Tag Archives: Compassion

News

Some women think that fathers should not protect their children with force

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Women often ask me why I am cautious about getting married. I have a number of reasons for being cautious. I have general concerns about the anti-chastity, anti-marriage, anti-parenting culture. I am concerned about the financial situation that the country is in, which my future children would inherit.

But there is a quirky reason that I almost never tell anyone, and that has to do with the aversion that many women have of men using force to punish evil. The kind of woman I am thinking about is comfortable with banning self-defense, banning guns, coddling criminals, opposing just wars, blaming Israel for Middle East tensions, etc. Even non-feminist women tend to want to regulate and seize firearms, even though though they know nothing about them, except that they go “boom” and loud noises are scary, and therefore bad. These women oppose wars, even they don’t want to know anything about how military history shows that weakness provokes aggression – not strength. They don’t like martial arts, they won’t play wargames, they don’t know anyone in the military, they think that contact sports are evil.

Now how widespread is this attitude, do you think? Sure there are some Harriet Harman and Lynne Featherstone types in the UK, and some Bertha Wilson and Beverley McLachlin types in Canada, and some Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Betty Friedan types in the United States. But how widespread is this? How many women want to use laws, courts, schools and government to prevent men fulfilling their traditional roles as protectors, providers and moral/spiritual leaders? How many women want to control the judgmental things that men say, and the use of force by men to protect the weak and punish evildoers?

First, consider this news story sent to me by Wes:

According to the Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office, the 23-year-old father and his family were enjoying a barbecue last Saturday at their ranch on Shiner’s outskirts where they keep horses and chickens.

His young daughter had gone off toward the barn, to feed the chickens, the child’s grandfather — who isn’t being named, to protect the identity of his granddaughter — told CNN affiliates KSAT and KPRC.

Then her father heard screaming and ran. He found a 47-year-old man in the act of sexually abusing his [4-year old] daughter, according to Sheriff Micah Harmon.

The father stopped the alleged abuser, then pounded him repeatedly in the head.

[…]The father himself called 911, saying his daughter’s alleged abuser was lying, beaten, on the ground. Afterward, the sheriff said that the admitted killer appeared “very remorseful” and didn’t know the other man would die at the scene.

Now here are some reactions from women to this story.

Here’s Jezebel:

Like, okay, instead of a trial, let’s just put a dad and a child molester in a room, and give the dad a sword and give the child molester a mild sedative and call it justice! And Judge Judy can referee! Nope. I’m not a legal wizard, but I’m going to stick with my gut here, which says that WE DO NOT JUST GO ABOUT MURDERING PEOPLE.

Now, for the record, I also don’t believe that the government should be allowed to murder people who murder people, so take my opinion with however much salt you want. Is it less upsetting when someone murders a child molester? I guess so. (Although, and I know I’m opening a can of worms here, even child molesters are officially human beings and entitled to the same legal recourse as any other citizen. Also, a lot of them get murdered in prison anyway, so…you guys will get your wish.) Is accidental deadly force excusable if someone walks in on a person actively molesting their child? I think yes. But that doesn’t mean we should legalize murder and normalize vengeance. If that was even a real question.

Got that? Defending your family is murder, and executing a serial murderer is also murder. This is from a web site that is radical on abortion – somewhere to the left of Obama, which is loony territory.

And here’s CafeMom:

I’m a parent, for cripes sakes. I never want to see a child being hurt in any fashion. Just last night I sat in my house with my heart beating fast against my chest because I’d heard a rumor that a local teen had to be airlifted out of an accident scene (good news: it was one of those exaggerations that spreads on Facebook — she’s fine). In that sense, if the allegation of abuse is true, then I would have been shaking with anger and horror both. If I were that father, I would have wanted to kill that man.

But wanted to does not equal would have.

Consider this: when you take justice into your own hands, what happens? You get in trouble. You, the person who, up until that very moment, was in the right.

You may say it’s “worth it” because the other person got what you thought was “coming,” but you are forever marred by having sunk to the criminal level. You are what you profess to despise.

Got that? Defending your family is sinking down to the level of a criminal.

This is actually quite common, and I do ask about it when I am evaluating women for friendships and courtships. I once was courting a Christian woman who told me that soldiers should not use violence to stop terrorists, and policemen should not use firearms to stop criminals, even as a last resort. She imagined that there was always some other feasible alternative to violence, and that war and use of deadly force was never justified. She even said that capital punishment was always wrong. (This is in spite of what the Bible says).

