Posted on 07/19/2007 2:03:08 PM PDT by Rodney King
You missed a big part if you think that Jesus forgave unrepentant sinners. These convicts were all repeat offenders.
I'm not a big drug warrior but these court watchers aren't doing anything wrong.
Huh? Which part of the Bible had Jesus commanding his followers to improve the world by demanding the government be harsher on crimianls?
I'm objecting to their making a religious movement out of it, doing it in Jesus' name, when there is no record of Jesus ever doing such. If they are in it for religious reasons, they should ask the judge for time to counsel to the accused and help them through their punishments.
Do you remember the discussion between the two other men between whom Jesus was crucified on Golgatha?
What do these people do? The keep a record of what happens in the court. The examples of problems they discovered were that officers were not showing up so the criminals could not be prosecuted, and that judges were giving repeat offenders a slap on the wrist over and over again rather than holding people accountable for continued and repeated bad behavior.
How is your objecting to that substantially different than saying the criminals should not be punished?
But, making a religious movement out of demanding that the government be harder on criminals is nothing that Jesus did, or asked that his followers do.
So you're saying Jesus was an anarchist who never believed in making sure people were justly punished?
Do you think that letting repeat criminals get off with little or no punishment is good for our society? Is it even good for those people? People need not only need forgiveness, they need to repent and seek forgiveness.
Jesus forgave those who repented, but I don't seem to see where he intervened with punishing those who did not repent. In the case of the man who hung on the cross next to him, he forgave that man of his sins, but he did not save that man from his punishment.
Christianity is also about more than just what the Gospels present to us of his life. There is a lot more to the bible than just the gospels, and simply because Jesus didn't explicitly tell his followers to watch and make sure that justice was done, doesn't mean that ensuring that justice is done is not a role that the church should take part in.
Proverbs is full of instances where the bible advocates punishing wrongs to help people learn from their mistakes.
The blind refusal to hold people accountable isn't based in Christianity. It is based in humanism. Love and forgiveness are at the core of Christianity, however so is accountability.
Yeah, and I don't recall Jesus demanding that they get punched and beaten before they died. Their punishment was the government's business, and Jesus was busy dealing with their souls, not their punishments on earth.
He certainly did nothing to prevent the crucifixion of the two men on either side of him, did he?
No. That was the government's business.
From the article, it seems they are motivated more by love than by some taking pleasure in someone else's punishment.
Some judges need adult supervision to get them to do their jobs. Criminals need to pay the price for their crimes. You can go visit them in jail and minister to them. Maybe you can change some lives for the better.
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