It is incredible that just last month many people around the world held Easter services in celebration of their belief that the tomb in which Jesus of Nazareth was lain, after being publicly executed by crucifixion, was later found to be unoccupied. In most parts of the world, at least where different belief systems are allowed to exist, these commemorative events were allowed to occur without protest even though many other people doubt the assertion that Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead. But simply dismissing the verifiable public execution of this known historical figure is neither a strong personal nor a defensible academic position. There are more ancient sources verifying the existence of Jesus than that of the existence of Socrates, and these accounts include many extra-biblical sources. So, in lieu of being eyewitnesses to the actual event through some future quantum teleportation device currently being glued together in some kid’s basement, we will just generally agree in this blog that the execution of this man by crucifixion did occur. The Romans created and commonly used this process to kill people in a horrible way apparently not only as a strong deterrent to crimes against the state, but also so that we could have a very descriptive English word in order to describe unendurable pain and suffering. Our word “excruciating” comes from their Latin root which literal means of “out of the cross” as a description of the torturous death of those whom they crucified. You can choose to believe or to not believe that Jesus rose from the dead, we all decide the things which embrace as “truth” as a function of our often calamitous free-will, but we cannot easily dismiss through denial that this man was actually here on earth, that he lived in that time, or that he was crucified under Roman authority at the bequest of an angry mob.
As demonstrably fallible as both we and our precarious opinions are one would think that humans should always, as a general rule of survival, make a conscious choice to seek the #truth in all things and to pursue it no matter how inconvenient and uncomfortable any specific fact pattern becomes. Particularly in public matters when we blatantly do not even try to seek the truth and subsequently deny it when it is shown to us, then we become nothing more than a pathological collective of petulant incubi and succubi mindlessly serving our equally dishonest master. As cities living in societies we must all do our very best to #believe the actual truth of a matter when it becomes known to us, and all citizens must at least be brave enough to admit that they neither know, nor completely understand, the absolute truth about everything. In fact, most of our positions on big topics, such as what happens after you die, are explicitly positions of faith that we have taken because we most certainly cannot say will happen in a future that we have not experienced. So, whether you choose to believe that God made everything including human beings and that there is a subsequent moral order to the universe under the authority of a creator, or if you otherwise determine that every single orderly thing in this precisely organized universe somehow sprang from the vacuum of absolutely nothing and you are as much of a god of this anarchic chaos as the next soulless zombie grabbing at all that they can get, you are solely responsible for whatever you choose to believe and you are directly responsible for whatever actions you take as a result of any flaws in your own belief system.
Therefore, we must all be extremely careful with the choices that we make about the opinions which we form, especially ones formed from the input of other people, because our personal beliefs always come with consequences. I personally feel that it is far more unimaginable that the precise order and inherent design present on Earth today somehow came from the chaos of universal nothingness than to believe that God created everything in ways that I cannot fathom, and then subsequently sent his son in order to be crucified and resurrected for our benefit. This is my own consequential opinion of course, but please also consider the net result of believing that everything came from absolutely nothing and therefore I am, or you are or possibly should be, the de facto god of everything. With this belief system in place one must careen headlong towards the nothingness from which one came throughout a pointless life and the individual must determine what is right and what is wrong, differentiate good from evil, and decide on the meaning and purpose of everything else in the universe because each person is, in fact, a divine and supreme being completely capable of self-organization and self-fulfillment. If you believe that this is true of you, please stop reading this blog since you already know everything and continuing is pointless. But if you know that you are neither #omniscient nor #omnipotent and are still reading this blog, you will discover an #Easter season twist because this is neither a post about #Jesus nor about the resurrection that many celebrated this year, but rather this post is about #Barabbas and the crowd that let him go because they failed to condemn all political violence.
