That is some lawyering. Good for Norm for jumping in, and godspeed to you and Sephora.

And good on Marc Randazza for not deleting this comment on a post in which he professed his atheism and asserted, inter alia, that “[i]f you believe in a magic space zombie Jew, you’re not rational enough to be president either”:

Hmmm… I would then assume that you could heap the same scorn on someone for their lack of beliefs…. so I will. The writer of this blog is a pompous ass know it all who thinks that his way is the right way. He is no better than those he despises. But….. that’s the way it always is.

Have a nice day.

UPDATE: I want to make clear that I don’t agree with the comment posted on Marc’s blog. I actually agree with the main point of Marc’s post. I just think some bloggers should have thicker skins.

Norm’s post concludes:

We live in this schizoid fog because we lack the confidence as individuals to say what is and is not just. Indeed, it’s chic in most quarters to view the very question as quaint, or perhaps, naive. We’re just like sheep, afraid to reason, and then following the man or woman bold enough to seize the shepherd’s crook. We love to complain about politicians, yet we follow them blindly. Because we lack the courage to say what is just, because we are nihilists at heart, we take what we get and hope for more. I wonder what would happen if we took our hopes more seriously, and if jurors began to say “no” simply because they can do so. I wonder what would happen if we casts more bricks than votes, if we had the courage to believe, as the anarchists do, the we do not need to be told what is just, that we know it in our bones.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Justice is the absence of crime. Although, as Norm says, “‘right reason’ is said to shed light on justice,” it’s not all that complicated. Reason is simply the faculty of knowing the truth. Argument is the lowest form of reason, and its aim is to directly understand the truth. Lawyers, law professors, judges and politicians are certainly not more qualified to discern truth, or what justice requires, than are human beings. Quite the opposite. Restoring the right of juries to judge the justice of the laws does not entail expecting jurors to become expert logicians or policy wonks. If Justice is the absence of crime, it is something negative (in the good sense). It is characterized, as the passage from Norm’s post quoted above suggests, by simply saying “no.” It is characterized, in the first instance, by not doing something rather than by doing something.

If Justice is the absence of crime, what is crime? Presumptively, it’s simply anything we would not have others do unto us. Locking a human being up in a cage like an animal is presumptively a crime. Taking a person’s money, by sticking him up in an alley, or by threatening to lock him up in a cage like an animal if he doesn’t pay his “taxes,” is presumptively a crime.

I am not pure enough to subscribe to the pacifism advocated by Tolstoy. Sometimes we should fight crime with what is presumptively a crime. But we should thus fight fire with fire, violence with violence, only insofar as doing so is truly necessary, and only as a last resort. As a practical matter, Justice is the presumption of innocence.

Here’s some food for thought from Spooner’s Essay on the Trial by Jury:

It is supposed that, if twelve men be taken, by lot, from the mass of the people, without the possibility of any previous knowledge, choice, or selection of them, on the part of the government, the jury will be a fair epitome of “the country” at large, and not merely of the party or faction that sustain the measures of the government; that substantially all classes, of opinions, prevailing among the people, will be represented in the jury; and especially that the opponents of the government, (if the government have any opponents,) will be represented there, as well as its friends; that the classes, who are oppressed by the laws of the government, (if any are thus oppressed,) will have their representatives in the jury, as well as those classes, who take sides with the oppressor — that is, with the government.

It is fairly presumable that such a tribunal will agree to no conviction except such as substantially the whole country would agree to, if they were present, taking part in the trial. A trial by such a tribunal is, therefore, in effect, “a trial by the country.” In its results it probably comes as near to a trial by the whole country, as any trial that it is practicable to have, without too great inconvenience and expense. And, as unanimity is require for a conviction, it follows that no one can be convicted, except for the violation of such laws as substantially the whole country wish to have maintained. The government can enforce none of its laws, (by punishing offenders, through the verdicts of juries,) except such as substantially the whole people wish to have enforced. The government, therefore, consistently with the trial by jury, can exercise no powers over the people, (or, what is the same thing, over the accused person, who represents the rights of the people,) except such as substantially the whole people of the country consent that it may exercise. In such a trial, therefore, “the country,” or the people, judge of and determine their own liberties against the government, instead of the [*8] government’s judging of and determining its own powers over the people.

