Senator sues God

News about the trial of Jodie Arias and the horrendous murder of  Tim Bosma in our area last week got me thinking about trials, juries, and justice, particularly issues around sentencing and the death penalty.

My musings eventually led me to the dramatization of  Dostoyevski’s story of The Grand Inquisitor and the sentencing of Christ to die again, by the Church itself.  See my most recent blogs…  and I also discovered other lawsuits against God, which I will blog about  later.

Here is a  suit from only five years ago, in  Nebraska.  Listen to the video… outrageous though it may be, Senator Chambers really sounds quite reasonable and convincing.  His efforts reminded me of the way Greenpeace  cleverly uses “peaceful direct action and creative communication” to expose folly and abuse.

Wikipedia gives us the details here:

In the U.S. state of Nebraska, State Senator Ernie Chambers filed a suit in 2008 against God, seeking a permanent injunction against God’s harmful activities, as an effort to publicize the issue of public access to the court system.^[1] The suit was dismissed because God could not be properly notified, not having an address. The Judge stated, “Given that this court finds that there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant this action will be dismissed with prejudice“.^[1] The senator, believing God to be singular and all-knowing, responded “The court itself acknowledges the existence of God. A consequence of that acknowledgement is a recognition of God’s omniscience … Since God knows everything, God has notice of this lawsuit.”^[1][2] Chambers filed the lawsuit in response to another lawsuit that he considers to be frivolous and inappropriate.^[3]

In response to Chambers’ case, two responses were filed. The first was from a Corpus Christi lawyer, Eric Perkins, who wanted to answer the question “what would God say”.^[4] The second was filed in Douglas County, Nebraska District Court. The source of the second response, claiming to be from “God”, is unclear as no contact information was given.^[4]

On July 30, 2008, local media sources reported the Douglas County District Court was going to deny Chambers’ lawsuit because Chambers had failed to notify the defendant.^[5] However, on August 1, Chambers was granted a court date of August 5 in order to proceed with his lawsuit. “The scheduling hearing will give me a chance to lay out the facts that would justify the granting of the motion,” Chambers was quoted as saying. He added, “Once the court enters the injunction, that’s as much as I can do,” he said. “That’s as much as I would ask the court. I wouldn’t expect them to enforce it.”^[6]

However, a judge finally did throw out the case, saying the Almighty was not properly served due to his unlisted home address.^[7] As of 5 November 2008, Chambers filed an appeal to the Nebraska Supreme Court.^[8] The former state senator John DeCamp and E. O. Augustsson in Sweden, asked to represent God. Augustsson’s letters, mentioning the Bjorn (see the BjornSocialist Republic) were stricken as “frivolous”. The Appeals Court gave Chambers until February 24 to show that he notified DeCamp and Augustsson of his brief,^[9] which he did. The case was finally closed on February 25 when the Nebraska Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal and vacated the order of the district court. The court quoted cases according to which “[a] court decides real controversies and determines rights actually controverted, and does not address or dispose of abstract questions or issues that might arise in hypothetical or fictitious situation or setting”.

Come back tomorrow for more!

Temptation

While writing about great trials yesterday, I thought of The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamozov. Several translations of this famous story within a story, chapter five of Dostoyevski’s great novel, are available online.

Then I also discovered that it was filmed by John Gielguld in 1975.

Wikipedia summarizes the key points this way: The Inquisitor frames his denunciation of Jesus around the three questions Satan asked Jesus during the temptation of Christ in the desert. These three are the temptation to turn stones into bread, the temptation to cast Himself from the Temple and be saved by the angels, and the temptation to rule over all the kingdoms of the world. The Inquisitor states that Jesus rejected these three temptations in favor of freedom, but the Inquisitor thinks that Jesus has misjudged human nature. He does not believe that the vast majority of humanity can handle the freedom which Jesus has given them. The Inquisitor thus implies that Jesus, in giving humans freedom to choose, has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer.

Online there are also learned explanations from many viewpoints: literary, religious, and philosophical.  I found this article from the New York Times particularly informative, and it concludes by posing the dilemma faced by the Inquisitor… and by extension, all of us… the choice between diabolical happiness and unendurable freedom. It is worth reading!

The problem of the existence of evil…

Here in southern Ontario to-day we seem to be staring at pure evil, senseless and tragic beyond belief. After a week of intensive searching, police announced this morning that they have found the body of Tim Bosma. I am too upset to write about it.  If you live anywhere near here, you know the story as it has unfolded so far.  If not, I am sure you can learn about it from many online sources.

Not since the murders by Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka, and Jonathan Yeo in the early 1990′s has this community been so emotionally affected by criminal activity.

