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Commentary

Is it OK for Christians to make moral judgments?

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I found this short article by Paul Copan on Chris Shannon’s Facebook feed. He’s gone Paul Copan crazy lately – he keeps linking to Paul Copan articles.

Excerpt:

It’s been said that the most frequently quoted Bible verse is no longer John 3:16 but Matthew 7:1: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”  We cannot glibly quote this, though, without understanding what Jesus meant.  When Jesus condemned judging, he wasn’t at all implying we should never make judgments about anyone.  After all, a few verses later, Jesus himself calls certain people “pigs” and “dogs” (Matt. 7:6) and “wolves in sheep’s clothing” (7:15)!  Any act of church discipline (1 Cor. 5:5) and rebuking false prophets (1 John 4:1) requires judgment.  What Jesus condemns is a critical and judgmental spirit, an unholy sense of moral superiority.  Jesus commanded us to examine ourselves first for the problems we so easily see in others.  Only then can we help remove the speck in another’s eye—which, incidentally, assumes that a problem exists and must be confronted.1 But let’s take a closer look at this charge that Christians are judgmental when we speak out on moral issues.

He then goes on to make some points:

  • If judging is wrong, then no one can judge you for being judgmental
  • In other places, Jesus urges people to make a right judgment
  • Is it possible to have convictions yet still treat people with respect?
  • Are inclusivists and pluralists (e.g. – Hindus) tolerant of exclusivists?
  • What is tolerance, and how does it relate to truth?
  • Comparison of “equality of persons” with “equality of viewpoints”
  • Are moral standards variable by time and place, or fixed?
  • Are moral standards merely descriptive, or also prescriptive?
  • Should atheists be moral? What reason do they have to be moral?
  • Can non-illusory morality exist in an atheistic universe?
  • Can there be real morality if there is no design in the universe?

And he also talks about what else the Bible says about judging.

It’s a good article. Moral judgments are necessary for us to warn ourselves and others about the harm that may occur if we cross boundaries.

News

Mitch Daniels thinks that government should cut spending

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Story about frugal Indiana governor Mitch Daniels at the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

Daniels is a font of statistics, but one comes to his lips more than any other. “Only 61 cents of every education dollar gets into the classroom in Indiana.” School funding increased every year under Daniels before the recession, and since the downturn, when most areas of state government have seen cuts of 25 percent or more, education has been reduced by only 2 percent. Yet the local school boards and their Democratic allies in the state legislature continue to complain. Daniels calls education funding “the bloody shirt” of Indiana politics: “It doesn’t take long before somebody starts waving it.” One of my favorite bits of Daniels video on YouTube shows him at a press conference defending a bill to end “social promotion” in the state’s grade schools. School districts were appalled that the bill would pass without “additional resources” to educate the kids who would be held back.

A reporter asked him about it.

“By the time a child has finished third grade, the state has spent $40,000 and the school district has had 720 days to teach that child to read,” he said, tight-lipped. “If that child can’t read by then, there is a fundamental failure in that district. And they’ll need to remedy it. The most unacceptable thing to do is to shove that child along to fourth grade into almost certain academic failure. That’s a cruel thing to do, it’s a wrong thing to do, and we’re going to put an end to it.”

The reporter pressed: But won’t the schools need more money?

Daniels’s eyes got wide.

“More than $40,000 to teach someone how to read? No. It won’t and it shouldn’t and any school district that can’t do it ought to face consequences.”

And this is actually normal behavior for him:

When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest.

Yes, let’s elect people like Mitch Daniels who like to cut costs instead of increasing spending – people with a record for caring about balancing the budget.

UPDATE: Or not! ECM pointed me out this “truce” comment that he made. It turns out that he is soft on social issues and probably a little soft on foreign policy issues as well! Thanks, ECM.

News

ACORN employees, voter fraud and the Democrats

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Story on the Daily Caller. (H/T Lex Communis)

Excerpt:

The radical activist group ACORN “works” for the Democratic Party and deliberately promotes election fraud, ACORN employees told FBI investigators, according to an FBI document dump Wednesday.

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, are FBI investigators’ reports related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., workers from ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate for violation of election laws. All eight employees involved in the scandal later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.

Project Vote is ACORN’s voter registration arm. Project Vote continues to operate despite the reported dissolution of the national structure of ACORN.

The handwritten reports by FBI agents show that ACORN employees reported numerous irregularities in the nonprofit group’s business practices.

So THIS is how they win elections.

Learn more about ACORN in this Wall Street journal article.