But all this trial by the country” would be no trial at all “by the country,” but only a trial by the government, if the government could either declare who may, and who may not, be jurors, or could dictate to the jury anything whatever, either of law or evidence, that is of the essence of the trial.

. . .

The force and justice of the preceding argument cannot be evaded by saying that the government is chosen by the people; that, in theory, it represents the people; that it is designed to do the will of the people; that its members are all sworn to observe the fundamental or constitutional law instituted by the people; that its acts are therefore entitled to be considered the acts of the people; and that to allow a jury, representing the people, to invalidate the acts of the government, would therefore be arraying the people against themselves.

There are two answers to such an argument.

One answer is, that, in a representative government, there is no absurdity or contradiction, nor any arraying of the people against themselves, in requiring that the statutes or enactments of the government shall pass the ordeal of any number of separate tribunals, before it shall be determined that they are to have the force of laws. Our American constitutions have provided five of these separate tribunals, to wit, representatives, senate, executive, fn2 jury, and judges; and have made it necessary that each enactment shall pass the ordeal of all these separate tribunals, before its authority can be established by the punishment of those who choose to transgress it. And there is no more absurdity or inconsistency in making a jury one of these several tribunals, than there is in making the representatives, or the senate, or the executive, or the judges, one of them. There is no more absurdity in giving a jury a veto upon the laws, than there is in giving a veto to each of these other tribunals. The people are no more arrayed against themselves, when a jury puts its veto upon a statute, which the other tribunals have sanctioned, than they are when the [*12] same veto is exercised by the representatives, the senate, the executive, or the judges.

But another answer to the argument that the people are arrayed against themselves, when a jury hold an enactment of the government invalid, is, that the government, and all the departments of the government, are merely the servants and agents of the people; not invested with arbitrary or absolute authority to bind the people, but required to submit all their enactments to the judgment of a tribunal more fairly representing the whole people, before they carry them into execution by punishing any individual for transgressing them. If the government were not thus required to submit their enactments to the judgment of “the country,” before executing them upon individuals if, in other words, the people had reserved to themselves no veto upon the acts of the government, the government, instead of being a mere servant and agent of the people would be an absolute despot over the people. It would have all power in its own hands; because the power to punish carries all other powers with it. A power that can, of itself, and by its own authority, punish disobedience, can compel obedience and submission, and is above all responsibility for the character of its laws. In short, it is a despotism.

. . .

I have a great deal of respect for Jeff. He’s been a great help to me on a couple of occasions with real life legal matters, once by phone and on another occasion by email. He’s encouraged me to hang in there when I’ve expressed readiness to throw in the towel. Beyond that, although we’ve sharply disagreed and traded barbs online on several occasions, and he’s come close to calling me an idiot, and probably close to half of my comments on his blog are critical (personally, I’ve always believed that thoughtful, critical comments are the most valuable), he continues to engage me, which is more than I can say for more than one blogger with whom I’ve also sharply disagreed and traded barbs.

I recognize that this blog has evolved or devolved to a single and simple philosophical point, and that philosophy doesn’t lend itself to blogging. I see this as a perhaps regrettable manifestation of my lifelong Platonic impulse, a preference for the universal over the particular, which some might – not unreasonably – interpret as intellectual laziness. Many criminal defense blogs ably and interestingly chronicle on a daily or weekly basis the crimes of the criminal justice system. My message is simply that the intention of the State is not to fight crime but to perpetrate it.

A major theme of the so-called practical blawgosphere is the denigration of attorney advertising. The true professional, although he earns his living by his profession, is not motivated by filthy lucre. He’s not an ambulance chaser. I’ve always appreciated this sentiment. I’m warming to it more and more. The legal profession is not a job like other jobs. It’s a calling.