This afternoon, returning from a wonderful fiber art show in Wellington County, we drove through the peaceful rural landscape of rolling hills and prosperous farms. Everything looked so perfect. But there is evil even here.

The question, as always, is why?

Law and Order

Perhaps I have watched too many Law and Order reruns.  I just discovered a British version on DVD at the library and they were almost as interesting, even without the wisecracking of Greevey, Cragen, and Logan.

Trials are fascinating, particularly those that move beyond assigning blame and address moral and ethical dilemmas in contemporary situations. I brainstormed a list of favourites, and these came immediately to mind…

Do read beyond the list, because I found other interesting things as well…

Law and Order

The Crucible

A Man for all Seasons

A Tale of Two Cities

Trial at Nuremburg

Inherit the Wind and recent documents about Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District

To Kill a Mockingbird

Snow Falling on Cedars

The Caine Mutiny

The Moon also Rises

The Apology of Socrates

Rashomon

The Gospel narratives

In Cold Blood

I “googled” the topic “movies about trials” and found  two fabulous websites:

The first is devoted to what aspiring lawyers should know, from many aspects of contemporary life and culture… movies for the law student.

The second is from Business Insider… the ten greatest trial movies of all time.  How could I have forgotted Twelve Angry Men?

Come back tomorrow for more intriguing information I found!

Jodi and the Jury

Jodi Arias testifies

Think of the Jodi Arias trial.

How, who, where, what and when were answered with mind- numbing detail, but  will we  ever know  why she killed her lover?

That’s were prurient curiosity about the shocking violence comes up against the real human tragedy.

Why can this happen?

Why can there be such overwhelming ugliness and evil?

Should she live or die? And what are the arguments for either?

Our television was unavailable during the front room renovations, and I knew nothing about the case until the summation. So instead of having it drag out for weeks of numbing detail, for me it was real courtroom drama, raw and unexpected. Like the fascinating trials of literature and screen that I will list in the next blog.

I was quilting with friends the day after the guilty verdict was announced. Several of us had participated in a vigorous discussion about Gone Girl at book group the week before, and I wondered whether they, too, were pondering comparisons. Their response was, who cares, why bother, why do you waste your time? Good questions, I suppose, but surprising.

Setting aside the media frenzy, obscene television commentary, and Nancy Grace’s strident indignation, there is a great deal to think about, and thinking about serious ethical and moral issues is never a waste of time.  This is the death penalty!

I have done jury duty in what turned out to be a very short trial. Jury duty in Ontario was enormously inconvenient because of my ongoing obligation to manage what was happening daily with the supply teacher in my classroom. My mother was also very ill at the time and her home care required close supervision. But the bailiff replied to my appeal that if I was able to work, I had to serve. A civic duty! The whole thing was utterly futile because after several days the accused changed his plea to guilty and we were excused.

So, I did not have to decide, after all, about what would happen to the foul-mouthed, scheming, drug dealing vicious little punk who, at great inconvenience and expense, had wasted all our time. Could I have been impartial and objective? I was not tested.

The Arias jury, having had their lives derailed for months already, having their minds filled with horror, forced to watch and hear such ugliness, now have to make a terrifying moral and ethical decision about the death penalty.

So I have been thinking about those twelve anonymous jurors, and feeling very sorry for them.  And I have been thinking about the death penalty. The best arguments I could find are on a BBC site that outlines both sides of the argument with great clarity.  

I wish I could find an interview or something written by Michael Sandel or Camille Paglia about the topic! Maybe it’s too soon for either to comment.

Meanwhile we wait.

Stick Your Neck Out

Curiosity is the door to discovery … but you have to stick your neck out
Hand and machine embellished art print on cotton
Ellen Collington, 2013

I finished my challenge piece on the Flammarion wood engraving just in time for the guild meeting this week. (See my last blog)

I like the image of the wandering pilgrim/scholar who finally reached the horizon separating the flat earth from the dome of the sky, and then had the courage to break through and look at the other side. In my embroidery I alluded to what I consider the two most important questions he could ask… why, and why not… or Y and Y*. These are metaphysical. The questions of who, where, what and when are usually answerable by research, by the accumulation of information. But Y and Y* require us to look at causation and purpose.

I used steam punk embellishments to reference both time and movement, both the discovery and the evolution of technology …and to remember that so much of the world as we experience it now is mechanical and technological, developed from  the earliest clockwork experiments. (I have written about steam punk before…  the search feature will find the archived posts.)

