I recently watched a video of one of OJ Simpson’s alleged co-conspirators in a Las Vegas armed robbery holding a Bible and claiming that “I’m a Christian man.” His attorney immediately told him to shut up, which was very good advice. You can claim that his actions were just naive attempts at posturing; however, I see something much more interesting going on.

There’s an indelible link between our ideas of religion and our ideas of justice. More than loving your neighbor, more than forgiveness, more than culture and nationalism, the idea of justice is central to any persistent view of religious thought.

So OJ’s alleged partner in crime wasn’t actually stealing anything. In his mind he was righting a wrong, helping OJ get back his memorabilia that was stolen from him. That is justice, and that’s a religious concept, thus the Bible and his righteous proclamation.

Despite what the Christian Bible actually says, what people view it means is that wrongs will be righted, that the unjust will be punished even violently, and that the just will be rewarded.

You see this contradiction everywhere. The “Bible Belt” is huge on both capital punishment and the Ten Commandments. I suppose “You shall not kill” can be reinterpreted to mean “You shall not murder.” However, “murder” is a political word. One man’s murder is another man’s liberation. Besides all that, the New Testament is full of requirements by Jesus that we forgive our enemies and not retaliate.

What we ultimately strive for in terms of religious spirituality is for justice to prevail. Not to say that things like compassion and forgiveness aren’t extremely important, but these things tend to have relevance in a more personal setting. Individuals forgive for personal reasons. It would be a perversion of justice for societies to forgive criminals regularly without cause.

One of the most common, but strange, questions in religious philosophy concerns the injustice of God. Why do bad things happen to good people and why do good things happen to bad people? I say strange because the question is absurd. God is not unjust. Bad and good things happen for two reasons. First they happen randomly. Second they happen because we make them happen. God has nothing to do with it.

We know from the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) that God on Earth acts in random ways, essentially like nature without any unseen motivation. We also know from the first chapter of the Quran that we must reach out to God in order to be shown the straight path.

This puts the cause of justice squarely in human hands. It’s up to us, not God to remedy injustice. This is a primary pursuit of human activity. We are motivated to create a just world and eliminate injustice.

The interesting suggestion that I would make is that injustice is much more than an element of behavior that humans remedy through criminal punishment. Injustice is innate to nature, and it’s up to us to get rid of it.

For instance cancer is an injustice. It’s unjust for a good person to suffer and die from cancer. Helping cure cancer is part of the fight for justice. A lot of people want to find cures for cancer, and it’s much more than making money or putting your name down in the history books. It is a part of our fundamental drive to make things right.

This idea begs the question of the degree of legitimacy of the US pursuit of justice in foreign lands. Consider that cancer kills over one half a million Americans each year, and now the US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan greatly out number deaths from 9/11 and all acts of global terrorism. I would say that if we prioritized our pursuit of justice, we would have different policies with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan.

We live in a violent world, and America is a violent society. I would suggest that this violence comes from not understanding the concept of justice, and being unjust in our application of government policy.

For instance, many American children join gangs. My claim is that they do this because the framework of justice that they grow up in, both at home and society at large is inconsistent and corrupt. They seek out gangs because within them, justice is swift and consistent in the self contained world of a young gang member. Paradoxically the drive to join a gang in a young person comes from that person’s desire for justice.

And on the global stage, meanwhile, the US hegemonic system of justice is absurd. It’s kind of like the Wild West out there were people are motivated to take justice into their own hands because just power structures are either non-existent or the power structures are unjust themselves. We won’t see any ebbing of challenges to the global power structures until they become just.

Tags: christianity, omar eljumaily, philosophy, politics