I’ve felt called before. The lords of the legal profession, however, have given me every indication that I’m not welcome in their domain. Nevertheless, I remain the kind of man who would not turn a deaf ear to a person who needs help and whom I believe I can help. I believe there’s nothing more noble in life. I am open to that call.

But if the phone doesn’t ring? If I’m not called?

Norm Pattis has a post up today contemplating the upcoming trial season. It’s not pretty. It’s midnight terrors. It’s gambling and trading in human life. It’s Russian Roulette. It’s war.

It’s not the kind of thing one does unless one is called.

The beauty of poetry, even when written by a self-described hack like Robert Service, is that it can romanticize even The Men Who Don’t Fit In:

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.

They say:  “Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!”
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.

Ha, ha!  He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in.

Call us the uncalled.

Michelle Bachmann is a true believer. For a time, I wanted to be just like her. But I lost my faith. It broke my heart, and this heartbreak makes me wary of those who wave their faith as a rallying banner. If God is there, He most certainly is silent. The Bible doesn’t speak; we read it, and find in it those truths that serve our interests. That’s a long way from grace abounding.

For my part, I mark reading the following passage in The Brothers Karamazov, while stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard during my first year in the Navy, as the “first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God’s word in my heart”:

From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is precious. With my memories of home I count, too, my memories of the Bible, which, child as I was, I was very eager to read at home. I had a book of Scripture history then with excellent pictures, called A Hundred and Four Stories from the Old and New Testament, and I learned to read from it. I have it lying on my shelf now, I keep it as a precious relic of the past. But even before I learned to read, I remember first being moved to devotional feeling at eight years old. My mother took me alone to mass (I don’t remember where my brother was at the time) on the Monday before Easter. It was a fine day, and I remember to-day, as though I saw it now, how the incense rose from the censer and softly floated upwards and, overhead in the cupola, mingled in rising waves with the sunlight that streamed in at the little window. I was stirred by the sight, and for the first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God’s word in my heart. A youth came out into the middle of the church carrying a big book, so large that at the time I fancied he could scarcely carry it. He laid it on the reading desk, opened it, and began reading, and suddenly for the first time I understood something read in the church of God. In the land of Uz, there lived a man, righteous and God-fearing, and he had great wealth, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children feasted, and he loved them very much and prayed for them. “It may be that my sons have sinned in their feasting.” Now the devil came before the Lord together with the sons of God, and said to the Lord that he had gone up and down the earth and under the earth. “And hast thou considered my servant Job?” God asked of him. And God boasted to the devil, pointing to his great and holy servant. And the devil laughed at God’s words. “Give him over to me and Thou wilt see that Thy servant will murmur against Thee and curse Thy name.” And God gave up the just man He loved so, to the devil. And the devil smote his children and his cattle and scattered his wealth, all of a sudden like a thunderbolt from heaven. And Job rent his mantle and fell down upon the ground and cried aloud, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return into the earth; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and ever.”

Fathers and teachers, forgive my tears now, for all my childhood rises up again before me, and I breathe now as I breathed then, with the breast of a little child of eight, and I feel as I did then, awe and wonder and gladness. The camels at that time caught my imagination, and Satan, who talked like that with God, and God who gave His servant up to destruction, and His servant crying out: “Blessed be Thy name although Thou dost punish me,” and then the soft and sweet singing in the church: “Let my prayer rise up before Thee,” and again incense from the priest’s censer and the kneeling and the prayer. Ever since then—only yesterday I took it up—I’ve never been able to read that sacred tale without tears. And how much that is great, mysterious and unfathomable there is in it! Afterwards I heard the words of mockery and blame, proud words, “How could God give up the most loved of His saints for the diversion of the devil, take from him his children, smite him with sore boils so that he cleansed the corruption from his sores with a pot-sherd—and for no object except to boast to the devil! ‘See what My saint can suffer for My sake.’ ” But the greatness of it lies just in the fact that it is a mystery—that the passing earthly show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished. The Creator, just as on the first days of creation He ended each day with praise: “That is good that I have created,” looks upon Job and again praises His creation. And Job, praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was ordained. Good heavens, what a book it is, and what lessons there are in it! What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with it to man! It is like a mold cast of the world and man and human nature, everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what mysteries are solved and revealed! God raises Job again, gives him wealth again. Many years pass by, and he has other children and loves them. But how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more, when he has lost them? Remembering them, how could he be fully happy with those new ones, however dear the new ones might be? But he could, he could. It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my hearts sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life—and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, that approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.