As I anticipated, the response to Doorway to Discovery was underwhelming. The winning challenge selection was a really cute and well executed applique hanging showing a frenzied quilter pushing against a closet door from which pieces of fabric were exploding.

But I didn’t enter the competition anticipating to win. The theme of doors sparked my imagination, and I did it for myself. As I brainstormed topics of really interesting doors, I thought of the discovery of the entrance to King Tut’s tomb; and then that reminded me of seeing the Tut treasures years ago at the The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and on to photos of the amazing addition to that building. I shall start an abstract piece on that soon.

The architecture, and its connection to the elegant old original building stirred considerable controversy.  I loved the old museum, especially for the crowded old-fashioned displays of very large collections of related items, the armor court, the temple court, the dioramas of taxidermy animals and insects, the dinosaurs, the live snakes in aquaria, the temple garden. I knew exactly where to go to visit my favourite things, and the list grew longer with every visit. There was an enormous model of the parthenon, like a huge dollhouse, with the statue of Athena, and a painted frieze around the room.  And a tapestry of Adam and Eve, and a real mummy, and tiny little Chinese bottles, and crystals … and… and. This has all changed, replaced by artistically curated displays.

But isn’t this amazing, too? This is a time-lapse of Michael Lee-Chin’s Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). The period covered is from May 2003 to opening night in November 2007, through a series of still images captured daily at 1 pm during construction and at 10-minute intervals throughout opening week.

Remember the Amish barn raising in the Harrison Ford film, The Witness? Our recent renovations have given me a new respect for what we don’t see in our buildings, and for the skillful workers who arrange it there… Now if only we could watch the pyramids go up, or Stonehenge, or a great cathedral…

The Door to Discovery

I just pried apart… with great difficulty and determination… a TIMEX watch from the sixties. Waterproof, shockproof, wife proof, it had survived in a box of interesting junk in the back of my husband’s top dresser drawer. I want to use the tiny cogs and springs to embellish a quilted/embroidered wallhanging based on the wood engraving I first encountered on the cover of Daniel Boorstin’s remarkable 1983 book, The Discoverers.

The wallhanging is for the June challenge of my quilt guild in Hamilton. A quilt challenge is a call for entry in a competition based on a defined criteria for size, theme, technique, etcetera. The topic is “doors”, and mine will be called, “Curiosity is the door to discovery, but first you must be willing to stick your neck out!”

A traveller puts his head under the edge of the firmament in the original (1888) printing of the Flammarion engraving.
The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire. It has been used to represent a supposedly medieval cosmology, including a flat earth bounded by a solid and opaque sky, or firmament, and also as a metaphorical illustration of either the scientific or the mystical quests for knowledge.

Flammarion was not the artist, but this is what he said in his book about the engraving:

What intelligent being, what being capable of responding emotionally to a beautiful sight, can look at the jagged, silvery lunar crescent trembling in the azure sky, even through the weakest of telescopes, and not be struck by it in an intensely pleasurable way, not feel cut off from everyday life here on earth and transported toward that first stop on the celestial journeys?What thoughtful soul could look at brilliant Jupiter with its four attendant satellites, or splendid Saturn encircled by its mysterious ring, or a double star glowing scarlet and sapphire in the infinity of night, and not be filled with a sense of wonder? Yes, indeed, if humankind — from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women — if they knew what profound inner pleasure await those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace. — Camille Flammarion, 1880

By to-day’s standards, Flammarion stuck his neck out about some very strange ideas, and I certainly do not endorse them, but I am grateful that he preserved and circulated this haunting image.

I suppose that both time and doors are very much on my mind these days.  It is now over six months since the old kitchen was torn out.  Since then the kitchen has been completed… it is now the only habitable room upstairs, and as in an old-fashioned farmhouse has become the center of all activity.  The doors to all the rooms have been replaced, but window installations were delayed by bad weather and are only now being finished.

Most quilting and fiber art is impossible and many of my tools are missing in action. Even hand embroidery is difficult to organize as the only floss I can lay hands on is a very limited selection of DMC… colourful, but boring!

All my books are packed away.  No television. Summer clothes are in a very large bin, somewhere at the bottom and the back of a towering pile.   Who knew it would take this long? But, surrounded as we are by cartons packed to overflowing, we are learning to actually live with much less… an interesting, possibly life-altering experience.

I am going to try to get back into routine of blogging more frequently.  Thank you for continuing to check in!

The Second Coming

I am not sure that I understand or agree with the metaphorical and metaphysical interpretations of the second stanza.

But when I heard about the tragedy in Boston yesterday, I thought first of Yeats’ description of anarchy.

“The centre cannot hold”…  but it must!

 

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats in 1919

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.