Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For August 28, 2019

Aug 27

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost quote of his article that criticizes the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for passing a non-binding resolution that changes how they have relabeled those on parole, those who have finished their criminal sentences, and juvenile delinquents. Clark laments that labels now used could be replaced by labels that are too soft and show that the Board is redefining sin. This appeared in Heidelblog and the Amazing Grace Radio website.
 
Also see
https://www.agradio.org/god-does-not-re-define-sin-or-righteousness.html

Though it is obvious that almost every crime is an instance of sin, what the San Francisco Board of Supervisors are trying to address is crime, not sin. To be specific, they are referring to how we should label those who have criminal records. And they are addressing that because they want to aid those who have paid their debt to society, those in society, and juvenile delinquents to succeed in society. And since labels have been used to inhibit people from living normal lives in society, here we could refer to labels used by bigots, the Board of Directors want to change those labels. The Board of Directors doesn't want those who have paid their debt to society to serve life sentences with overly harsh labels. They want to increase the odds that those who have had run-ins with the law will not return to committing crimes.

If what the Board of Directors advocated was addressing sin, then they would change the labels used on both those who have always kept the law and those who have not. And sinning is what those who have never been convicted of a crime have in common with those who have.
In addition, all crimes occur in a context. The life of the criminal before he/she commits a crime is a substantial part of the context of their crime. To deny that is to assert that the individual is solely responsible for a given crime. And to attribute to the individual sole responsibility for committing a crime is to imply the moral superiority of those who have never committed crimes over those who have and such is the real denial of sin that appears in the above article as well as a denial of reality.

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To Joseph Pearce and his blogpost about what makes a good education. In the article he claimed that a good education must revolve around Christ. Therefore, secular education can never provide a good education while Christian education can. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

The above article apparently ranks secular education below Christian education because while the former does not  revolve its studies around Christ, the latter does  But history and the present beg to differ as to which side offers a good education.
We might start with the debate over heliocentricism vs. geocentrism. While a few outside the Church, not just the Roman Church, said that the earth revolves around the sun, those whose education was centered on Christ disagreed. Now we know that the Church was wrong. But that brings up the following question: What else has the Church been wrong on?

The Roman Church was wrong to support the Nazis simply  out of opposition to the Communists. In the pre-revolutionary times in France, Russia, and Spain, the dominant branch of the Church supported those with wealth and power. Where was truth then?

Then came the debate on evolution. While the Church initially tried to reject everything about evolution, we found that such a rejection was wrong. So is accepting everything about evolution as well. And now that climate change has become a hot topic, we find a substantial part of the Church trying to deny what science has said about our world. That we now have man-induced climate change and our survival depends on our willingness to change.
Why we don't want to change is that adjusting for climate change implies that we significantly  change both our way of life and our way of doing business. And too many in the Church have tried to deny the science behind climate change because they have sided with wealth and power and too many with wealth and power don't want to change the business-wise good thing they have going.
Because of the associations made above between a good education and Christ, the above article is telling us that a good education must be a Christian education. But history shows that to be not necessarily true since the Church has had too many other loyalties to sometimes care about what is truth.

And there is something else that History teaches that many in the Church might disagree with. The Church does not always effective teach people how to be good. In fact, Romans 2  points out that the judgmental religious person can be put to shame as the unbeliever who follows his/her conscience can outperform them in doing good.

We could go to American history and see how many in the Church believed in and promoted white supremacy whether it was manifest in the guise of slavery or Jim Crow.
And in addition to that, Church history with its authoritarian leaders, intolerance of others, and religious wars has shown that quite often, the Church is the last place we should consider to go to in order to learn how to be good.