What some women really want is to feminize men and to dominate them – stopping them from getting into debates, from defending themselves with force, from telling the truth if it offends others, from judging immorality, from excluding others whose beliefs are false, from disciplining their children, and so on. I was once called a “bully” by a woman for saying that I would discourage my daughter from studying ballet instead of a STEM field in college, even though my motive was to make sure that she could be financially independent, so that she would be able to pick a husband for the right reasons, instead of being desperate.

Feminism – the denial of and disrespect for distinct male roles – has influenced everything in society. Feminism has influenced the tax rates, the size of government, the laws, the courts, the schools… everything. If I were to get married, I would be getting married in a world dominated by feminism – where the majority of single/younger women are fully supportive of regulating and controlling men, as evidenced by their voting patterns.

Many women just seem to have this enormous confidence about regulating and dominating other peoples lives, and these convictions are often not based on any evidence, but merely on intuitions and feelings – or even the desire to be perceived by others as “nice”. I am frequently encourtering women on the right and the left who boast to me about how they do not judge others – as if having no informed, evidence-based moral convictions was a qualification for being a wife and mother. Who wants to marry a hedonistic sociopath? Not me.

I think it is very important for me to be careful about getting into a relationship where the state can intrude and regulate my entire life, in the event of a divorce or because I have children and they want to be a “co-parent” with me, as a Canadian educrat recently said. I can take care of myself, but when you have to face divorce courts, or let your children face government agencies and public schools forcing their secular left viewpoint on tiny little kids, it’s a lot to ask of a man.

I am already being forced to give a third of my salary to fund a secular leftist bureaucracy which opposes my plans and my values. For me to consider marriage, I would have to be convinced that the woman would support me. And the precondition for support is having an informed view of what men care about and what we are trying to achieve. Women need to show that they are willing to recognize the differences of a man, and his distinct roles, and to give him space to make his contributions.

This understanding of the contributions of men has to be done at the micro level of defending the family, but also at the macro level of defending the nation. Women ought to make an effort to understand and affirm the use of force by Western nations against tyranny and oppression. Counter-terrorism, national security and a robust peace through strength foreign policy are not things that come easily to women, and that’s exactly why they should be open to studying those things, so that their minds are naturally changed as they grow in knowledge.

UPDATE: Grand jury says there will be no charges laid against the father.

Polemics

Is the story of the woman being stoned for adultery in John 7-8 authentic?

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Here’s the leading conservative New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace to explain.

Excerpt:

One hundred and forty years ago, conservative biblical scholar and Dean of Canterbury, Henry Alford, advocated a new translation to replace the King James Bible. One of his reasons was the inferior textual basis of the KJV. Alford argued that “a translator of Holy Scripture must be…ready to sacrifice the choicest text, and the plainest proof of doctrine, if the words are not those of what he is constrained in his conscience to receive as God’s testimony.” He was speaking about the Trinitarian formula found in the KJV rendering of 1 John 5:7–8. Twenty years later, two Cambridge scholars came to the firm conclusion that John 7:53–8:11 also was not part of the original text of scripture. But Westcott and Hort’s view has not had nearly the impact that Alford’s did.

For a long time, biblical scholars have recognized the poor textual credentials of the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). The evidence against its authenticity is overwhelming: The earliest manuscripts with substantial portions of John’s Gospel (P66 and P75) lack these verses. They skip from John 7:52to 8:12. The oldest large codices of the Bible also lack these verses: codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, both from the fourth century, are normally considered to be the most important biblical manuscripts of the NT extant today. Neither of them has these verses. Codex Alexandrinus, from the fifth century, lacks several leaves in the middle of John. But because of the consistency of the letter size, width of lines, and lines per page, the evidence is conclusive that this manuscript also lacked the pericope adulterae. Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, also from the fifth century, apparently lacked these verses as well (it is similar to Alexandrinus in that some leaves are missing). The earliest extant manuscript to have these verses is codex Bezae, an eccentric text once in the possession of Theodore Beza. He gave this manuscript to the University of Cambridge in 1581 as a gift, telling the school that he was confident that the scholars there would be able to figure out its significance. He washed his hands of the document. Bezae is indeed the most eccentric NT manuscript extant today, yet it is the chief representative of the Western text-type (the text-form that became dominant in Rome and the Latin West).

