We live in an age in which euphemisms are used to cover up public criminal acts. We embrace language and words that obscure and excuse moral guilt.
We refuse to call things by the words that will convey the evil and horror of those actions, particularly when it's the government committing those acts.
If a person calls out those actions with words that convey their moral abhorrence, he will be pounced upon for refusing to assume that the state acts lawfully, or that courts cannot commit actual crimes.
This week, a local citizen filed a lawsuit against a Greenwood police officer for assaulting him, abducting him, kidnapping him, and holding him for ransom. Naturally, all those acts were called by their sanitized labels: arrest, incarceration, and bail.
But in fact, the officer broke the law, and had no legal basis for what he did to the gentleman. Though publicly known, our city officials conducted no investigation and filed no charges against the officer for his criminal actions.
Official perpetrators who harm citizens are never criminally charged in Greenwood.
In America, we won't call abhorrent acts by their actual names. We call it "war" when actually it's just mass murder.
We call it slavery when actually it was theft, violence, oppression, torture, and murder.
We call it "enhanced interrogation" when actually it is torture.
We call it "abortion" when actually it is mass murder.
God isn't impressed by the clever language we use to mask evil and crime.
"Crucifixion" has become to many a technical word, but in Jesus' time, it conveyed all the abhorrence and evil that the act was. Let us never forget how Jesus was treated by His creatures. |
