Moss and Johnson on bridges and tolls.

Taken together, these two Sunday opinion columns appearing in Louisville metro newspapers occupying opposite editorial sides of the bridge tolls debate make a unified, if unintended point.

Opposition to tolling may be misdirected, and perhaps even wasted, without a fundamental examination of future transit options as largely contradicted by the assumptions of the ORBP. Does the sacred plan and its $4 billion worth of boondoggle actually provide "mobility solutions," or might these goals be achieved by altered or entirely different means? What is the future?

Dale Moss Jeffersonville restaurant owners take on tolls (Courier-Journal)

Like many Hoosiers, Wes Johnson and Mike Kapfhammer wait impatiently for fewer maybes about the Ohio River Bridges Project. And like many – including me - they want to believe in it but still cannot.

Johnson and Kapfhammer co-own the Buckhead Mountain Grill and Rocky’s restaurants on Jeffersonville’s riverfront. They were regionalists before regionalism was cool ...

... Johnson and Kapfhammer are trying to rally people as part of the No2BridgeTolls.org effort. “When they realize, then they get excited,” Kapfhammer said.

In short, we mustn't accept recently proffered diversionary bait. It's time to take toll talk to a different level, but more on that later. For now, know that No2BridgeTolls is holding a another meeting on Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. at Buckhead Mountain Grill in Jeffersonville. Now, notice how Rev. Johnson instinctively grasps certain points that seem forever to elude the iron dictates of Stemlerism.

JOHNSON: A bridge too far, by Richard Johnson (Tribune)

... When new highways and bridges are built in urban areas, they tend to have the long-term effect of encouraging more people to drive. This in turn leads to more traffic and bigger traffic jams…the opposite of the intended effect. We know this, but continue to build them anyway.

Tribune columnist Johnson's "heart condition" belongs on the religion page.

Why does the Tribune’s local guest columnist Richard Johnson receive editorial page placement for pieces that amount to religious sermons?

It seems to me that the newspaper should relocate the prison pastor’s testimonials to the weekly religion page, where they’d be more at home. After all, in the past, Johnson has explicitly rejected church-state separation when it comes to issues of crime and punishment.

Moreover, not since the mercifully concluded heyday of bizarrely outdated Tribune syndicated columnist Dr. George Crane, he of the relentlessly right-wing Worry Clinic and unintentionally hilarious frequent references to “boudoir cheesecake,” has there been anything on the Tribune’s editorial page to compare to Johnson’s oft-repeated “heart condition” analogy, which effectively mocks any contemporary explanation of criminal behavior that does not spring from the pages of an ancient scroll.

JOHNSON: The truth is out there, by RICHARD JOHNSON, Local Columnist (October 19, 2008)

If you have been reading my column for a while, you may remember that not long ago, I wrote about the root cause of crime. As a follower of Christ and a minister of the gospel, I believe that the cause of crime is a universal heart condition that the Bible calls sin.

From my perspective, the inner process that leads someone to break the law looks something like this; first, if our hearts are wrong, we will harbor evil. Next, the presence of evil in our hearts will affect our thinking; we will rehearse, or plan evil. Finally, because our hearts are wrong, and our thinking is wrong, our behavior will be influenced; we will commit a crime.

I'm a longtime proponent of fair and balanced, even before the television network started abusing the phrase, so just for the fun of it I searched for a non-Biblical explanation for crime.

Throughout history people have tried to explain what causes abnormal social behavior, including crime. Efforts to control "bad" behavior go back to ancient Babylon's Code of Hammurabi some 3,700 years ago. Later in the seventeenth century European colonists in North America considered crime and sin the same thing. They believed evil spirits possessed those who did not conform to social norms or follow rules. To maintain social order in the settlements, persons who exhibited antisocial behavior had to be dealt with swiftly and often harshly.

By the twenty-first century criminologists looked to a wide range of factors to explain why a person would commit crimes. These included biological, psychological, social, and economic factors. Usually a combination of these factors is behind a person who commits a crime.

