On a related note, Jeff Gamso credits Mike at Crime & Federalism with having the best tag line in the whole blogosphere:

Because everything I was ever told was a lie.

But this is a prime instance where I’m aware that I’m saying something that might be viewed as controversial and even “crazy” but which appears to me incontrovertible and clear as day. I believe in, more than I believe in anything else in the law, the presumption of innocence, and I extend that presumption of innocence even to judges and prosecutors. I have learned to hate the State, but the State is a big Nothing. I try very hard not to hate people. I don’t imagine myself to be purer or holier than anybody. I’ve worked for the State in the past, including but not limited to six years in the military, and even now in family law cases I regularly ask the State to positively intervene on behalf of my clients. If somebody burglarized my house I would call the cops and make a report.

I believe in the presumption of innocence, and I believe that presumption should apply equally to all people. What I object to is the judiciary’s attempts to confer upon itself what amounts to a heightened presumption of innocence, and specifically, a presumption that their judgments are innocent, just, lawful and honorable. (If anything, as Vincent Bugliosi, who is widely regarded as a poster boy for the State, has explained, common sense would seem to diminish rather than heighten the presumption of innocence in the case of judges.) Judgments, and particularly judgments from which violence and incarceration issue, are not entitled to a presumption of innocence.

I wonder about Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito, who are all Roman Catholic, and whose God has commanded them to “Judge not, lest you be judged,” but whose Constitution has apparently recently told them (and Justice Kagan), but not three of their fellow Justices, to send a probably innocent grandmother back to prison indefinitely. I wonder if they really believe in their heart of hearts that on Judgment Day their Constitution will save them.

Jeff Gamso today honors an Honorable judge.

But if you think that judges as a class are higher as well as mightier than the rest of us, then behold this Texas family law judge administering “justice” to his own daughter:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl9y3SIPt7o

The denial of Bryan Brown’s application for admission to the Indiana Bar was nothing but tyranny, and leads me to assume that I myself am practicing law on borrowed time. I’ve met Bryan, and he’s far fitter than I to practice law.

Please pray for Bryan as he argues his case to the Seventh Circuit next Thursday at 11:30 a.m. EST.

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? “As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.”

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? “Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

Do you believe in God? “I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

Is this a Jewish concept of God? “I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew.”

Is this Spinoza’s God? “I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but I admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.”

Do you believe in immortality? “No. And one life is enough for me.”

In “What I Believe,” he wrote:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

From Chapter 2 (“Chicago”):

George Schilling was a prominent trade unionist when he encountered Darrow at a gathering of freethinkers. The other speakers had gone too far in mocking the ministry of Jesus Christ, and Darrow “jumped in, and with a ten-minute speech defended the carpenter’s son of Judea with such a sympathetic, persuasive voice that I fell in love with him,” Schilling recalled. “We became fast friends.”

Though Darrow admired Christ’s teachings, he doubted his divinity, and was a regular with Schilling at the Secular Union. . . .

Here, Darrow expressed the deterministic philosophy that would guide him all his life. “The worst of all cruel creeds and of all the bloody wrongs inflicted by the past can be found in the barbarous belief that man is a free moral agent,” he said.

. . .

In August 1887, he wrote a letter to his friends at the Democratic Standard in Ashtabula, recounting a visit with the anarchists in jail.

“They are a good looking intelligent lot of men. At first they were not inclined to talk, but after assuring them that I was something of a crank myself . . . they entered freely into conversation,” Darrow reported. “They imagine that wealth is so strong that it controls legislation and elections and that we can only abolish present evils by wiping out capital and starting over new.

“It is very hard for one who, like me, believes that the injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system, to understand how intelligent men can believe that the repeal of all laws can better the world; but this is their doctrine.”

. . . “I hope you will not conclude that I am an Anarchist,” he wrote. “I think their doctrines are wild if their eyes are not.”

At the time, Darrow was a member of a single-tax group inspired by author Henry George, who had initially supported the Haymarket defendants but now was running for political office in New York, and modulating his beliefs. He infuriated Darrow and the others by declining to publish the club’s resolution asking for clemency in his organization’s newspaper. Darrow wrote a stinging letter to The Solidarity, a labor publication in New York, accusing George of cowardice.