You see the Roman Prefect to whom the death penalty case of Jesus came to adjudicate was named #PontiusPilate, and Chief Justice Pilate did not believe that Jesus deserved death by crucifixion or by any other means. Most historical accounts of this man recount him as a draconian tyrant of a ruler, but somehow even he could clearly see that Jesus had not done anything egregious enough even by his loose standards to justify crucifixion. Jesus was clearly hated by the local religious sect, a rabid mob not at all dissimilar from the many mobs in our society that are now routinely formed around polarizing opinions and whose proselytes then fervently spew their version of #THETRUTH onto everyone else non-stop as if to help solidify their own belief in their new mantras. But from Pilate’s perspective, as an official of Rome, the accused man’s feud with his religious accusers certainly was not a problem that the Roman Empire needed to address. The religious leaders tried to condemn Jesus for sedition, and they apparently believed that by making him appear to be an #ExistentialThreat to Rome that Pilate would help them get rid of his #ProblematicOpinions. But Pilate did not like being manipulated and, after talking to Jesus and finding no fault in him at all, he countered their demands to crucify Jesus with an offer of crucifying someone who was an actual direct threat to everyone’s safety and freedom instead. The Biblical record says that this person, #Barabbas, was a “notorious criminal”1 and that he had apparently been involved in acts of sedition and murder among other crimes that were actually worthy of crucifixion under Roman law. To Pilate’s amazement when he offered to set one man or the other free, either the religious man who healed the sick and had harmed no one or the murderer who was a threat to everyone, no matter how he worded it the crowd still cried out for the guilty Barabbas to be released to them and for an innocent Jesus to be crucified. When he could not convince the crowd to not only stop the unjust murder of an innocent man but also to not free an obviously guilty one, Pilate washed his hands of the whole affair. He departed the scene after infamously quipping: #WhatIsTruth? 2 in a microphone drop moment heard around the world, and an innocent man was horribly murdered to try and placate a rabid mob.
But certainly, in this modern age, we would not celebrate the death of an innocent person while crying out for the guilty to be released . . . would we? A modern comparison cannot be as clear as the crucifixion of Jesus in lieu of a criminal like Barabbas because we are all guilty of many things which fall short of being righteous. So, none of us are, and none of us can ever be, completely #Innocent. This is probably why there are constant #VirtueSignals on social media as people carefully select and research causes that they can champion in order to look righteous and good to the mob, all while monitoring pseudo-moralistic positions obsessively for support from as many “followers” as possible. We do this so that we not only appear to be more virtuous, but also so that we appear wiser than other people, especially those with whom we disagree. And as we continually conform our own thoughts to the confines of #GroupThink like a bunch of mindless sheep, the world continues to change around us and we have to constantly shift our positions in order to remain relevant as our group rapidly becomes more radical in order to garner more attention. You see, by comparing ourselves to other people we can momentarily feel superior to others because we are not as bad that person in the eyes of an angry mob. But there is a moral law written upon every human heart and we inherently know the difference between right and wrong from a very young age so, as the wrongs add up, we must constantly find more ways to lie to ourselves about the truth in order to cover our wrongs.
Pilate knew that Barabbas was evil, but he succumbed to a mob of rioters just to make the issues his public persona faced in that moment go away. He was a weak ruler and many of his policies had backfired on him, so he knew that he would face more scrutiny from Rome for failing to control a riotous mob than for murdering one innocent man. However, in his haste to placate the mob by condemning an innocent man to a cruel death, he never even bothered to try and answer his own question about the truth. The truth of what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, is not some political position posited by media and academic propagandists that you can recite until it becomes a perceived reality, the truth is the very knowledge of what is good and what is evil and it is written on your heart.3 This is why you feel bad when you do bad things and this is why you have bouts of #conscience around decisions that may not be wholly just. You can, and most people do, learn to fight off the negative feelings that the ingrained knowledge of good and evil gives us with distractions and pleasures of all kinds. But that instinctual knowledge of good and evil is in our hearts for a reason, and the pursuit of evil in spite of our knowledge of the truth always eventually results in the same harvest: Rotten fruit. So, why don’t we agree to look for the real #justice and the real #truth that we are expecting to find in the world around us deep inside of our own hearts before we justify destructive actions against others which will only lead to anarchy and death? Why don’t we look inside ourselves and put the person being murdered and attacked amongst our own loved ones before we do something despicable like gunning down an innocent couple because of either their nationality or their political decisions, attempting to set people on fire whom we do not know but have somehow decided that we do not like or those whom represent authority in our society, or before we do something unconscionable like creating a fan pages for a murderer who shot someone in the back because we think that he is cute?
