Moral Accountability

Accountability is the eternal question; it can be addressed from many angles.
My faith asserts we are all accountable to God. If there is one thing I will seek verbally in holding your feet to the fire, this is it. Even to the point I would rather deemphasize talk about God Himself if that would get you to listen, I want to press this issue. Go ahead and ignore my religious expression. If there is anything about which I would even approach being an activist, it is in promoting moral accountability.
Naturally, we’ll argue about how to derive the ground of understanding what is and isn’t morality, but I dare say most people know when something they see lacks accountability. I’ve moaned about it missing from the Open Source software community, and Linux in particular. I invested many good years Linux, promoting it myself. Frankly I feel very much betrayed, because Linux is not what I was promised by those who promoted it, and for all I can tell, they were supported by the very people who give us what Linux is. What remains is a significant collection of projects in Open Source are not simply unaccountable to users, but range between elitist dismissal of user input, all the way to very open hostility to user input. There is no sense of “customer service” because the Open Source way makes the developer god, unaccountable to anyone else.
“Code it yourself, the source is open,” they say. If we could code it ourselves, we would have no need of your projects. But we do need them, and you refuse to provide what we need. Instead, you let people lie on your behalf and we invest our time and energy, and it comes up short. So now I tell people, “Windows is bad, and Mac is worse, but you are more likely to find something you can use when you stick with the established commercial stuff.” Naturally, I do use some Open Source software, but I run it on Windows, because there are a few projects which seem to hold themselves accountable to the users. Sadly, those projects are not pivotal in whatever Linux is when you try to use it. I go so far as to say my God is angry with this abusive attitude from the people who make Linux a viable alternative, because they are making it less viable, being in many ways far worse to the user than Microsoft and Apple and all their snotty, smirky selling of users to the highest bidder. In the process, MS and Mac at least do respond just a little to loss of reputation and money. The leverage is small with the big corporations, but with Open Source, it’s just about zero.
This is not about what software I recommend, but I’ll offer this much: Opera and Chrome browsers (Opera especially for email), GIMP photo editing, gVim for text and HTML markup, Cygwin for CLI software, and VLC Media Player, FFMPEG for media conversion, PySol and jShisen for games, and the rest depends on what you seek. Some of those do require dedication to learning them, because they aren’t easy, but they work exceptionally well, offering a level of control which makes me comfortable. They do it for me.
But the church can be even worse about accountability, and that’s why I spend more time with my Savior outside the institutional religious organizations than inside. They have become unaccountable on the very most important things I face every day in my faith. In what God demands of me they want no part. So I am accountable in warning you to be aware most churches will in one way or another abuse your trust; they certainly have abused mine. While a great many Christian people tend to be rather nice, and they try to do what they sense is good and right, when you raise certain issues their souls slam shut, and no amount of facts and spiritual persuasion can help them understand they are clinging to something not at all in Scripture. The details are elsewhere on this blog, but if you need my response to specifics, ask.
I rather expect rejection of accountability from government. People who like having power over others are not good people. Good people don’t want power over others, and accept it only with the greatest reluctance. Good people try to avoid having to exercise power they hold legitimately, because they have a powerful sense of moral accountability, and the burden is weighty, indeed. But we look at the world around us with holy cynicism and don’t expect much, even as we make the clarion call to consider better things. But it’s an old saw: We expect sinners to sin.
It’s when someone claims the moral high ground we are most rightly skeptical.
You won’t catch me claiming that ground. I will confess a desire to stand there, to live there, but I don’t pretend I own it. What I do have is my experience with things, and that’s all I can offer. Yes, I will claim I am standing in a place where I do reap some serious benefits of moral probity, however limited it might be. I recognize a certain Law binding on my behavior and I see the blessings of that Law in my life. Hey, it might work for you. Maybe just a sliver is all you can use, but that’s okay with me. I can only assert how it works for me, and even to the shedding of blood I’ll cling to that.
Yet time and time again, it always seems to boil down to accountability. Answer that one great moral demand, and it seems a lot of crap dries up and blows away.