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Paying for Others' Mistakes

As I prepare for the first summer term of classes, I will be reflecting over policy changes in the syllabus that might be needed due to new loopholes students may have found. Life would be so much simpler if folks would just do what is expected of them. But that is one of the problems with humanity. We are anything but simple.


Thus, in my five years here, my syllabus has become around five pages and refers to the first chapter of their lab manual, which runs somewhere around 50 pages. It is amazing after millennia of human civilization, we are still in need of more laws, which usually do nothing more substantial than limiting people’s legitimate freedoms because of the abuses of a few.

For instance, we can’t carry our fingernail clippers on board a plane (much less our pocketknives) because an exceedingly tiny minority used them to kill hundreds in a single go. And now innocent travelers get to be groped and/or irradiated and are presumed guilty until proven innocent.

God Himself started with Ten Commandments and ended up with something like 635, when really He only had two biggies—Love God and love people. Even that was an expansion upon His one original rule—“don’t eat the stupid fruit.”

It cumulated into the ultimate example of someone paying because of the bad behaviour of others—Christ’s atonement on the cross for us. It kind of puts a new perspective on the mere inconveniences we tend to suffer and about which we love to gritch. Having my freedom’s toes tripped over or dying for an ungrateful race? I know which I’d pick. And I’m exceedingly glad He chose the other.

SDG

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