And now I can make an obvious point which is perfect for this moment in time: Crying out for the release of the criminal Barabbas is no different than crying out that a criminal like Luigi Mangione is a “morally good man.” Deciding to believe in the falsehoods that others represent evil and that we, the good stewards of the universe, should have the authority to kill them as we see fit is a vile and evil line of thought. You know that this is true, so you should therefore fight to overcome the malignant idiocy spreading through the world around you that says otherwise and carefully consider why such destructive thought lines are being propagated. That the good vs. evil seed is effective for manipulating mobs is readily apparent since it is always placed into belief systems which subsequently require mob action in order to assert greater control by some dissident group. It can easily be used to build an anarchistic narrative about Western capitalism being bad and the freedoms that have sprung from it are worse so that one group can effect change and shift power to themselves using violence. Rioting is done in lieu of peacefully debating the facts around their assertions in order to determine the merit of the “new” ideations which are being propagated. The ostensibly “peaceful” protests of yesteryear now all seem to lead quickly to riots, and eventually these dissident, delusional ideologies all lead directly to the murder of human beings whom happen to be Jewish, or black, or white, or an executive at a corporation, or a politician, or a judge, or a police officer, or any other group member that can be easily #Othered and targeted for the not especially well- hidden purpose of destabilizing western governments. These evil thought seeds are actively being sown by those whom #Hate freedom, and they actually are taking root in the minds of our #Free citizens through unfettered growth in online #ThoughtSilos which are subsequently cultivated by pompous university elites living in imaginary worlds and ivory towers. So, let me be crystal clear on this issue: Any justification that you can viciously attack and even murder those with whom you think that you disagree is a lie whispered by Satan and is as old as humanity itself. Think of the arrogance and the pride that goes into the thought process which leads to a belief system that will support cowardly attacks on, and even the rogue assassinations of, innocent people whom the attackers do not even know! There is no justification for this mindset and turning yourself in after the event or leaving a manifesto explaining the way you believe that the world should work does not make you a hero, it makes you a delusional fiend.
It seems that the West, which is both mother and father to all the personal and collective freedoms that exist in the world today, somehow must be made into an evil empire in order to galvanize the minions to destroy their fellow citizens and set fire to their own countries. Apparently, having successfully implemented freedom of speech inside of the only system that allows equal access to opportunity for everyone has created dissidents amongst our citizenry whom now believe that our society must be attacked and destroyed BECAUSE there is too much freedom at the individual level. More freedoms at the individual level translates into less power for the State to wield, and this equates to less personal power for those behind the curtain pulling the levers. Those who buy the lie that the Western States must be destroyed also fail to acknowledge that the richness of being, an individual state one has when one is at peace with the world around them however messy it may be and is truly happy within oneself,4 is a much greater treasure and a more worthy goal than the pursuit of fame, fortune, or even of popularity and political power. Please understand this point: In order for the Western system of governance to die individuality, and all of the individual freedoms that have been granted to every single one of us by this same system, must die first.
The mindset that is fixated on the death of the West projects the image of the redistribution of wealth and the re-consolidation of power for the benefit of everyone equally and blah, blah, blah . . . But oddly the utopic delusion they are projecting for some great future world desperately needs objects of common hatred to attack in order to disguise what they are actually doing: Breaking down civil society brick by brick. They also need some simple phrases to repeatedly shout at all of the “others” whom are not destroying their own towns and cities, and the Nazi / Fascist tropes being overused presently leap to mind here. These repetitive slogans are used to increase conformity of thought by completely shutting down any consideration for what the now #Nazi labeled person is saying, and this is done in order to inflame emotions so that they can direct actions of violence and sedition for their growing legions of minions to take. Somehow, the blatant fact that all of this nonsense is a thinly veiled effort to grab power in order to consolidate and control all of the masses and mobs including their own minions is blatantly missed by the mobs being manipulated into violence. The death of America continues to be touted as a great idea by those whom want to shift the power from the Constitution and our existing rule of law system to some ostensibly benign ruling body that that is existentially proposed to make us all suddenly more equal, while we all have to become paradoxically less free. These same people profess to have undeniable moral authority over all things and can somehow speak with absolute certainty about a future that will be better without this group, or that person, etc. Be very careful BELIEVING this lie because power changes everything! All groups seeking to usurp existing power structures only reveal their real hierarchy and rules once their power is birthed into being, it is never revealed while their path to power is being conceived and pursued! But I digress from the real point at hand today: Assassinating people in our society, either citizens or lawmakers, is not a morally justifiable action and believing that it is not only makes you a liar, but it also makes you an accomplice to the downfall of our nation.
