Searching for Justice and Trust ...

Monday, Oct 15, 2012. Yesterday the news in Germany were full of articles about the PhD of the federal minister of education. She has carried out her PhD in 1980, but recently it has become a popular sport of some people to dig for plagiarism in the PhD works of well-known politicians and other people who are in the public. Some anonymous people think they found many passages which are not to be accepted …

Whom can you trust? …

The whole process around the hunting for plagiarism today is extremely difficult. Of course, we want to fight for clear authorship and against plagiarism! But! All the articles this weekend relied on a secret report, which is not even handed over to the person about whom it is written. In the political world the newspapers (and all of them!) report statements, she should step down, without waiting for any clarification of the matter. The newspapers and journals claim to work towards trustworthiness, but use unfair tools in the process. They are not trustworthy at all. It looks like a crowd of very dangerous people who are completely governd by hunting instincts - using whatever tools they can use to destroy their target.

I see another difficulty here. The criteria, which are used, are not at all balanced. Everyone today can take a sentence, find something similar in an old manuscript - sometimes in those which are cited one sentence before or after it, and claim fraud. You might say I did not look closely, but I have seen many of the accusations. And I expect a theses to summarize some things and rely on other texts, which of course should be cited as the basis of the summary. So it usually needs specific knowledge to judge what is going on in a text, in particular when summary and recapitulation is used.

It would be good if we could at least rely on some basic level of justice in our state, in our institutions and in our media. In western democracies there is at least some balance and independence of legal institutions. But sometimes there are developments which threaten justice … and modern media lynch law seem something which threatens it currently.

God is trustworthy …

Whom can you trust? Can you trust a newspaper, which at any time will confront you with a bucket full of anonymous insults? Perhaps you say that it is part of politics that you need to be able to deal with that type of publicity. Yes, that seems to be the way our media world. But is it good? No, it is not.

Who is trustworthy? All the political friends? They are afraid to be pulled into those problems, they are afraid to get negative publicity as well.

I know only one person who is completely honest and completely trustworthy at the same time. It is the eternal Lord, the living God. The father of Christ Jesus, father, son and holy spirit. They know where we fail. They know where we did it by purpose, where we knew what we did, and they know where we failed without knowledge and insight. They know, but they still hold us and forgive us and give us responsibility. They ask us to be changed, to be transformed, and to go on - an invitation to life, eternal life! (Roland Potthast) ... more texts