the price of freedom and the wages of sin

This is not easy reading. It documents the death of a pro-democracy activist in China. He was set on by o mob :

They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men. This was not about teaching a man a lesson, about scaring me, about preventing access to the village; this was about vengeance - retribution for teaching villagers their legal rights, for agitating, for daring to hide.

I am humbled, how easily we take for granted our democratic society and its protections. How easily we seem not to realise that we are frittering it away in anti-terrorist legislation.

The other thing that struck me was the price for the journalist to both witness the murder and to feel partly responsible. I can only begin to imagine what it is like to be thinking that if only a different decision had been taken then or there, that man would still be alive.

The web of interactive decision making that is human society and relating is not a sharply defined allocator of responsibility. Our responsibility fades and shades into others as the power or authority we have disipates and is redefined by circumstance and the deciding of others and the group entity that emerges from our relating. I am coming to believe that an account of original sin that takes account of our social nature is needed. The individualist account we have inherited serves us ill. I wonder if, in fact, when many modern and post-modern people struggle with original sin it is because they (actually 'we') at a gut level feel that there are important dimensions missing in the account: our vulnerability to suggestion, our formedness by others and the structures of society. We can recoil at such suggestions; the thin edge of a wedge that will erase sin and replace it with social and economic ills; a pulling of the carpet from under the need for crucifixion of Christ. But abuse is no excuse not to try for right use...
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'He lay there - his eye out of its socket, his tongue cut, his body limp and twisted':On Del.icio.us: democracy, rights, agitation, activism, cost, mob, lynching, China