Even if you believe that the person(s) who was murdered - and recent references include a healthcare executive who was a family man, a young Jewish couple who had their whole lives ahead of them, and now elected officials in #Minnesota - have somehow perpetrated crimes for which he or she or someone else should be held accountable, the acts of vigilantism that took these lives and injured these people were not righteous deeds, they were despicable acts of evil. Even in the Wild West where challenging someone to a duel to the death in the street was allowed for a period of time, shooting someone in the back or ambushing them at their residence would get you hung for cowardice. Therefore, these actions were not some grand but misguided gesture towards some imaginary future better state of being, or some morally good deed as one of these crimes has been called by current social commentators: They are acts of cowardice and evil. Saying otherwise and celebrating the gunman puts you right in the middle of the crowd yelling for the release of Barabbas and the death of Jesus Christ.
There is also no justification when circular, #CloudCrowd - reasoning is used to suppose that firebombing certain vehicle dealerships, which are owned by someone that cloud-crowd pack behavior demands should be hated and reviled, is in any way acceptable. It is certainly not acceptable to riot and damage the property of others just because the world is not working exactly the way that you want it to work at this present time. Can you really justify damaging someone else’s property just because you do not agree with them on this or that point? Property is actually protected under the Constitution in the United States,5 so by having these infantile public temper tantrums and destroying personal property you are exceeding the boundaries of your own freedoms and infringing upon the rights and freedoms of others. And I think that this question, as ludicrous as it is, must be asked of those whom seem to believe that constantly rioting in order to sow the seeds of sedition is OK. The question of the day is this:
If Timothy McVeigh took a truck full of explosives and parked it next to the Tesla factory and detonated it today, just like he did at a federal building in #OklahomaCity 30 years ago last month, would you celebrate him because his evil act is now serving what you, in all of your self-righteous wisdom, deem to be the greater good?
If you would, for any reason, celebrate such a colossal evil as this then you have a serious problem accepting the reality of the interconnectedness in the world around you and you are also specifically denying the sanctity of the lives of others. This is a dangerous philosophy: That your ideas are so righteous and true that killing and harming those with whom you disagree is morally justified and, in fact, thinking this way makes you a #Nazi. The protesters whom are now holding signs with the moniker #Spartacist are certainly trying to invoke images of the attempted communist uprising in 1919 Germany, but I would like to point out that my utilization of the word “Nazi” also comes from the same time period. #NAZI is a 1920 word for a German group that was formed with the same idea of a common worker’s party for the greater good: the Nationalsozialist or the National Socialist, aka the #NAZI party. If you and your ideas about a future state of governance are so great that you can justify the torching of personal and corporate properties of those with whom you disagree or whom you do not like (Anyone remember Kristallnact?), you are a #Nazi. If you can gleefully applaud the assassination of private citizens, political figures, or persons of certain nationalities, races, and religions, or any other orientation or sub-groups of “others” that you can come to hate enough to eventually “see the logic” around trying to eliminate them on scale just like the Nazi party did in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, you are a #Nazi. And if you can think that setting either your fellow citizens or the police and emergency personnel on fire until you can start using Zyklon B to kill them in mass is a justifiable use of your freedoms, then just pull your #Nazi jackboots on and goosestep to the front of the line because you are 100% confirmed as a #Fascist and should be leading the parade!
Mr. McVeigh received the Death Penalty from a jury of his peers, and he deserved it. ALL of those whom continue to act exactly like him, as well as all of those celebrating the ideations which inspired the murders of #BrianThompson, #SarahMilgrim, #YaronLischinsky, #MellissaHortman and her husband Mark, as well as the recent attacks on peaceful marchers in Colorado, other political figures, and law enforcement officers in California and other places, will certainly deserve the same fate if they either attempt or actually do commit murder. If you see the world through a lens that is so opaque that you believe that your opinions elevate you enough to make you want to act like God, and that you are so bereft with grief over the fact that other people do not put the same credence in your ideas that you just have to attack and try to kill them, then please acknowledge that you are having a mental health crisis and tell one of the voices in your head to dial 9-1-1 and get help! The opinions that you have formed and now hold as treasured beliefs do not make you a god any more than they can transform those with different opinions and beliefs into devils. We must all be very careful about harboring hatred in our hearts for others simply because of who they are, where they are from, what they believe, or how they serve society. Hatred and intolerance act as the triggers for man’s inhumanity to man which, once pulled and the bullets are released in full-auto format, cannot easily be deflected and often cause catastrophic harm to everyone.
