Blogger has decided to limit all comments on Blogger-hosted blogs to 4,096 characters. Brilliant move, guys. Keep it up with that enforced, incremental dumbing-down and before you know it we’ll all be putty in Google’s hands.

So long as the Wordpress software does not start creating similar limits, I’m proud to say you’re welcome to respond with long comments here. (That is, when I find the time to start posting things again…)

In his essay “How I Believe in God,” Roger Ebert observes: “Science is not ’secular.’ It is a process of honest investigation.” And then: “No, I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.” He writes about growing up in a Catholic home, going to a Catholic school: “Most of my neighborhood friends were Protestants who were not interested in theories about God, apart from the fact that of course he existed.”

Ebert describes a way of living—an engagement with being—that is a process,  a voyage of exploration that’s driven by curiosity and guided by reason. It is not a response to marching orders because there are no discernable orders. You can look for them, you can claim you found them, you can find others who already agree with you, but you will probably never be able to persuade people that your orders are what you what you claim they are. If you persist, then one day you will probably find yourself old and frustrated, your curiosity destroyed, your reason dulled, and no one caring what you think or say. Having ignored your life in a futile effort to skip to the back of the book for the answers you believe must be there, you will find that others who lived the process are happier and better equipped for the changes that are inevitable.

Never stop your honest investigation of everything. You will be more content with questions than answers.

Ebert more recently wrote:

I grant you that if the universe was Caused, there might have been a Causer. But that entity, or force, must by definition be outside space and time; beyond all categories of thought, or non-thought; transcending existence, or non-existence. What is the utility of arguing our “beliefs” about it? What about the awesome possibility that there was no Cause? What if everything…just happened?

If you want to have a “spiritual” experience, ponder that last question. But while it’s useless to argue beliefs about what transcends existence or nonexistence and all categories of thought or nonthought, we have plenty going on right here inside space and time, within our categories of thought, sharing our existence. That so many religious people choose to ignore those things as the substance of life and the source of plenty of problems and questions that are worth arguing about makes no sense to me. Why do they shove aside the mysteries that shoot through every moment of our existence to exalt the other mysteries whose presence and existence are not obvious, and which first need to be persuasively established before anyone will bother to care about them at all? Paraphrasing John Lennon, life is what happens for everyone else while you are cajoling them accept your religious beliefs.

Shakespeare, through Hamlet, called the bluff:

There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

If the purveyors of divine edicts were as sure of their truth as they demand everyone else to be, then why not speed the way to that undiscovered country? Why not make your quietus? Why bother to grunt and sweat in life? Why bother to bear those ills we have? But conscience makes them cowards. They hang, like fools, between their claims to know the truth of what lies beyond and their inexplicable refusal to go there themselves. But we should rather bear the ills we have, and struggle through our lives, to join that voyage of discovery that’s driven by curiosity and guided by reason because we possess that now, and we know that the process yields great satisfaction.

That the religion-pushers fail to recognize their bluff, their cowardice, or their hypocrisy is pathetic on the individual scale, but tragic in the global extent of their number. Life is here to be lived, and they are here, too, but not living. They walk among us like zombies, purporting to carry out those marching orders that, despite their claims to the contrary, lie just beyond the other side of an unscalable epistemological wall. Most of them will never wake up.

Yesterday, I attended a continuing education course on winning writs and appeals. The main speaker was Myron Moskovitz, who is a professor at Golden Gate University. As a practitioner, he also has a great record of winning in appellate courts. Most of what he said confirmed what I had already intuitively concluded: judges care more about justice than about law.

That’s not to say the law doesn’t matter. Where there are settled principles, the law certainly matters. But Professor Moskovitz suggested that of the three elements in any argument—facts, policy, and law—you do more to increase the probability of winning by using the facts and public policy than you do by stating the law correctly and applying it to your situation.

He demonstrated this principle by asking the room full of lawyers and judges if we had heard of Rod Blagojevich and the story of his legal troubles. We all had, of course. “How many of you think he’s guilty?” he asked. Many hands around the room went up. The professor paused. “Now, how many of you know what he’s charged with?” One hand darted up. In other words, explained the Professor, in this room full of lawyers and judges, where almost nobody can state the charges at issue, where probably nobody has read a single applicable statute or case, we were willing to convict the guy based just on the story—the facts, the policy, and our sense of justice. Judges are no different.

The law matters, but justice matters more. That may not be fair or even right, but it highlights the tension between law and justice. Most people want justice for themselves, but they want the law applied to others. Law simplifies reality. Law says, “You can consider these things, but not those things.” But justice requires you to think about all those other things. We’re all intimately familiar with the mitigating factors that should result in justice for ourselves, but for others, we want everything simplified. You stole a loaf of bread? Criminal conviction for you! Don’t tell me why. Don’t tell me your family was starving. That doesn’t matter. Irrelevant! But if I stole a loaf of bread? Please, let me explain!

We need law to keep our system of justice rolling. If disputes could only be resolved by considering all the factors that inform our sense of justice, we could hardly work efficiently.

None of this is new or earth-shattering. Anybody who has ever thought seriously about the philosophy of law or politics has struggled with this tension. But we need to recognize that the tension is there. Failure to consider that problem leads to ill-considered views about our own rightness and the wrongness of others, which only breeds more conflict and increases the need to resolve more disputes.

That is probably why President Obama, talking about appointing a replacement for Justice Souter, said:

I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes. I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role. I will seek somebody who shares my respect for constitutional values on which this nation was founded and who brings a thoughtful understanding of how to apply them in our time.

The President strikes exactly the right tone, I think. Judges must be dedicated to the rule of law and have the empathy that allows them to understand and identify with people’s hopes and struggles. If we could reduce the courts to legalist science, we might have a pure system of neutral principles, but I doubt people would be happy. The laws applied by the courts would still be dictated by legislatures who can be swayed by monied interests,and by the tyranny of the majority in states with more direct forms of democracy. In other words, the disputes would simply be limited to the unabashedly political arena and removed from the place where people can go to tell their story in search of mercy and justice, relief from the legislature, from monied interests and tyrannical majorities.

Neutral principles sound nice in the abstract. They seem fair. But the longer I think about them, the less I think that trying to establish them in the courts will result in a more just society.