Senator Magoo?

Jules Crittenden says:

I generally would prefer to avoid political endorsements, but I could get behind a Magoo candidacy.

Thanks, Mr. Crittenden! I don’t think I’d want to move to Massachusetts, though.

Idle Reflection

I’m using sftp instead of plain ol’ ftp to transfer files between two Linux machines, due to the security settings on said machines. Nothing unusual about that, and I only mention it because every time I glance at the sftp> prompt it looks like the computer is telling me to stfu.

That is all.

The Question

I grew up in a Methodist family and (aside from some experimentation with Eastern religion and philosophy in college) I’ve been a Christian all my life. Still, there was always one fundamental question that I never seemed to get a satisfactory answer to: Why did Jesus have to die for my sins? Couldn’t God have forgiven us without sacrificing His Son? I mean, He is God after all… He’s the One who makes the rules, right? And if He had to die, why in such a horrible, brutal way?

Nearly forty years I’ve been asking that question and never had an answer that felt right. The answers either focused on the laws of Moses and how animals were sacrificed to atone for sins, or contained even more vague statements about how God was a God of justice so someone had to bear the punishment for sin. Neither of these answers really worked for me. I kept coming back to “But God makes the rules, right? If He chooses to forgive us, He can do that without some sacrificial ritual can’t He?”

Then I ran across this: Something the Iranian government and I agree on.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

From the BBC article that Eugene Volokh is discussing:

An Iranian serial killer who murdered at least 20 children has been executed in front a large crowd of spectators.

Mohammad Bijeh, 24, dubbed “the Tehran desert vampire” by Iran’s press, was flogged 100 times before being hanged.

…

The crimes of Mohammed Bijeh and his accomplice Ali Baghi had drawn massive attention in the Iranian media.

They reportedly tricked children to go with them into the desert south of Tehran by saying they were going to hunt animals. They then poisoned or knocked their victims out, sexually abused them and buried them in shallow graves.

It has been nearly two years since I ran across this post and I still think about it. While I disagreed with Volokh about this I definitely understood, on a visceral level, why he felt this way. As I was following the responses of the various bloggers, and Volokh’s defenses (and eventual change of heart) the thought struck me: Christ died for that man’s sin.

I suddenly understood clearly what so many people had tried to explain to me before. It isn’t that God needed to sacrifice His Son in order to forgive us, but that we needed the sacrifice in order to accept that forgiveness. We want to see justice done to monsters like Mohammad Bijeh. We want to see them strung up and flogged before being executed. In order for us to accept the forgiveness of God, in order for us to share that forgiveness with the world, we needed to see justice done. Which is why Christ not only has to die, but die in a horrible, brutal fashion. The way we would want to see Mohammad Bijeh die.

It took me four decades to finally get this idea through my head. I always was a slow learner.

Why am I here?

I’ve been cruising various blogs for some time now, but I rarely comment on any of them. The main reason being that when I do have something pertinent to contribute, a quick scan of the comments reveals that someone else has already made the point I planned to make, and I never saw much point in adding “Yeah, what he said” to the comments.

On those rare occasions when (a) I have something to say, and (b) it hasn’t already been said, my comment usually rambles on for so long that I end up deleting it instead of submitting it. On those occasions, I always think “If I’m going to use up this much bandwidth I ought to start my own blog instead of using someone else’s.”

So I finally got around to doing just that. We’ll see what happens with it.