The Good Samaritan's Dilemma

We all know the story of the Good Samaritan. It is one of the stories in the Bible that even the staunchest atheists can admire Jesus for telling. Of course, Christian agnostics like me admire it greatly. Here is too brief a summary. A man was traveling down the highway, on foot. Thieves attacked him, took his money, and beat him almost to death. A priest walked by and deliberately ignored him. A Pharisee religious scholar walked by and deliberately ignored him. But a Samaritan saw the man and rescued him. Samaritans were a minority group that the mainstream Jews (Jesus’ own ethnic group) despised even more than Southern whites despised blacks in the twentieth century (and as some still do today).

So, according to Jesus, if we are really doing God’s will, we should not ignore someone who needs our help. We cannot pretend that our religious practices can compensate for not helping our neighbor. (Who is our neighbor? That was the question that Jesus answered by telling this story in the first place.)

Well, it’s not quite so simple today. Consider two examples I have recently expeienced.

The first one. It was Sunday night about 10:00 and I had just finished writing a book chapter about altruism. There was a knock at my door. It was a mentally impaired woman who said she was cold and needed to get home. She wanted to use my phone, which I allowed her to do outside. There was no answer, and she did not know what to do next. I wished her well and closed my door. Was I being like the priest or the Pharisee?

Here is why I gently closed the door. If I had let her in my house, or been alone with her in my car, someone in her family might later have brought charges against me that I was taking sexual advantage of her. Or, when my car arrived at her house, I could have gotten robbed, even if the woman herself had no plan to manipulate me into such a circumstance. Now it is true that in Jesus’ day the Samaritan would have been taking a risk of helping the victim—the victim could himself have been planted as a decoy by thieves—but would not have run the risk of being sued. We are now caught in a legal cobweb that makes almost any altruistic act a danger to ourselves.

The second one. My wife and I were in Taco Bell. A burly man was there who looked like he was the product of the kind of genetic engineering that Dr. Moreau would have used had he lived today. He was a Moreauvian mixture of the worst aspects of both black and white races. He started yelling into his cell phone. It was something to the effect of Fuck you bitch I’m coming over and am going to slap the shit out of you.

So what were we to do? I watched his car drive away, and I was about to memorize his license plate number. But I let the moment slip. Here is why. Suppose I had called the police. First, they would have done nothing. They cannot do anything preventive. All they can do is go to the crime scene afterward. Besides, in Tulsa, the new Republican leadership is so afraid of raising taxes that they instead have cut back on public safety, and the police (as a matter of policy) no longer intervene in domestic disputes or go to accident scenes unless an injury is involved. The Republican mayor’s constituency probably doesn’t mind, since they all have guns and can take the law into their own hands. Second, my bit of contributed information would be a matter of public record and the man, or his family or friends, could come by my house and do something to either me or my wife or my daughter, should she be visiting. And the police would do nothing to prevent it, just make a record of it afterward. I have good reason to worry. The house next door was firebombed a few years ago. Vandals frequently go through our neighborhood—a solidly middle class mixed neighborhood—and destroy property. I don’t think Jesus’ Samaritan had to worry about this.

So my wife and I did nothing about it. We could only hope that the woman, who obviously had a phone, would call for help, or would flee, since she obviously had warning that her favorite monster was on his way. We had to leave it in the hands of God, who has never helped anyone in need. God has worked only through humans, but when humans have done all they can, God just leaves the mess untouched. We went home and ate our Taco Bell stuff. We rarely eat out, even fast food. It was the first time I had been in a Taco Bell for years. I was surprised that their food items have evolved into mostly layers of carbohydrate with thin smatterings of scarcely identifiable fillings.

So what is a Good Sam to do? And is it only progressives like me who worry about it? A conservative would say, if the woman gets hurt it is her fault because she ought to have her own gun, so don’t worry about it.

It would be a little easier to answer the Good Sam dilemma if we humans, just once in a while, got a little help from God. In this way as in many others, the world matches an agnostic viewpoint.