Re: The cult of justice – from Charlie Stross’s Diary

There’s a set of patterns I keep seeing that are implicit in our news reportage—specifically, the reporting of legal cases. Patterns which seem to me to have a very simple underlying cause but which we take so much for granted that we don’t recognize them explicitly.

1. Justice is a religious cult.

2. Law is holy scripture.

3. Judges are priests.

4. Judicial capital punishment is human sacrifice.

via The cult of justice – Charlie’s Diary.

My alternate hypothesis from the comments:

1. Communities are shared narratives.
2. Governments are attempts to fix the narratives and who gets to create them.
3. Laws are created by authors and administered by editors.