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South Bay SDA Church

Phil Mills

Christianity, Social Justice & Emotional Intelligence

We'll begin with Paul's graphical description of people at the end of time.

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come.

For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying its power, and from such people turn away.

During my high school days, I remember doing a chemistry experiment where we super-saturated a solution with a salt.

The salt was completely invisible, dissolved by the water.

But when we added just 1 tiny amount of ingredient, suddenly, the salt crystallized out.

What had been invisible, hidden, completely dissolved in the solution, quickly became visible to all.

We live in a society super saturated with social justice ideas.

And although these ideas are everywhere, in many ways they're invisible, absorbed by our society.

It's my hope that some thought in this presentation can crystallize out our understanding of social justice, and we can see it clearly and examine it biblically in the context of emotional intelligence.

When I was 10 years old, I read an article reporting on research, surprising research that was found by the well-known general electric psychometrician, Johnson O'Connor.

O'Connor found that simply studying vocabulary increased your IQ.

He also found that a person's vocabulary level was the best single predictor of vocational success.

Reading that article changed my view of vocabulary and definitions.

After reading the article, I decided that words were my friends.

And ever since, I've loved expanding my vocabulary and learning word definitions.

So, in an effort to increase our combined IQ and vocational success, this presentation will begin with definitions starting with the word emotion.

The new Oxford American Dictionary defines emotion as a natural, instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationship with others, instinctive or intuitive feelings as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.

The same source also gives synonyms for emotion.

Feeling, sentiment, reaction, response, instinct, intuition.

The English language contains a lot of words used to describe emotions.

1 researcher found more than 300 words for emotions.

On the screen is just a short list of some more common words for our varying feelings, but there are many others.

I highlighted a few of the feelings most of us have experienced at some time in our lives.

Anger, disgust, embarrassment, fear, loneliness, love, regret, sadness, shame.

Notice how the dictionary contrasts the heart with the head.

We're not simply reasonable and logical beings.

They can even use this logic to detect emotions in human voices.

But no 1 has found a way to give computers emotions.

It doesn't appear that we'll need IT psychologists to treat robots with emotional problems anytime soon.

The head contains knowledge, facts, logic and reason, which make up our thoughts.

To some extent, some of these functions can be computerized.

The heart holds our desires, purposes, motives, feelings, inclinations, and intentions.

Machines and artificial intelligence lack this.

IQ is one's ability to recall, organize, and creatively utilize information, knowledge, and facts using logic and reason.

EQ, or emotional intelligence, is the measure of our ability to control our emotions versus their power to control us.

We have all experienced mental battles between our thoughts and feelings, our head versus our heart.

We could even divide the people in the world into 2 groups.

Those whose thoughts control their emotions, high EQ, and those whose emotions control their thoughts, low EQ.

EQ is not about how brilliant our mind is or how high our IQ may be.

Instead, it is about our head's ability to take charge of our feelings.

Head and heart are not independent from each other, they are tightly linked.

Thoughts produce actions, words, memories, experiences, which in turn color and trigger our emotions.

But our emotions, in turn, produce actions, words, memories, and experiences, and trigger thoughts.

As we repeat this cycle over time, we develop habits of thought, and habits are linked with habits of feeling.

Habits are powerful because they are virtually automatic and effortless.

They are seldom changed and then only with a great deal of effort.

Our habitual patterns of thinking and feeling make up our character, and character is who we are.

This is important because our character determines our destiny.

We've looked at the operational definition of EQ as the measurement of our ability to control our emotions versus their power to control us.

Here is the dictionary's formal definition of emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is, and I quote, the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotion, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.

Before we look at social justice, we need to understand justice.

West's definitive legal dictionary, the Encyclopedia of American Law, defines justice as the proper administration of the law.

Of course, that raises the question, what is proper?

The fair and equitable treatment of all individuals under the law.

In other words, justice is the impartial and proportionate enforcement of good laws.

When you have good laws impartially and proportionately enforced, you have justice.

You cannot separate justice from law, they're linked.

When law is good, it's impartial and proportionate and enforcement is good.

A just society impartially and proportionately enforces good laws.

"'The Lord is a God of justice, Isaiah says.

Solomon said, to do justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.

Christ does not accept church going as a substitute for law keeping and impartial and proportional law enforcement.

At the close of Jesus' ministry, he called out hypocritical religious practices.

He said, you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the more important matters of the law.

You ought to give a tenth, but without forgetting about those more important matters.

In the Bible, justice is bound to God's law and is extremely important in Christian thought.

Paul, the greatest evangelist of Christianity, said of God's end time justice, "'He will give justice with blazing fire "'to those who don't recognize God "'and don't obey the good news of our Lord Jesus.

God's justice, biblical justice, is God's impartial and proportional enforcement of his 10 Commandment Law.

This is not, however, the meaning or definition of the word justice in the phrase social justice.

Let's look at the meaning of the phrase social justice.

The Oxford Dictionary defines social justice as justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, the distribution of opportunities, and in the distribution of privileges within a society.

While specifics vary, social justice is generally used at a minimum encompasses these 3 areas, wealth, opportunities, and privileges.

It is important to notice that social justice, as it has come to be understood today, is not linked to impartial and proportional enforcement of good law.

Because social justice is not tied to impartial and proportional enforcement of good law, the word justice is actually a misnomer.

Social justice is not about justice for all, rather it is about perceived unfairness for some.

Hayek, an influential European economist and Nobel Laureate, pointed out that social justice is opposed to actual justice, since social justice opposes treating all individuals impartially and is itself promoting inequality and injustice for some.

Although Wikipedia is not an academic source, it often reflects the view of those who are particularly passionate about a topic.

Here is the Wikipedia's description of social justice.

It summarizes it as a concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society.

Social justice makes the claim of standing for fairness and against injustice.

Once again, we see social justice is all about perceived unfairness and injustice.

Fairness is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity, and social privileges.

We see the equitable distribution of the same 3 areas, wealth, opportunities, and privilege.

However, social justice has no objective standard, so there is no agreement on what is fair.

Schemes for equitable distribution of wealth opportunities and social privileges differ widely.

An excerpt from Tristan Rogers' essay, Justice is Lawfulness, illustrates such differences.

Political philosophers like Philippe Van Perroute have worried about such trivial matters as whether surfers ought to be subsidized for what Ronald Dworkin calls expensive tastes which they have blamelessly developed yet unfairly bear the burden of financing.

Cohen of whether 1 can support egalitarian policies while remaining wealthy oneself.

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Christianity, Social Justice & Emotional Intelligence

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