Numbers, Race Relations, and Humanity

For a moment, let’s pretend that we all are willing to set aside our emotions and look at two sets of raw numbers. Set one:  330,000; 60,000; 1,200.  Set two: 330,000; 1,100, and 1. 

Each set contains the following: first, the number of a group of people, second, a subset of those people, and, third, the number of fatalities as a result of an activity in which the second group has engaged.  Which set of numbers bothers you more?  For what’s it’s worth as you consider this, note that the activity in which the 60,000 engage is 1,200 times more likely to cause a death than the activity in which the 1,100 engage. (You can do the math for yourself – I think I got it right).

What’s the point of these numbers?

If you change the first set to 330,000,000, 60,000,000 and  1,200,000 you get the number of people in America, the rough number of women of childbearing age in America, and the number of abortions each year.  If you change the second set to 330,000,000, 1,100,000, and 1,000 you get the number of people in American, the rough number of law enforcement officers in America, and the number of people killed by police officers each year.

Now, let’s factor in some other issues.  Not every fatal shooting by a police officer is of an innocent victim.  I think we can agree that some percentage (probably a substantial one) of police shootings occur because someone shot at the police first.  Not every fatal shooting by a  police officer is of a black person.  In fact, more white people die from police shootings every year in the United States.  (Of course, this should be expected in light of the much larger percentage of white people in the country).  Whatever the reasons for police shootings, no police shooting occurs because of “convenience.”

Every abortion kills an innocent child who has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to start the killing.  No child in the womb does anything to his or her mother to require firing back.  Second, it is well known that the abortion rate among blacks is significantly higher than among whites – whatever the reasons this is simply true.  (Again, because there are many more white people in the United States white abortions represent a larger number of overall abortions).  Third, 93% of all abortions occur because of convenience.

If you are serious about looking at numbers and you are willing to leave emotion out of it, abortion is a much more serious problem in the United States than police officers shooting people.  In particular, if we assume that half of police officer shootings are justified (self-defense or to protect another person from being harmed), then the number of relevant fatalities goes down to about 500.  I don’t know what the true number of “justified” police shootings is, but having known many police officers who spent whole careers without ever discharging their firearm at anyone, it just seems highly unlikely to me that even half of police officer shootings are of “innocent” victims, however defined. 

My point isn’t to debate whether specific instances of police conduct are wrong.  That is something for the justice system to work out.  If a police officer shoots someone he or she should be investigated just like anyone else would be if they shoot someone.  If the officer wantonly shot someone for no legally justified reason, then the officer should face the full penalty of the law.

We cannot let emotion rule the day, however.  The numbers simply do not indicate that police are on some kind of nationwide killing spree of black people.

The abortion numbers, however, present a different story.  Black abortions account for more black deaths than any other cause every year.  About 4,400,000 black babies have been aborted since 1973.  Even if every one of the 1,000 people killed per year by police was a black person, that would mean 43,000 since 1973, or 1 percent of the number killed by abortion (and that assumes the number of police shootings has held steady at around 1,000 per year – I don’t know if that is correct or not, but even if it were 5,000 per year, it would be staggeringly smaller than the abortion numbers).  Which of these is an epidemic?

We can rightly and appropriately feel sorry for people shot by the police, even when they have acted in ways that some might feel were less than sensible.  For instance, we can feel sorry for the guy who was driving 100 mph and lost control of his car and killed himself, even though what he was doing was unreasonable.  Yet, feeling sadness because someone was killed doesn’t justify ignoring reality for the sake of engaging in an emotion laden but clearly false claim that young black men are somehow being targeted for death by the police.  To listen to the news, you’d think police were shooting young black men by the hundreds for no reason.  The above numbers show this simply isn’t true.[1]

Unfortunately, when a guy like me makes these statements, I am often simply branded a racist and ignored.  Then people who are angry about the situation complain because we aren’t having a national “conversation” about the “problem.”  We can’t have a conversation if we’re going to ignore reality in favor of scapegoating police.  Moreover, when 2/3 of the people in the country are white, they have to be included in the “conversation” even when they bring up uncomfortable and inconvenient facts like those above.  Branding people with labels that make them sound bad only serves to minimize conversation, not help it flourish.