When P66, P75, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus agree, their combined testimony is overwhelmingly strong that a particular reading is not authentic. But it is not only the early Greek manuscripts that lack this text. The great majority of Greek manuscripts through the first eight centuries lack this pericope. And except for Bezae (or codex D), virtually all of the most important Greek witnesses through the first eight centuries do not have the verses. Of the three most important early versions of the New Testament (Coptic, Latin, Syriac), two of them lack the story in their earliest and best witnesses. The Latin alone has the story in its best early witnesses.

Even patristic writers seemed to overlook this text. Bruce Metzger, arguably the greatest textual critic of the twentieth century, argued that “No Greek Church Father prior to Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth century) comments on the passage, and Euthymius declares that the accurate copies of the Gospel do not contain it” (Textual Commentary, 2nd ed., loc. cit.).

It is an important point to note that although the story of the woman caught in adultery is found in most of our printed Bibles today, the evidence suggests that the majority of Bibles during the first eight centuries of the Christian faith did not contain the story. Externally, most scholars would say that the evidence for it not being an authentic part of John’s Gospel is rock solid.

But textual criticism is not based on external evidence alone; there is also the internal evidence to consider. This is comprised of two parts: intrinsic evidence has to do with what an author is likely to have written;transcriptional evidence has to do with how and why a scribe would have changed the text.

Intrinsically, the vocabulary, syntax, and style look far more like Luke than they do John. There is almost nothing in these twelve verses that has a Johannine flavor. And transcriptionally, scribes were almost always prone to add material rather than omit it—especially a big block of text such as this, rich in its description of Jesus’ mercy. One of the remarkable things about this passage, in fact, is that it is found in multiple locations. Most manuscripts that have it place it in its now traditional location: between John 7:52 and 8:12. But an entire family of manuscripts has the passage at the end of Luke 21, while another family places it at the end of John’s Gospel. Other manuscripts place it at the end of Luke or in various places in John 7.

The pericope adulterae has all the earmarks of a pericope that was looking for a home. It took up permanent residence, in the ninth century, in the middle of the fourth gospel.

Wallace teaches at the ultra-conservative fundamentalist Dallas Theological Seminary:

Daniel B. Wallace

Professor of New Testament Studies

B.A., Biola University, 1975; Th.M., Dallas Theological Seminary, 1979; Ph.D., 1995.

Dr. Wallace influences students across the country through his textbook on intermediate Greek grammar. It has become the standard textbook in the English-speaking world on that subject. He is a member of the Society of New Testament Studies, the Institute for Biblical Research, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Evangelical Theological Society. Dr. Wallace is also the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible and coeditor of the NET-Nestle Greek-English diglot. He has been a consultant on four different Bible translations. Recently his scholarship has begun to focus on John, Mark, and nascent Christology. He works extensively in textual criticism, and has founded The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (csntm.org), an institute with an initial purpose of preserving Scripture by taking digital photographs of all known Greek New Testament manuscripts. He has traveled the world in search of biblical manuscripts. His postdoctoral work includes work on Greek grammar at Tyndale House in Cambridge, textual criticism studies at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, and the Universität Tübingen, Germany.

He also blogs at Parchment & Pen and has been linked as an authority at Gospel Coalition, Monergism, Christian Research Journal, etc. He is the absolute best we have, he has debated liberals like Bart Ehrman many times, and his skepticism of John 7-8 has been written up in Christianity Today. (Note: I am not necessarily endorsing reformed theology, but they are conservative and generally quite correct, in my view). And if that were not enough, he has been interviewed by Brian Auten of Apologetics 315.

Why is this important? I think it is important because this story is very prominent for a great many Christians, especially Christian women, who use this to justify a variety of positions that are inconsistent with the rest of the Bible. These Christians do not like the idea of anyone being judged and so they are naturally inclined to blow this disputed passage into an entire theology that repudiates making moral judgments on such things as capital punishment. In fact, in another post, I was accused of being the equivalent of one of the people who wanted to stone the woman taken for adultery because I oppose fornication and single motherhood. That’s how far this has gone, where some Christians, especially Christian feminists, have leveraged this passage to redefine the Bible so that women are no longer responsible to the Bible’s moral rules and can never be blamed for acting irresponsibly.

Is WK a big liberal?

As this debate between Peter Williams and Bart Ehrman shows, there are only TWO disputed passages in the entire NT that are theologically significant. The long ending of Mark and this adultery passage. A good case can be made for the long ending of Mark, but it’s best not to assume it in a debate. The adultery passage is difficult to defend as authentic. Dr. Wallace talks about both passages in this Parchment & Pen article (reclaimingthemind.org). Wallace has also debated Bart Ehrman in the Greer-Heard Forum. What that debate showed is that the New Testament text is actually quite reliable except for those two passages, but it’s important to be honest about the two places that are not well supported.