From Chapter 4 (“Populist”):

Darrow had been shaken by the state’s relentless insistence on killing Prendergast. Now he watched its army and its judges, deployed at the behest of corporations, quell the collective action of American workingmen. The experience left him angry and alienated. The idealist who had said, when he arrived in Chicago, that the “injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system” began to reconsider.

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.

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.

Nuthouses are full of people who believe they are saviors, if only they can nail themselves to a cross. . . .

None is the gravest injustice ever, except perhaps the Holocaust.

In the same post Greenfield references an exchange he had in 2009 with Regan, then commenting under the handle “John R.,” on Greenfield’s blog. Coincidentally, back in 2009 I wrote a post here describing an earlier exchange between Greenfield and the same “John R.” on Greenfield’s blog.

I’ve been reading Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra (2010), by Paulette Frankl. (Back in 2010 I nominated Serra “Most Admirable Living Lawyer.”) Somehow these excerpts from the book quoting Serra seem relevant to Greenfield’s attempted ass-kicking, or at least relevant to the theme of my last series of posts:

“My overwhelming ego probably is my central religious failing. Although I respect, intellectually, the concept of selflessness, I can interpret everything I do as an ego trip. For the most part, I seek high-publicity cases, and this is obviously to feed my need for publicity and self-aggrandizement. Even most of the free cases I do offer some kind of publicity factor, media attention, or psychological hedonism; they bestow upon me what I’m going to call self-centered, egocentric, egotistic, and selfish motivation.

. . .

“Even my old clothes and old cars and modest living habits are a way of gaining attention. They’re a way of saying, ‘I’ll be more humble than you. I’ll manifest a greater degree of humility. Therefore, look at me.’

. . .

“I brag about my past use of cocaine and methamphetamine, and I’ll brandish my marijuana smoking before the world. But down deep, I practice with the divided mentality of a drug addict.”

. . .

“Some of the saddest words ever spoken to me came from my ex who said, ‘You give more time to those weirdoes and crazies and drug addicts than you do to your family and me.’

“Yes, I court that dimension because I’m metaphysically sullied. In my opinion, that’s the greatest indictment that I can bring upon myself.”

. . .

“Going into law and dropping so many notches down to the warrior image meant giving up the particular grace I had, let’s say, for interpreting poetry and philosophy. I surrendered all of that. I’m now nothing but a semantic sword! For me it’s not demons but guilt, unfulfilled destiny, the path not chosen, that I mentally revisit. I chastise myself for not being purer or more perfect. I chastise myself for being intrigued by the world of sensation and sensorium, for living in the fast lane in the neon-light jungle, for courting the more vicious experiences of life, dropping into drugs and living at the edges of my sensations, encapsulating them as my universe.

“That’s all a fall from grace. . . .”

The difficulty is removed, however, if we recognize with Meister Eckhart that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and indeed, that God is more us than we are ourselves. (If a strictly philosophical rather than theological “proof” of this proposition is wanted, I suggest it might be found as well in Platonism as anywhere else.) I commend to you the The Cherubinic Wanderer by Angelus Silesius, from which the title of this post was taken, which was influenced by Jacob Boehme (who also strongly influenced William Law) and especially by Eckhart, and which (surprisingly enough) received the imprimatur of the Roman Catholic Church when it was published.

God does not so much exist as insist.

In this light must be understood the denial of “Self” also preached by these same Christian mystics. Who we really are can’t be anything that can be taken from us by robbers, or thrown in prison, or lost in old age to dementia, or buried in the ground along with our corpse. How might a person who recognizes his essential Oneness with the Divine live his life? He would see his neighbor as God sees him, as a child of God like he is a child of God, not through the blinders of Self, and thereby be capable of Justice. He would judge by the Word within what others tell him about God and God’s Will. I suggest he might live and die as Jesus lived and died:

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.

Why, again, have I felt it important to mention these things on a blog titled “People v. State”? Because the outer Freedom at which anarchism aims is but a shadow of the inner Freedom at which true religion aims, and because the propagation among people of this inner Freedom is the surest foundation for that outer Freedom.

Observe that this greatest of commandments demands of us nothing more than Justice founded in Truth. Observe also the Liberty of a soul which through Truth has overcome the fear / wrath / despair which necessarily sprouts from Self-regard and Self-concern. It may be that we doubt the very existence of God, but only through living in accordance with the Truth about our selves may we hope to learn the Truth about God.

Observe, finally, that we need not believe anything about Jesus Christ to see the Truth in and obey this greatest of commandments.