If we really want to make meaningful headway in the racial conversation, we must first start by recognizing that all people are human beings who have dignity because they are made in the image of their creator.  There’s a lyric from a Sunday school song that little kids were often taught when I was young: Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.  The conversation can’t start with reprisals or with attacks or with arguments about white privilege, or police brutality, or even the past evils of slavery.  The conversation has to begin where God started it: human being to human being.  Second, we have to actually listen to what people are saying, even when we find it burdensome, irritating, troubling, or disconcerting.  For instance, it bothers me when I hear some people argue that all white people should pay reparations to blacks for slavery when I was never involved in slavery, had nothing to do with it, agree it’s deplorable and morally reprehensible, and in all ways reject slavery as an acceptable attitude of human toward human.  Yet, if I am to truly engage in a conversation about race, I must at least listen to those who make such arguments.  Perhaps there is something to what they say, perhaps not, but I should at least hear them out.  Only when I’ve actually listened do I have an ability to assess the reasonableness of an argument.  Finally, and as a corollary to the other two, we’ve got to stop the ad hominem attacks and the efforts to shut down those with whom we disagree.  As a Christian who is seeing more and more effort to simply shut down my voice by those who disagree, I do have some small understanding of what’s it like to feel your voice is being denigrated.  Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the key to really, truly understanding others is to let them speak, not shut them down.  The best way to know someone is totally whacky is to let them speak out – they’ll be sure to show how absurd, rotten, pathetic, racist, mean-spirited, irrational, illogical, or unreasonable their arguments and statements truly are.  Thus, you don’t need to argue about the unreasonableness of the KKK or the Nazis – they do fine job of making clear just how insane they are.  Fools need no help proving themselves fools, they inevitably do it on their own.

The numbers don’t lie.  There is no epidemic of young black men being killed by the police in the United States.  That fact, however, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep talking.  There is an epidemic of young black babies being killed at abortion clinics.  That fact, however, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep talking.  But until we treat all human life with the respect and dignity human life deserves, it will be hard to have a meaningful conversation about only some of those lives.  And the death toll will climb. 

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[1] By the way, I found all the relevant numbers by doing simple searches via Google.

The Wildebeest Stop Bleating: Why "Ought" Means God is the Source of Morals

Let’s admit that no matter what one’s political, religious, or philosophical bent, we all talk in oughts.  In this political season, politicians everywhere are claiming the moral high ground for their positions.  Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both speak about things the United States ought to do.  Partisans from all walks of political, religious, and philosophical life make demands as if their demands are self-evident.

In my last post, I suggested objective morals simply cannot exist in an evolutionary framework.  That should leave us wondering, why then do so many people seem to think they’re, well, right about so many moral issues? 

If morals have any objective basis, they can’t depend on perception or taste.  The sun exists – it’s an objective fact because it doesn’t depend on my perception.  If I can’t see, the sun is still there.  Sometimes the sun is hidden by clouds.  For many hours every day, the earth turns away from the sun and I don’t see it.  If I live underground my entire life, never coming above ground to see the sun, that doesn’t negate its existence.  None of these experiences mean the sun doesn’t exist.  My perception doesn’t alter the reality.

I like vanilla ice cream.  Really.  Just plain vanilla ice cream in a bowl – no fruit, no fudge, no nuts, no toppings of any kind.  This is simply a matter of taste.  No one can reasonably argue that my desire to eat vanilla ice cream is somehow morally inferior to their desire to eat jamoca almond fudge because this is just a matter of taste.  That said, whether one prefers vanilla or jamoca almond fudge, taste does not negate the reality that either type of ice cream in fact exists.  Taste doesn’t alter the reality.

Likewise, morals have to come from some other source than our perceptions and tastes.  Our perceptions are often incorrect and our tastes are not prescriptive.  From where, then, do morals arise?