PART I. My final comment responding to another commenter in a thread on an Althouse post quoting Glenn Greenwald’s reaction to Althouse’s distortion of something Greenwald said about the Drug War:

John Kindley said…

Scott M said … “Does that mean you think universal health care is a left-wing or a right-wing cause?”It’s a right-wing cause. As Greenwald recently wrote (on July 7th): “Congressional Democrats began the health care debate by categorically vowing — in writing, by the dozens — never to support any health care bill that did not contain a public option (on the ground that it would be little more than a boon to — an entrenchment of — the private health insurance industry) … (and that debate followed the same template as the deficit battle: the White House publicly pretending to advocate for a public option while leading the way in private to ensure it never happened).”

PART II. Karl Hess on the Left / Right spectrum:

The overall characteristic of a right-wing regime, no matter the details of difference between this one and that one, is that it reflects the concentration of power in the fewest practical hands.

Power, concentrated in few hands, is the dominant historic characteristic of what most people, in most times, have considered the political and economic right wing.

The far left, as far as you can get away from the right, would logically represent the opposite tendency and, in fact, has done just that throughout history. The left has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.

PART III. Norm Pattis, reviewing a novel, The Oregon Experiment, about a “not-so-young college professor with a professional interest in anarchism [who] puts his theory into practice in Oregon”:

My heart belongs with anarchists everywhere. I can’t quite shake the sense that government is a hoax, especially now, when I see right and left posture about the debt ceiling. While these fools bob and weave and avoid any pragmatic sense of compromise, the rest of us sit helplessly by, watching, paying taxes and, at least for the believers among us, praying that the it all doesn’t come crashing down around our ears. Some part of me says bring the crash on. I’ve an active apocalyptic gene.

But I am also late-middle-aged, a man with mortgages, children now out of college, employees, a vast network of commitments in a social web that seems forever out of control, but just serviceable enough to provide an anchor. Like the politicians I abhor, I have become vested in a world that doesn’t work. I behold anarchy with something like a pleasing sense of horror: I want to see what happens when the walls come tumbling down; I just don’t want one of those walls to fall on me or my family.

PART IV. Albert Jay Nock’s essay “A Little Conserva-tive,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1936

PART V. Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society on “counter-economics”:

The late Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3), in the New Libertarian Manifesto, coined the term “counter-economics” to describe the building of an economy outside the corporate-state nexus, and operating below its radar.   The counter-economy would evade both state regulations and state taxation, starve the state of the revenues it needed to operate, and eventually supplant the corporate-state economy.

Unfortunately, SEK3 took too narrow a view of the counter-economy:  rather than viewing illegality as a means to an end, he viewed it as an end in itself, and as the defining characteric of counter-economics.  That approach is unsatisfactory, since it means we define our efforts in terms of the state rather than in terms of our own self-derived goals.

Indeed, the state’s own statism is a means to an end, and defined largely in relation to our own self-determined goals:  to prevent us from supporting ourselves in comfort, independently of the corporate-state nexus and wage employment, and from receiving the full product of our labor.

If counter-economics is the means, we should also remember that the means is the end in progress.  Evading the state is not an end in itself; it is, rather, a means of accomplishing what we would want to accomplish for its own sake, even if the state never existed.  Counter-economics is the building of the kind of society and economy we want right now.  And if we define it that way, it dovetails nicely with many similar concepts prevalent on the libertarian, decentralist Left:  counter-institutions, dual power, and (that wonderful Wobbly slogan) “building the foundation of the new society within the shell of the old.”

Two things struck me from afar about why the defense won this case, and both come down to rules broken by Casey Anthony’s lawyer. If Mr. Baez had tried the case according to the textbook, he might well have lost it.

