Weeds in the Wheat

I am not a dualist in the sense of believing that evil and good, roughly equivalent in power, are fighting it out in the world and the outcome is in doubt. Good is by its nature the absolute and evil the derivative. Good can never be conquered by evil, because evil cannot exist apart from Good. The more derived something is, the further it is from the ideal. This is the reason that when a carpenter or craftsman needs several pieces just alike, such as rafters, he cuts one pattern, puts a big ‘P’ on it and uses it to cut all the rest. Every deviation from the pattern introduces more errors and the deviations are multiplied.

This is probably some of the idea behind the noble savage myth. As a primitive man is closer to “nature” than the civilized man, he is less “derived”. The reason the myth fails the test of reality is that it’s not how close to the creation you are that makes you noble, it’s how close you are to the Creator. I have The Journals of Lewis and Clark sitting a few feet away on my bookshelf. Their first hand and generally fair accounts indicate that some American Indian tribes were composed of decent people, while others were a lot closer to the Devil than they were God.

Matthew 13:37-39a He replied, ‘The One who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world; and the good seed – these are the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the Devil ...

Jesus is speaking and explaining the meaning of the parable known traditionally as “The Wheat and the Tares”. Tares were weeds which initially bore a resemblance to the grain in the early stages. It does have a rather dualistic feel to it. Jesus sows His people into the world. The Devil sows his people. They battle is out for space in the field. The angels come in and throw all the bad seed into hell and take the good ones to heaven. Who knew the Devil had his own evil spawn available to for planting next door to me?

This parable is probably less troublesome to Calvinists who think there are a whole bunch of people whose reason for existence is to up the occupancy rate in hell. Why waste all that space? My free-will friends used to try to mitigate it by making the field the Church or the Kingdom. They turned it into a parable about how we should not judge anyone in the Body of Christ and just let God sort it all out in the end. Even if I were to agree that “judge not” means you shouldn’t defrock a pedophile priest, I would be uncomfortable using this parable to justify it. That interpretation does violence to the very words of Jesus when He says “the field is the world.” I get the impression that the Lord generally said what He meant and meant what He said.

While I’m not much of a Calvinist, the idea that some soulless bastards are roaming around definitely would explain some things. It has a certain appeal, though the down side is that just because they are soulless I don’t necessarily get to use them for target practice.

Yesterday, as the lovely QP tells us, the Supreme Court gave us a pretty good decision in Heller but the day before they had struck down the Louisiana law allowing the death penalty for child rape. I’m kind of with Charlie Daniels on this, as he says in “Simple Man” – “...just take them rascals out in the swamp. Put ‘em on their knees and tie ‘em to a stump. Let the rattlers and the bugs and the alligators do the rest.”

I think it was late last year, a county or two west of here, a nine-year-old girl disappeared. She was found after a week or so. Her little body had been dumped in a hole that led down to a cave. Her step-father and a friend of his were arrested. They had taken the girl while her mother was at work and, after raping her repeatedly, they strangled her because, as the step-father explained, “she knew who we was.” The death penalty is still applicable in their case, but it just doesn’t seem quite fair.

I’ve been shot, though – must I state it? – not killed. It can hurt a lot, but not lots and lots. A guy who coldly murders a clerk during a liquor store robbery can get the death penalty, and that seems reasonable. I’m all for kill ‘em and let God sort ‘em out when it comes to terrorists. That seems fair, too.

What seems fair in the case of these two worthless grab-bags of guano would be to take them to some nice, rocky, hard-packed bare ground on a very hot, sunny summer day. Strip them naked and stake them out on their backs at high noon. Let them stew for one and one-half to two hours. Next, very carefully and slowly slice open their bellies so their intestines are exposed. Finally, unleash a half-dozen or so very hungry Rottweilers.

I am the Martha Stewart of cruel and unusual punishment. It’s a good thing.

Yes, it’s cruel and only a sick mind could conjure up such an idea. But if we would do it consistently, it wouldn’t be unusual, and, as Mushroom’s Maxims point out – it’s cruel and unusual, not cruel or unusual. Thank you, George Boole.

Actually I would be quite satisfied if the perpetrators were executed by lethal injection swiftly rather than being allowed to sit on death row, growing old and wasting tax dollars on lunch meat and pointless appeals.

Apparently the Devil’s weeds will always be among us until the Kingdom does come. Most of them will never expose themselves as tares to society at large. They will fit in and become Hollywood celebrities, lawyers, politicians and professors. We can be confident that, in the end, they will be run through God’s big cream separator and dumped, since they are as tasteless as the blue-john we used to feed the hogs.