Before answering, think about the following: no one likes it when someone cuts in front of them in line at the grocery store (or wherever they might be in line).  We don’t care for it when others lie to us.  If morals simply arise because of a “crocodiles eat and wildebeest bleat” kind of power over others to decide our morals then why does it seem that no one likes it when someone lies to them or cheats them or steals from them or even does something as simple as cut in line?  These moral “feelings” have to arise from somewhere, but their near universality indicates they’re not simply a matter of perception or taste.  These “feelings” live within our very souls.

All Ford automobiles have distinctive qualities that make them Fords – if nothing else, the word Ford appears on them.  How do we distinguish Fords from Chevrolets, from Chryslers, from Toyotas, from Hondas?  At bare minimum, the words on the cars, but more than that, each line of cars has distinctive features that people recognize as belonging to that brand.  These cars are created – they are designed and built to exacting specifications.  As a result we are able to recognize them as distinct.

Morals are a mark of our creator God.  That’s one of the distinctive marks of human beings.  We can (even if we don’t always do it) exercise restraint and remain in our place in line despite the temptation to cut.  We can tell the truth even when a lie seems more palatable.  We don’t need to cheat on the test or on our taxes and more often than not, even when we know the odds favor cheating without getting caught, we nonetheless don’t.  Why?  Evolution?  Are you kidding?  There are, of course, those who will try to make the rather weak-kneed argument that somehow, at some time long ago, under some circumstances of which we really aren’t fully aware, these traits helped perpetuate the species and thus made sense.  But if these traits helped perpetuate the species way back then, why wouldn’t they still work to do so now? 

The reality is that a creator God gave us an amazingly complex set of instructions known as genetic code which tells the material parts of us (the chemical and physical components) how to organize.  This code includes a moral component that contains things like empathy, sympathy, and honesty.  While, as a Christian, I believe this moral component was corrupted by the fall of humanity due to original sin, nonetheless significant vestiges remain.  Thus, even atheists get aggravated by lying, stealing, and cheating and, yes, even cutting in line.

Given that atheists, humanists, and “free” thinkers all claim some sort of monopoly on rationality and logic (at least as opposed to Christians), then the simple question boils down to this: if you think you can be moral, but morals are simply defined by those in power, would you still get mad if someone lied to you, cheated you, or cut in front of you in line even though those in power had declared all these actions morally acceptable?  Wouldn’t rationality and logic indicate that if those in power said so, then it would be reasonable and sensible to just accept it?  Yet, my guess is even atheists, humanists, and “free” thinkers would all argue against this.

The only meaningful answer to why this is true is because an intelligence lies behind our existence and put things into place in a meaningful and sensible way that helps us navigate through the stormy seas of life on this tiny blue planet.  That intelligence is the creator God of the universe.  He put his stamp on his creation, particularly human beings (we Christians refer to this as the imago dei).  He made us to be like him, although we are not exact duplicates.  Thus, we understand the concept of morals when no other creature on this planet does.

More importantly, as the creator, God gets to determine what is and is not moral, even when we think we know better.  Since we are less than the creator, this puts us in a position to accept that morals are an objective reality.  I suppose one could argue God simply has more power than anyone else, so my view is no different than the evolutionary view.  Almost true except for one unbelievably important reason: God instituted morals for our good and for our benefit.  Evolution never lifted a finger to help me or anyone else on this planet.  God also provided a means to satisfy the requirements of his moral code even when we have broken it in the worst possible ways.  Rather than punish us as we deserve for transgressing the moral code, God provided a uniquely perfect substitute to stand in our place: Jesus, the God-man, the king of the universe.  He lived a perfect life, was tortured on a Roman cross as punishment for the moral failures of all humanity, died for those sins, but was raised to life on the third day to provide us with hope.  All we must do is repent of our sins and believe that this is true.

God provides objective moral standards – the only reason so many reject those standards is because they cannot and will not live up to them on their own.  Jesus is the only possible way to solve that dilemma.  The wildebeest need no longer bleat.