According to Norm, these two unconventional things were: (1) laying out in opening statement and arguing for in summation a theory of how Casey’s daughter died, even though he kept Casey from testifying and wasn’t able to offer any actual evidence supporting this theory at trial; and (2) arguing to the jury that the case against Casey was not strong enough to support a penalty of death, even though punishment is not supposed to be a consideration during the guilt phase of trial.

Real the whole thing, as well as Norm’s initial reaction to the verdict yesterday.

Second, “Strike Lawyer”:

Reasonable doubt is more tricky than the talking heads I have seen let on so far. The way it works is not that you just point out holes in the prosecution’s case and tell the jury they don’t know, so they have “reasonable doubt”. You have to – and this was part of the brilliance of the defense strategy here – offer a competing narrative, and preferably a competing villain as well. Here the defense did both: they had a competing narrative (the accidental drowning) and the competing villain (George Anthony), of whom the one alternate juror that has answered questions said that he was “hiding something”.

Read the whole thing.

As I see it, the defense didn’t need to offer actual evidence supporting its competing narrative, so long as its competing narrative wasn’t refuted beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence that was offered. It made sense for Baez to assert his competing narrative in opening statement, even if he knew that Casey wouldn’t testify and that George would deny on the stand the narrative’s truth (and that therefore Baez would be unable to offer actual evidence supporting the narrative), because it was probably best to get the competing narrative in front of the jury as early in the trial as possible, and because George’s denial of the narrative’s truth was in a way itself equivocal evidence supporting the narrative. You expect a villain to deny his villainy.

I didn’t see the jury voir dire in this case, but the same expectation — that a villain will deny his (or her) villainy — is commonly used to explain to prospective jurors why they shouldn’t hold it against the defendant if the defendant doesn’t testify: “What would the defendant have to gain by testifying? Regardless of her guilt or innocence, she knows that you know that of all the people who will appear in this courtroom during the course of this trial, she has the greatest motive to lie.”

So presumably the jury had been conditioned by Baez not to hold it against Casey if she didn’t testify, and George’s denial of the narrative’s truth didn’t count for much with the jury for the same reason Casey’s affirmation of it wouldn’t have.

It wouldn’t have been sufficient, though, to simply argue in summation that the competing narrative could have happened, and that the prosecution hadn’t proved beyond a reasonable doubt that it didn’t. Baez needed to assert that it did happen, even if the balance and bulk of his summation was spent pointing out the holes in the prosecution’s case. In an important sense, then, he was Casey’s star witness, and it was probably by winning the credibility contest with prosecutors that he won the case.

CONTRAST Jeff Gamso’s July 4th post contrasting the relative “necessity” of dissolving political bands in 1776 and now with Norm Pattis’ July 4th post contrasting the trial in 1770 of the British soldiers charged with murder for their role in the Boston Massacre with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2011 in the case of Harry Connick, District Attorney v. John Thompson (throwing out a $14 million jury award for an innocent man who was imprisoned for 18 years, including 14 on death row, because prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated him).

I’ll write more about the book later, once I’ve actually finished it, but wanted to note the coincidence of Norm’s (perhaps hyperbolic) embrace of “chaos” with my (perhaps hyperbolic) embrace of “chaos” in my last post, titled “Chaotic Good v. Lawful Evil.” (Incidentally, for the edification of my non-geek readers, “Chaotic Good” and “Lawful Evil” are “alignments” in Dungeons & Dragons.)

Norm,

I am completely disgusted by Greenfield’s hit piece on you. The guy’s a raging hypocrite. Look at his very first blog post at Simple Justice. It clearly had in mind as an audience and was directed to potential clients.

I may be completely wrong about this, but it seemed your falling out with the part of the blawgosphere led by Greenfield coincided with your limited defense of me when most of the rest of the blawgosphere mocked me over my position on the topic of justice, and with Greenfield’s ridiculous banning of me from his stupid blog. (I’ve never quite understood the vehemence of the reaction to my posts on justice relative to the role of the criminal defense attorney. Locking a person up in a cage like an animal is presumptively unjust. That’s what a criminal defense attorney fights against. And locking a person up in a cage like an animal is even more unjust if that person is innocent.)

