  It matters how much we learn to love our situation, the internal environment as well as the external reality of our nature.  The more we love the Law Maker and the Great Lover, the better is life and the less we have to rely on the external force that makes us do good.  The more we live within the bounds of the internal guide, the happier we are.  If we could free ourselves from the influence of the Law, we would then have attained perfection.  Well, that "ain't gonna happen.  Get used to it."  But since the voyage is where the fun is to be found, it is the struggle to free ourselves from the necessity of the external force so that we can declare ourselves 100% "innies", that straining and stretching for perfection will get us to the Eternal Kingdom of Happiness in the Face to Face glory of God Himself.  That happiness is what will enable us to stop crying at one another's funerals...especially mine.