A Lousy Lot in Life

A pair of angels came to Sodom, where friendly Lot invited them in to his house. A mob formed around his house, wanting to rape the two angel men. Lot instead invited them to rape his virgin daughters. The mob did not take Lot up on his offer, but the angels saved Lot by blinding the mob.

The angels paid Lot back for his kindness by warning him to escape the city. The next day, as Lot and his family fled the city, God burned it down and killed everyone left in it, warning Lot and co. not to turn back and look at the city. Lot's (unnamed) wife turned and was transformed into a salt pillar (salty?). Sad that their lineage was threatened, Lot's daughters plied their father with alcohol then slept with him.

I'm afraid I find this story even more disturbing than Daphne. We have a father offering his daughters up for rape, then those same daughters later raping their father in the name of family continuity; there's mass killing (murder?) of a city by horrific means; divine favoritism, all sorts of nastiness.

I am fortunate to never have experienced any injustice approaching that scale; really, not even close. The situation that comes to mind when I think of my personal experience with unjust punishment is trivial, and I've experienced worse. That situation occurred sometime (probably several times) in elementary school, when upset teachers would discipline the entire class during recess (already a tragically brief period) for the actions of a few miscreants. This is an excellent example of a desirable end (good behavior) being attempted through undesirable, arbitrary, and unjust means.

More seriously I often think of sentencing and convictions disparities in the American criminal justice system, where empirical data indicate that black men are convicted at a far higher rate than any other demographic then given longer sentences than their non-black or non-male counterparts. Similarly, legislative responses to the crack-cocaine epidemic were highly arbitrary and discriminatory. The two main forms of cocaine, crack and powder, were used mostly by blacks and whites, respectively. Crack use (as might be expected) was punished at massive disparity when compared to powder use. The weight ratio between the two types of cocaine (used for determining charges and sentences) used to be 100:1, suggesting that politicians believed crack to be 100 times worse than powder. Subsequent research found no substantive difference except among the populations using; recent legislation (Fair Sentencing Act of 2010) has taken steps to mitigate this injustice.

Source:http://www.freebibleimages.org/illustrations/sodom-gomorrah/
"Here, how about my daughters?"