My understanding of your posts about Rakofsky is reflected in the email above [see below], in the comment I tried to post on your blog. You instinctively took the part of, and gave the benefit of the doubt to, an individual who was being attacked en masse by those in the blawgosphere possessed of a group mentality. His version of events in his complaint, if true, made the whole thing pretty interesting. Subsequently, it turned out that his version of events doesn’t really appear to match up with reality, and your second post acknowledged that. But those spouting off about Rakofsky earlier had no more information than you did.

My opinion of Gerry Spence just went up a notch, in light of his willingness to write an intro to your book despite the critical words you’ve had to say about him and the TLC in the past.

I wish I had the opportunity to learn the law from someone like you. My independent spirit, along with fate’s determination that I stumbled in law school upon the issue that obsessed me for several years out of law school, have left me in a position where I’ve had to try to figure things out on my own. It’s not easy. I do have a mentor I’m able to run things by, but I wished I could have really learned from a master.

I look forward to reading your book.

John A. Kindley

*****

What follows is the earlier email I sent (before I got this news) to Norm referenced in the email above:

Norm,

I tried to comment several times on your most recent post, but each time after submitting the comment I got a message saying all fields must be entered and to try again. Here’s the comment I tried to submit:

I too refrained from commenting on Rakofsky, but for reasons different than yours. I too a couple years ago took on an attempted murder case without having previously tried a case before a jury. I too thought that I could compensate for my inexperience by engaging experienced co-counsel (and telling the client I wouldn’t take the case without doing so). I too was ineffective at trial (although Rakofsky in his complaint denies his ineffectiveness, and unlike the rest of the blawgosphere I assume his denials are true without convincing proof to the contrary). I too worked very hard on my former client’s case, and recognized my client had grounds for a motion to dismiss which hadn’t occurred to my client’s previous experienced attorneys (a motion which the court of appeals ruled should have been granted but which is now before the supreme court on transfer). I too, while recognizing my own ineffectiveness at trial, also had to contend with prosecutorial misconduct and erroneous rulings by the judge which uniformly favored the prosecution. I too see in my ineffectiveness a silver lining, and an additional hope for my former client’s eventual freedom should his direct appeal unjustly fail.

John A. Kindley

What I mean by describing myself as a Christian Deist is illuminated by the following two articles, my discovery of which online was prompted by my discovery in a bookstore yesterday of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief:

Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas

On Leo Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief

I happen to “believe,” based on my own fallible reasoning, that Jesus, inter alia, was born of the Virgin Mary and rose from the dead, but I don’t pretend to believe those things beyond a reasonable doubt, and to the contrary am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that “salvation” doesn’t depend on such things, but rather on realizing the divinity within and without. When at around age eighteen I was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church a couple weeks after being baptized, I chose Thomas, who is described in the Gospel of John as doubting that Jesus rose from the dead until seeing the risen Christ for himself, as my confirmation name. Nowadays, more than two decades later, I no longer believe in the authority of the Church, and am inclined to believe that the most “authoritative” of the gospels is the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, according to which Jesus said, among other things:

If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.

. . .

Don’t lie, and don’t do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed.

. . .

Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is. Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.

. . .

Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.

. . .

I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, because they are blind in their hearts and do not see, for they came into the world empty, and they also seek to depart from the world empty. But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will change their ways.

. . .

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.

. . .

Be passersby.

. . .

Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.

. . .

Look to the living one as long as you live, otherwise you might die and then try to see the living one, and you will be unable to see.

. . .

Those who know all, but are lacking in themselves, are utterly lacking.

. . .

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.

. . .

I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

. . .

Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father’s light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light.

. . .

When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!

. . .

How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.

. . .

Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don’t you understand that the one who made the inside is also the one who made the outside?

. . .

Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.

. . .

The heavens and the earth will roll up in your presence, and whoever is living from the living one will not see death.

. . .

[The kingdom] will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.