"Sin" isn't required to make sense of this explanation. As I've noted previously, the concept of sin is undoubtedly a religious construct. Without sin’s purely conditional aspect of disobedience to God’s “word” – according to whatever “God” means within the framework of a specific religious worldview – the concept of sin is just about meaningless. Johnson assumes the truth of the religious construct, subtly linking it to social science as though the latter must spring from the former. Shine a spotlight on the veracity of the religious construct, and the argument crumbles.

In fairness, Johnson’s column today makes more sense, but only barely.

Crime is a family affair, and the business is being handed down from one generation to the next.

In my opinion, the redefinition of marriage, and the breakdown of the traditional family unit, are making our crime problem worse.

Alas, Johnson can’t get through 900 words without including a plug for the handbook of his particular religious perspective.

“We took the Bible out of our schools, and now our prisons are full!”

I’d like to see him prove this assertion … on the religion page, where his thinly veiled evangelical tracts truly belong.

It's a "sin" to drink Lite beer, but that's as far as it goes with me.

With the smoke finally clearing locally (ahem), I’m finally beginning to catch up. Scrum muddying really takes it out of a guy, and besides that, my knees are still toast after Friday’s thoroughly enjoyable Carnegie Center fundraiser.

Here’s one I missed from late August.

JOHNSON: Unite church and state, by Richard Johnson, (local Tribune columnist).

While there are many theories that try to explain what causes crime, only one of them in my opinion offers a complete explanation. The root cause of crime is a universal heart condition that the Bible calls sin.

As a longtime follower of Christ and an ordained minister of the gospel, I have served the Lord for many years, 15 of them in America’s prisons and jails …

I’ll cut to the chase. Johnson’s argument goes something like this:

Sin, not “fancy theories” (i.e., poverty, poor education, bad childhoods) leads to a chosen “lifestyle of crime”, which is a spiritual condition.

As such, “Government cannot do anything about sin; show me any government, anywhere, that can. Dealing with sin is the church’s job,” and the government’s job is preserving order, nothing more.

Therefore, the separation of church and state is an inefficient way of tackling crime because the state, which exists to preserve order, must have “allies” in the church who can deal with sin on spiritual terms.

Assertions of this nature never cease to amaze me. One wonders why the Founding Fathers even bothered with civil law if all they needed to do was mimeograph the teachings of one or the other Christian denominations and join certain areas of the Muslim world in shackling the legal system to one specific interpretation within a multiplicity of religious perspectives.

The concept of sin is undoubtedly a religious construct. Without sin’s purely conditional aspect of disobedience to God’s “word” – according to whatever “God” means within the framework of a specific religious worldview – the concept of sin is just about meaningless.

Johnson asserts that sin is the only “universal” explanation for crime, but that’s a fairly obvious over-simplification. When it comes to the behavior of a schizophrenic, there’s a better answer over at Wikipedia:

Increased dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic pathway of the brain is consistently found in schizophrenic individuals.

If an undiagnosed (and untreated) schizophrenic commits a crime, was it the result of sin or bad brain chemistry? The schizophrenic made a choice, and “chose” sin, but how did he know what he was doing if the wiring in his brain is faulty?

And, what are we to make of God’s role in the creation of schizophrenia? If a supreme being created the brain and the brain is faulty, and if the schizophrenic commits a sinful crime as a result of what amounts to pilot error, then the crime and the sin were pre-determined. Free will, anyone? Making mistakes is one thing. Suffering from an illness that precludes the rationality necessary to make a sensible choice is something else entirely.

Johnson’s argument isn’t without an element of cleverness, though it’s an epistemological shell game. To make sense of sin, one must accept the existence of God. To accept the existence of both sin and God in this context implies plausibility of Johnson’s central point, that church and state should be anything but separate when it comes to crime.

Sorry. These are theistic back doors best left closed and locked. Johnson and his brethren are perfectly free to dispense spiritualistic solutions to personal problems, though not to graft them onto the secular law that governs the nation.

All these religious columnists lately! I may become a professional atheist yet.

See also: Making your own dirt: Why not evangelical atheism?