Druidry and Justice

(narrated by Nimue, journaled by James)

Justice is a human concept. it doesn’t really exist in nature. Any living being may experience life as fair or unfair but when you think about nature as a whole, it just is. No moral judgements are being made. One of the worst things about religion is this human urge to find meaning in random experience. When we see life as holding that kind of meaning, bad experiences can look like punishment. This never goes well. If you think some sueprnatrual force is dishing out punishment in the form of suffering then you blame those who suffer for things they may well have no control over. Connecting misfortune with sin ironically results in something that is totally unjust.

If we treat justice as a human concept and relate to it purely on human terms that’s a better approach. This raises questions of how we think about fairness and unfairness. What does justice mean? What does it look like? how do we achieve it? I have a deep distrust of punishment dished out as justice. I don’t think it fixes anything. I’m much more interested in justice that restores, fixes, or gives something back. I think we need much more attention paid to the ways in which we are responsible for each other. So much that is criminalised is a direct consequence of systems that were unfair in the first place. For me, social justice is a critical aspect of justice. I also want to think about what environmental justice means in terms of human action. What do we owe to the living world? Perhaps justice is best considered in terms of personal responsibility and what we are prepared to step up to, not what we want to inflict on other people.