I believe that justice is a greater need for people then security…
you can see this in the religious need for people to have justice
done, if not in this life, in the next… and you see this need for
justice in religion…
for it is a principle point of Jesus… he remarks more then once
about how justice is found in the next life… leaving us to wonder
how does justice denied in this life is sufficient for us to live with…
why must we wait for justice in the next life?
the meek shall inherit the earth… this is a form of justice in the
next life…just not in this life…
you don’t see this great need for justice with security or with freedom…
if you don’t have security in this life, you shall have it in the next…
or if you don’t have freedom in this life, you shall have it in the next…
that doesn’t have the same ring, the same feel as “the meek shall inherit the earth”…
thus we can see from a religious context that this search for justice has been with us
since humans have a religious context to their lives and indeed, religion may have
been invented to give us a sense that justice denied in this lifetime will be found
in the next lifetime…
in fact, justice plays a strong role in religions all over the world…
if you are just, you shall be rewarded with heaven…a rather
common refrain of religions…but security or freedom does not
have the same religious context given to them as justice has…
God can be seen as a judge who dispenses justice to human beings…
fail to live to god’s standards and he punishes you, live up to it and he
rewards you… justice is done in terms of your faith or actions in regards to
god and his laws…
in fact, religions can be seen as an attempt to discover the justice that
is not found in our daily life…we turn to religions because we fail
to find justice in our day to day life…that shows us the importance of justice
to us human beings…
but in the 20 century, we cannot fall back on religions to secure for us
the justice we so seek in our lives… as we cannot turn to religions,
what do we turn to in some attempt to have justice, even if that
we turn to don’t exist in real life… we have created a mythology of
superhero’s to dispense justice in our world… we are so in need
of justice we have created superhero’s like batman and superman to
salve our need for justice…
in fact, our need for justice is so strong, we may be
people who seek justice first and foremost… whereas Aristotle
wrote that people seek happiness and theologians wrote that people
seek god, we see now that we actually seek justice…
and the great stresses in our society comes from justice being denied,
both individually and within the society… the winter of our discontentment
comes from us seeing that our modern age is an age of justice being denied…
the Jews of the holocaust…Sacco and Vanzetti…the deaths of millions in our
world wars…we see this in the cultural wars of the last 30 years…
health care is an issue of justice… for we see that people often are denied proper
health care which is an injustice for reasons like preexisting conditions and the cost of
health care… we deny health care to people because they can’t afford it and that
is injustice… thus leading us back to why liberals value justice over security…
justice denied within a society damages the society… it was once believed in America that
it was better to allow 100 guilty people to go free then one person found guilty who was
innocent… we have lost this notion because we want justice and we don’t care how
we achieve it and who we hurt to achieve it…
we have allowed our anger and hate to influence our notion of justice…
when we commit injustice, we damage our souls and when we act justly,
we improve our souls… that is why we must seek out and find justice
and do battle with injustice…it is about saving ourselves… we can
find salvation in finding justice…and this may be the only true way to find
salvation in our searching for justice…
Kropotkin