The other other NT passages that are a concern are the earthquake passage and the guard story in Matthew. I think that the earthquake is apocalyptic language and the guard is more likely historical than not.

For a closer look at what the Bible says about capital punishment, look here.

News

Recently widowed mother uses legally owned gun to defend her child

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From liberal CNN. (H/T All American Blogger)

Excerpt:

An Oklahoma 911 operator calmly advised a recently widowed mother who asked if it was permissible to shoot an intruder, officials said Wednesday.

“I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes in this door?” asked Sarah Dawn McKinley of Blanchard.

“Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” dispatcher Diane Graham responded during the incident on New Year’s Eve day. “I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you do what you have to do to protect your baby.”

In the end, McKinley, 18, fired a 12-gauge shotgun and killed Justin Shane Martin after he entered her residence, according to a Blanchard Police Department affidavit filed in court Wednesday.

“You have to make a choice, you or him. I chose my son over him,” McKinley told CNN Oklahoma City affiliate KWTV. Her boy is 3 months old.

First Assistant District Attorney James Walters told CNN that McKinley will not be charged because she acted in self-defense.

“A person has the right to protect themselves, their family and their property,” Walters said.

As for the 911 operator’s guidance?

“I would agree with that advice,” the prosecutor said.

In the United States, you still have the ability to defend your home from intruders.  But I know that in leftist countries like the UK, the police are trained to arrest people who defend themselves from criminals.

In the UK, the police protect criminals from law-abiding citizens

Look at this recent article UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Officers were called to Vincent Cooke’s house in the affluent Stockport suburb of Bramhall, just before 8pm on Saturday following reports of a break-in.

Mr Cooke, 39, a married father of one who has run a number of small courier and logistics companies, was relaxing alone in the detached interwar property when the two intruders struck, Greater Manchester Police said.

His wife Karen, 34, and 12-year-old son returned home during the incident but escaped unharmed. Police said that during the break-in Mr Cooke was threatened and one of the intruders, Raymond Jacob, 37, of was stabbed.

Mr Cooke, who is one of five children, was being questioned on suspicion of murder on Sunday night.

I thought the response of the police was interesting – self-defense is murder:

“Clearly this is a serious incident in which a man has lost his life and at this time we believe the dead man was one of two men who were attempting to carry out a burglary at the house.”

The other suspected intruder fled in a small white Citroen van. Police last night confirmed a second man had been arrested in connection with the incident.

On Sunday afternoon relatives of Mr Jacob, of Northern Moor, Greater Manchester, laid flowers outside Mr Cooke’s home.

One read: “To my baby boy who will always be my baby boy. I will miss you, but never stop loving you. Mum.”

Last night friends and relatives also left tributes for Mr Jacob social networking websites.

“Still doesnt feel real, cant believe your gone we will all miss you,” said Danielle Leach on Facebook.

Just to be clear about the facts, here’s the UK Sun.

Excerpt:

Two knife-wielding intruders burst into the home of company director Vincent Cooke, 39.

Burglar Raymond Jacob, 37, is believed to have been stabbed with his own knife.

Mr Cooke was later arrested in Bramhall, Cheshire. His wife and son fled the house unhurt.

Isn’t the mother’s reaction interesting? It’s not unexpected coming from the feminized UK, though, where no one is responsible for anything they do. In fact, the one who judges and refuses to bail others out is the bad one. How mean! Defending your home from armed intruders! Just let them kill you! After all, the government already takes your money, so why not not ban self-defense so they take your life as well?

This is not unusual in the new Harriet Harman-onized UK. It happens all the time.

Consider this story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear’Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was illegal.

Jonathan Shalit, Miss Klass’s agent, said that had been “shaken and utterly terrified” by the incident and was stepping up security at the house she shares with her fiancé, Graham Quinn, who was away on business at the time.

He said: “Myleene was aghast when she was told that the law did not allow her to defend herself in her own home. All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off.

You can read more about how the 1997 ban on handguns in the UK doubled violent crime in the four years after the ban at Reason magazine. Similarly, in the United states, legalizing the concealed carrying of firearms resulted in dramatic declines in violent crime. But that is just common sense. The more people who own guns and can defend themselves, the less crime there will be.