The Casey Anthony in all of us

Representation of Casey Anthony's tattoo, "beautiful life" in Italian.

The recent jury verdict brought another chapter to a close in the sad story of Casey and Caylee Anthony. It is sad to see the death of a little girl so early in her life. It is sad for the young woman who seems to have been all too willing to throw away friends, family relations and even her young daughter for a few weeks of pleasure. It also strikes me sad the almost morbid fascination that our media and population have had with this tragic affair, the way it has crowded out more serious news, and even the anger over the verdict expressed by people entirely unconnected with the situation. Maybe it is shock that such things could happen in our society, although unfortunately this type of child neglect is far more common than many would like to admit. Maybe it because mother and daughter are so attractive looking, and many could imagine them being someone we knew. Maybe it is because it quietly made us feel better when we secretly compared ourselves to her, thinking that, while I may be too busy to give my children the attention they really need and might color the facts when filling out taxes or talking to my boss, I’m certainly not like her. Or am I?
Perhaps just as sad is that we don’t have to look very far to find other examples of self-centered people trying to spin the truth to fit their convenience. At the moment not one but two professional sports leagues are engaged in lockouts, involving people whose income far exceeds most Americans who are trying to convince us that they are being impoverished by each other through contractual agreements they themselves agreed to. Perhaps the greatest farce at the moment are the budget “negotiations” that seem to currently consist largely of Republicans and Democrats trying to paint each other as the roadblock to resolving a serious national issue. But of course, we elected them and they are simply pandering to and enabling our selective reading of facts to keep believing that the nation’s financial bind can be resolved without any significant tax increases or modification of entitlement programs. Maybe we are not so different.
Sadly, being loose with the truth when it suits an agenda extends past our politicians and hard-partying young women to even groups we want to think of being more trustworthy. For example, I am troubled by a prominent radio preacher blithely claiming there is not one shred of evidence for evolution—note that is ANY evidence, independent of whether it is enough to convince him or not. I have difficulty understanding such claims as anything but willful ignorance, given not only the mass of scientific work but even a book specifically written by Christians and published by a Christian publisher with an explicit goal of explaining such evidence to the church. I cringed at a cutesy cartoon video produced by a major creationist organization (which now has a successful for-profit arm) that claimed that teaching about evolution was the root cause of abortion, homosexuality, and a host of other social ills, basically conflating “evolution” with “secular humanism” in a way that would make Louis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty proud. On the other hand, I am baffled by atheistic scientists who are so careful in their scientific work yet turn around and make blanket statements about religion being the root of mankind’s ills, blithely lumping Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Teresa into the same category as Osama bin Laden. I even had one otherwise respectable colleague claim to me that Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were religious fanatics, despite the latter two—as atheistic communists—explicitly used state power to repress religious activity. More subtle is the continued promulgation of the idea that science is entirely objective and based solely on facts while religious belief is completely subjective and based only on opinions, so that the latter has no place in public discourse. While there is certainly a difference in degree, science does have a subjective element—witness Einstein’s refusal to accept non-deterministic quantum mechanics because it just seemed wrong to him—and theological discourse is hardly fact-free, for example bringing up the etymology of words in the original text, comparing different passages and appealing to respected authorities. Unfortunately, it is so much easier to paint opposing views with broad brush strokes to dismiss them without trying to really understand a different view point; after all, we might discover that they might be at least partially right, and our most cherished beliefs might need to be re-evaluated in light of new knowledge.
Our tendency to “adjust” fact to fit what we want to be true is a human thing. In the prototypical sin described in the Bible, Adam and Eve (egged on by the serpent) chose to re-interpret what God had told them because they decided for themselves that eating the forbidden fruit was good for them. It is a pattern one sees throughout scripture, whether it is King David trying to cover up his liaison with Bathsheba, Peter denying knowing Christ in response to a woman’s accusation, or the unnamed Corinthians using freedom in Christ as a cover for sexual perversion. I don’t think the root problem of our society are Democrats or Republicans, scientific evolution or public displays of faith, greedy sports figure or owners, biased media or dysfunctional families. It is so much easier to try to play victim and put the blame on someone else, like Casey Anthony tried to, but that just points back to the real problem. Much as we hate to admit it, there is a little bit of her in all of us, spinning facts to match what we want to be true, trying to hide uncomfortable truth even from ourselves. There have been great scientific and technological advances over the last few centuries that have radically changed the material existence of most in our society. Human nature, however, hasn’t really changed, so on this subject I believe that certain ancient collection of writings still offers the best insight into our spiritual problem and its resolution. Call it what you will, but the root is in us, not them, and best we can do on our own is to cover it up. A good life can not be built on lies and what we just want to be true.