Justice

“Why are the wicked so prosperous?
    Why are evil people so happy?
You have planted them,
    and they have taken root and prospered.
Your name is on their lips,
    but you are far from their hearts.”

Jeremiah 12:1b-2

To give context to this post, my wife and I just finished with a court trial involving my wife’s SA as a child.

What do we do when justice fails? When the very system designed to protect the weak and the powerless fails to provide that safety and protection.

I grew up believing that it didn’t matter what happened “in this world.” That the divine would enact a sense of justice. Horrible things can and will happen to good people, but when the abuser is mentioned you would hear “god will bring them to justice one day.” It’s how my own family, particularly my mother, has coped with her own trauma and the unfairness of the world as a whole. And she has stated multiple times that she wouldn’t be able to cope with everything that has happened to her without her faith.

But I don’t hold those views. I don’t believe in a divine being that controls justice. Nor do I believe in the existence of an afterlife. This is it for me. The time and experiences I have while I’m alive are all there is going to be. Nihilism may be the word I would use to describe my thoughts and beliefs. What is in front of me is what is in existence.

A large portion of me still desires to have a world where good is rewarded and evil is punished. But I see no evidence for it. I see before me horrible people having success in their lives that I initially want to call “unfair.” Why is it “fair” that some people work hard to prevent harm to others and obtain no success? While the abuser and doer of harm walks free smiling and laughing at their own success.

“Fair” is a lie. There is no great cosmic sense of “justice.”

The abuser laughs on. Quoting scripture and singing songs of praise to his god. Praising his god that has delivered him from this great trial.

God, the divine judge, is dead. There is no justice is this world or the next.

I guess for now I will sit with my discomfort and pain. And mull over why I need the world to have sense of ultimate justice, or why I need good to be rewarded. Or for evil to be punished.