No #BarabbasLovers, we certainly cannot justify attacking the property and personhood of those with whom we do not agree! Where did all of this fatal opinion fragility and unbridled #Fear come from, by the way? I believe that it is at least partially from our internet driven media addictions that leads to a state of unnatural and constant interconnectedness, as well as the algorithmic herding that is pushing us all into #ThoughtSilos so that we can all be labeled and categorized. This is an efficiency that will be appreciated at that point in time when all of the so called #AntiFascists become the de facto #Fascists that they really are, and start punishing those with different points of view in mass. One needs to look no further than certain parts of Europe where those whom are deemed guilty of some #MindCrime for thinking differently than those in power, are promptly arrested for #HateSpeech and are given longer prison terms than the rapists and other dangerous villains whom seem to get virtually unlimited free passes to commit crimes against civil society at will. To think that, after we were given an unprecedented amount of freedom in this nation and in the West, now those with the most freedom in the world are trying to find a way to destroy all freedom for everyone is morally repugnant and disgusting to me as a #Veteran. Especially since we just celebrated #MemorialDay where we supposedly remembered those whom have died in the quest to secure these same freedoms, and the US Army is now celebrating 250 years of doggedly defending ALL of our freedoms around the globe at great personal cost to themselves after they all #Volunteered to do it! There are more than 400,000 reasons at Arlington National Cemetery alone to not give up our individual and collective freedoms so easily. All of our freedoms, including the freedom to peacefully protest, were bought with a price and that price was paid by other people in blood. Constantly screaming your opinions at others, blocking roads, throwing rocks and starting fires is not a good use of the #FreedomOfSpeech, especially if you never bother to open your ears and really listen to the ideas and opinions of others. This type of behavior is an arrogant foolishness and it is rooted in the pride of life so we all need to fight against it by actively listening more than we speak and having civil discourse with one another regardless of our world views.
Even for all you #BUBA folks out there (pronounced BOOB-AH, to differentiate from all of the BUB-BAH’s already in existence, as an acronym for the Bring Us Barabbas Again crowd), assuming that you are divinely right enough to kill others for their opinions is unconscionably wrong. I will use the term #BUBA so that I do not invoke the name of the killer whom you choose to revere, because you do not get to hate and even kill those human beings whom happen to hold different opinions than you on social issues. You do not get to celebrate these cold-blooded murders by lionizing the murderers and making the evil actions that led to these assassinations and other attacks appear to be justified in any way. You certainly should not try to force your half-cocked academic ideations upon a world that does not want them, and where they have objectively never worked out for the good of those whom they were supposed to help, by harming the lives and properties of other people. Caution, #Narcissus, staring at your own beautiful ideas and the images that they create for you is a trap: Because human existence is actually not all about you. Traveling in the direction of violent dogmatism and tyranny has brought humanity every malady from the #COVID pandemic, a paper mask wearing fiasco that continues in certain circles to this day, to the invasion of Poland which started World War II and that led to both the Holocaust and the purges of Stalin. Abort the doomed bayonet charge up Dogma Hill soldiers of “absolute truth,” avert your eyes from your own reflections and remove your ears from the echo chambers of your own #ThoughtSilos so that you can see and hear other people. Some of them may actually have ideas with some merit that can help shape a more accommodating and realistic world view, especially since they are different than yours. What if we choose to believe that there a better path forward for humanity may actually exist but that we can only discover it together, does this change your perspective of those on the other side of your political chasm at all?
