Where do YOU get the idea that imperfect contrition is good enough? - Edit 3
Before modification by Joel at 25/09/2011 02:34:34 PM
Fear of Hell can excuse no one from it; only love from and for God can.
Just because your dogma comes with a pedigree does not make it doctrine. By your logic someone who despises God but recognizes His authority would be fine so long as they were grudgingly and resentfully observant of divine law--which just happens to fly in the face of more scripture than I can list (various parts of Psalm 40 come to mind.) Most of the Prophets specifically condemned the "holier than thou" attitude prevalent in an Israel that observed the letter of Mosaic law while selfishly perverting its meaning (i.e. attempting to pervert the Holy Spirit.) Assyria destroyed Israel and Babylon Judah because they obstinately continued that habit despite ample repeated warnings; the presence of a High Priest conducting regular sacrifices in Solomons Temple were no security against that because "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart—these, O God, You will not despise."
Have you forgotten Jesus' scorn for the pharisees empty, meaningless but elaborate and public prayers? Imperfect "contrition" is no contrition at all, not love of the Savior Who died for us, the Father Who sent Him nor the Holy Spirit Who led us to Him, but only prideful self-love that is an active barrier to salvation. The desire to save ones sorry hide is understandable, but possessing the self preservation instinct of an amoeba is not righteousness. Our own judicial system recognizes this and does not release mass murderers whom death row convinces to behave; why do you think God is easier to fool or has lower standards?
I forget which Pithy Pet Phrase that is, but I stand by it. That remains my biggest problem with fire and brimstone theology: It encourages hollow "repentance" based on self preservation rather than reverence and devotion to God.
Potayto, potahto. If perfect contrition was truly required, Heaven would be as empty as Dannymac's arguments.
As you reminded him, many are called but few are chosen.
As James said, "You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble!" Christianity is not a "get out of Hell free card," and treating it as such is horribly dangerous.
And I did not remotely argue that it was.You still argue just that: That people can remain as corrupt as they like if they nominally obey the Lord they despise but to Whom they recognize they are subject; essentially, that salvation is given to those who resent God as an unwelcome and funadmentally misguided tyrant so long as they accept and comply with His authority. Were that so God would not have rejected Cains sacrifice and Abel would not have been murdered. Obeying God does not make hating Him permissible.
It may surprise you to hear, but I accept those practical arguments, in principle; my solution would be to bring back things like Alcatraz and Devils Island. The Rock (and syphilis) broke Capone, and no successful escape has ever been confirmed; the only possible candidate is three guys who made it beyond the wall and, if they also made it through 20 miles of frigid shark infested water, were never seen or heard from again,
What about the two unusually large women who showed up at the funeral for the mother of two of those disappeared convicts, who stayed a considerable distance from anyone else at the service and whom no one could recognize?Sounds rather "anecdotal" to me.
despite being such incorrigible criminals that they wound up at Alcatraz. Send the most violent repeat offenders to some inescapable island to live by the jungle law for which they rejected the laws of God and man, periodically airlifting them food and water, if necessary. Many would still die, but their blood would be on each others hands, not yours or mine, and the potential to free wrongfully connected prisoners would remain in most cases (though restricting such sentences to the worst repeat offenders would reasonably ensure inmates were violent criminals even if their most RECENT conviction were erroneous.)
The blood is on no one's hands when criminals are put to death by the law. And one murder should be more than sufficient to warrant execution. Solutions such as yours are moral cowardice.No, your solution is moral, intellectual and spiritual laziness; while you are entitled to that, it should not be the basis for societys gravest penalties. In democratic states such as ours the publics collective will establishes the law, making the public culpable for systemic institutional faults in that law. The onus is on the public individually and collectively to try to remove systemic flaws; otherwise it tacitly approves them, however hard it tries to pass the buck to officials it elected. Even if we accept that execution is a valid penalty for some crimes, advocating execution for those crimes despite knowing some innocent people will inevitably be executed as well makes one culpable in the killing of those innocents.
What such a practice would not do is continue the execution of people later discovered to be innocent with no recourse to correcting that injustice. I fail to see why killing an innocent is so great an evil in an individual that it merits death but an inevitable acceptable VIRTUE in a state.
No one is executed for an accidental murder, they are executed for the wanton or willful crimes. The execution of innocent men by the state is only after a rigorous system for trying their guilt has been applied. Such deaths are hardly comparable to the sorts of criminal behavior that warrant execution, and even if by some absurd chance the innocent slip through the cracks, that is simple human nature. To demand perfection of any human institution is absurd. I MIGHT consider these attitudes even slightly morally justifiable if the people who expressed them were not usually the exact same ones unwilling to accept the same fallibility of human investigative processes and demanding that we accept as an absolute given that there are no signs of human life at X point in a pregnancy or that global warming & human evolution are proven and indisputable facts. On THOSE, liberals are perfectly willing to plunge ahead, confident that the proof will catch up to them, but there is never sufficient proof that a shady sketchy character has committed murder, even with over 30 eyewitnesses to his guilt, like Troy Davis.Coldly dismissing Two Wongs list of proven innocents wrongfully executed does not make the "chance" of those ACTUAL EVENTS "absurd." It just means executing innocent people is acceptable and leaves us debating the extent to which that undeniable injustice should be tolerated.
As to the tangential issue of abortion, I and many other (though not all) liberals argue that since the best science claims only UNCERTAINTY about when a human being is a "being," and since many women will continue seeking abortions (partly because of that scientific uncertainty) and die if abortion is outlawed, abortion should remain legal. In the face of scientific proof a fetus is a person at some point, my position and that of many others would change, just as many of us only support late term abortion when the alternative is the mothers certain death. In the interim, banning abortion would save no fetuses, but kill many women. Saying all or even most pro-choice people believe it "an absolute given that there are no signs of human life at X point in a pregnancy" misrepresents their position horribly, as I believe you are aware (and know you should be.)
While some dispute mans role in, and many the effects of, global warming, no credible person disputes its existence; more importantly, mitigation attempts take no lives, but without them millions of lives will be lost if the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence for mans role in and the effects of global warming are correct.
No lives are even indirectly at stake with evolution; it is not even a tangent to the capital punishment debate, but an outright irrelevance.
Nothing like the undeniably real and lethal facts of executing innocents, which you so casually ignore as beneath trivial, is available for skeptics of global warming (anthropogenic or not,) evolution or even abortion. Only that last subject can be reasonably compared to capital punishment, but there is no identifiable point at which a fetus, unlike a prisoner, is known to be a person, so it is still not an equal comparison. If, however, you wish to go there, it is contradictory to say the possible life of a definite innocent is too precious to tolerate abortion but the definite life of definite innocents is not too precious to allow execution. Put another way, opposing the death penalty is no less pro-"choice" than supporting access to abortion, but supporting the DEATH penalty is, by definition, not pro-LIFE.