Tag Archives: Judge

Commentary

Can a person be a Christian and yet still do bad things?

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I sometimes write posts about atheists and say that they will have difficulty grounding the minimal requirements of morality if the universe is an accident and they are just lumps of matter. To show how this works out, I like to cite famous atheists who also managed to get political power, and then point out how they treated other people. I then say that doing bad things is not really wrong on atheism, since morality is really based on doing whatever you feel like that makes you feel good and that your peers will approve of. And if you want to do something they won’t approve of, you can still do it, as long as no one ever finds out.

Atheist readers sometimes object that Christians can behave just as badly as atheists.

But consider this post from Retha’s English-language blog. (She’s from South Africa)

Excerpt:

However you choose to define Christian, the definition most certainly is not “anyone who calls himself a Christian, is a Christian.” We don’t use that definition for anything else. We don’t believe that everyone who calls themselves “honest” are. We don’t believe that everyone who calls themselves “not overweight” are not. You cannot be a king, or a genius, or a dog, or a tall person, by calling yourself that. (If it worked that way, it would have been a very strong temptation to call myself drop-dead gorgeous.)

Simple word etymology is more useful: Christian has the root word Christ and the suffix –ian. A Christian is a Christ-following/ Christ-imitating person. Who is meant when we speak of Christ? He is the Jesus described in the New Testament, as described there.To be a Christ-ian, you need to follow/ imitate Jesus as he is painted in the Bible. That is where He is painted as the Christ.

There’s a lot of wisdom in those two paragraphs.

I think it’s possible for someone to call himself a Christian and yet to do bad things. Christians aren’t perfect. Even when they know what they ought to do, they struggle to do it. The dividing line here is that a real Christian is never going to call sin anything other than sin. They aren’t going to try to defend it. (Although I always try to explain what leads me to sin if anyone asks – which is not the same as rationalizing, it’s just explaining). Someone who claims to be a Christian and yet does things that Bible forbids without any shame or regret is not a Christian. If that person responds to being judged by denying that what they are doing is wrong, or by attacking the Bible’s authority on moral issues, then that person is not a Christian.

If the person is saying “don’t judge me”, or “the Bible doesn’t say that”, or “the Bible was written by men“, or “the Bible was written a long time ago”, or “I believe in a God of love”, or “you’re intolerant”, or “I was born as a pickpocket”, or “I have the bank-robbing gene”, or “that’s your truth”, or “that’s just your interpretation”, or “if God loved me, he would give me a Mercedez Benz”, then you are probably not dealing with a Christian, whatever they claim to be. Lots of people claim to be Christians but don’t follow Christ. An we shouldn’t believe that someone who tries to argue that abortion is consistent with the Bible is an authentic Christian, for example. The Bible forbids pre-marital sex and murder.

I sometimes struggle with going to church, because I can’t stand being around happy, singing people (unless they know apologetics, in which case I can). But you would never hear me say that going to church was wrong, or that I was morally justified in avoiding church. Instead, I would say I was wrong not to go to church regularly, but that I hadn’t found a church that made me feel comfortable yet.

News

Iowa voters dismiss three judges who redefined traditional marriage

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USA Today reports on the fate of three Iowa judges who redefined traditional marriage by legislating from the bench. (H/T Dr. J at Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Three Iowa Supreme Court justices lost their seats Tuesday in a historic upset fueled by their 2009 decision that allowed same-sex couples to marry. Vote totals from 96% of Iowa’s 1,774 precincts showed Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit with less than the simple majority needed to stay on the bench. Their removal marked the first time an Iowa Supreme Court justice has not been retained since 1962, when the merit selection and retention system for judges was adopted.

Dr. J writes:

Other courts, state and federal, have failed to discover a right to same sex marriage. It is disingenous for these justices’ to try to brazen it out by claiming that they based “their decisions on the law and the Constitution and nothing else.” They are assuming the very thing that needs to be proven, and which Iowa voters believe cannot be proven, namely that there is an open and shut case for same sex marriage to be found in the Iowa Constitution.

If the right to redefine marriage was Constitutional, the people could surely be convinced to have their legislators enact it in the normal way. Judicial activism would not be needed. Good riddance.

News

Five of Obama’s radical leftists judicial nominees approved by Democrats

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Here’s the post by Hans Bader on the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Five radicals have been approved for judgeships by the Senate Judiciary Committee, voting along party lines.

The committee held over for a future vote one controversial nominee, Judge Robert Chatigny.  Chatigny unsuccessfully tried to block the execution of a serial murderer and rapist known as the Roadside Strangler based on the ridiculous argument that the murderer’s “sexual sadism” was supposedly a mitigating factor. Chatigny presided over that case as a trial judge even though he had briefly represented the Roadside Strangler, creating an obvious conflict of interest.

Chatigny’s nomination to an appeals court had previously been approved by the committee earlier this year, but it died when the full Senate failed to vote on his nomination due to public opposition. He was then renominated by President Obama, along with other controversial nominees whose nominations had also earlier died in the full Senate, like Edward Chen, Goodwin Liu, Louis Butler, and Jack O’Connell.

The rest of the article talks about what makes each of the 5 judges radical.

Here are a couple:

The committee rubberstamped Edward Chen, a fervent advocate of racial preferences who unsuccessfully challenged a provision of the California Constitution banning racial discrimination and preferences.

[…]It once again approved radical law professor Goodwin Liu, who wrongly thinks that the Constitution requires some forms of welfare. Liu has no experience trying cases at all, even though judges are supposed to have “substantial courtroom and trial experience.” Liu claims that “‘free enterprise, private ownership of property, and limited government” are right-wing concepts and ideological “code words.”

Obama is appointing people who will disregard the law and the Constitution so that he can do whatever he wants – an Imperial Presidency. Even Bruce Ackerman, a liberal law professor from Yale, says that Obama’s appointment of radical anti-business leftist Elizabeth Warren is another step toward an Imperial Presidency. (H/T Competitive Enterprise Institute)