If the thought of better futures together does not move your needle, please remember that all historic attempts at extermination of and domination over a specific people group, from Rwanda to Cambodia and beyond, have always been perpetrated by minions whom could neither individually nor collectively find the strength to say “no.” History is rife with tales of the many whom were deluded enough by the few to believe that killing their fellow humans on scale was somehow morally right. And to be clear, Adolf Hitler did not kill all of those people in WWII and, quite possibly, he never actually killed anyone himself after his military service during WWI. But rather it was his poisonous ideas that, when adopted and elevated by those whom were searching for definitive answers in themselves, gave power to his homicidal ideations and led to the deaths of millions of people. That many millions of people just like you and I chose to believe that some group of #Others, even those whom were formerly neighbors and fellow citizens, did not have an inherent and moral right to exist on this planet is a global absurdity which we have neither the societal nor the survival discretion to ignore. History has demonstrated that some group has to be made into the #Scapegoat in order to mobilize a revolutionary power purge, but also history clearly reveals that those whom do the work against the “others” in the name of the revolution are actually just used up like any other patsy and discarded. Perhaps they did not understand that they were just being led from one pen on the #AnimalFarm into another even more restrictive one, or that killing the #Others really only served to make more room for themselves to be crushed under the eventual jackbooted heel of another oppressor. #Napoleon from Animal Farm did not wear jackboots in Orwell’s fictional story and neither did the historical Jesus from the Bible, but only one of these did not abuse his power by imprisoning and killing those with different opinions.
You can choose to believe the words of Jesus or not, but his death created a perfect picture of the imperfect nature of human justice and he was crucified on an ugly cross while trying to show us how to live and to love more perfectly. You will not be celebrated for having a different opinion than any of the rabid mobs currently fomenting hate in our society, but you must take a concrete position to never placate terrorists such as those whom perform attacks that target other groups and individuals within those groups. We must all unequivocally denounce violent attacks on any group or individuals in our society. This #jackassery cannot be tolerated if we expect to have either civil discourse or a civil society. The anarchist mindset may be popular in certain circles right now with elevation of the “delay, deny, and depose” mantra, or the use of other word ploys designed to make complex global issues seem to have simple solutions. So, you may certainly lose “friends” or even be personally attacked if you separate yourself from the hateful herds of minions stampeding through our country and the world today. But if you commit to following truth-based opinion seeking as you form beliefs about the world and engage in respectful dialogue with those whom may hold different opinions than you, your actions and words may influence others to also act in more positive and productive ways. Clearly, if you choose to follow this different path and to seek the objective #truth while maintaining your own dignity and insisting that others be treated with dignity also, you may suffer harm. But, in the end, if it is freedom that you really want, then truth is the only thing with the power to actually set you free.6
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1. Matthew 27:16, NIV.
2. John 18:38, NIV.
3. Jeremiah 31:33, NIV.
4. See Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor A. Frankel. The author was imprisoned in a death camp by the Nazis but, as a trained Psychologist, he was used as a medical doctor for the prisoners. With almost no supplies and with little food or hope, Dr. Frankel mainly just observed the other prisoners. He noticed that while some would fight and harm their own family members in order to get on a departing train which was only going to another death camp, there were other people who seemed to be at peace regardless of their circumstances. He was fascinated by these people, they clearly stood out from the crowd of anxiety ridden prisoners fighting for scraps while being starved to death on their way to some extermination event. His experiences in the concentration camps of World War II watching people at peace with the world at war around them led him to the creation of a new school of psychotherapy known as Logotherapy, where a human beings will to find meaning in, and to derive purpose from, life is prioritized above pleasure and other base philosophical drives and instincts which have been propagated by Dr. Freud and others.
5. In the US Constitution, property rights are protected under what is known as “Due Process” and expressed in the important concept that no one “shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” So no, you cannot burn down Tesla dealerships or destroy the property of others because it is not only a crime, it is a Constitutional tort and as such it directly undermines the basic tenants of all of our collectively enjoyed freedoms. And also no, the other citizens whom are being harmed are not obligated to sit by placidly and watch as you inflict harm upon them, so it is advisable to stop both the obstruction of liberty (e.g. blocking roads upon which people need to travel to go to work) as well as the destruction of property (e.g. everything which you do not personally own).
6. In John 8:32, NIV, Jesus told the Jews whom had believed him that if they held to his teachings that they would know the truth, and that the knowledge of truth would set them free.