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Oreoracle
Guest
I’m not talking about just observing actions as evidence to use in a court of law. I am talking about interpreting the actions. If I claim that a suspect killed with malice aforethought, that is an interpretation of the act of killing. It goes beyond the mere fact of killing, and requires us to judge a person’s motives, their consent to the action, and their knowledge of its wrongfulness. In short, it requires us to judge the very conditions under which mortal sins are committed. You said we cannot establish when someone has committed a mortal sin, therefore you must disagree with the necessary conditions for first-degree murder convictions.We are talking about two different things. I am talking about spiritual judgement. We can’t be the judge, Jesus is the judge. You seem to be talking about a temporal court with temporal judgement. Apples and oranges. As far as I know, nothing in Scripture forbids weighing evidence to see if man’s laws have been broken.
The two judgments you mention are inseparable in some cases because some of our charges, such as first-degree murder, require judgments that would also inform us of a person’s state of mortal sin. If criminal justice never cared about intentions for the purpose of these charges or for establishing a possible motive for a case, then perhaps you could have a judgment-free legal system. But this isn’t so.
I feel like “better” is a pretty vague notion. Certainly I am “better” than a murderer in the sense that I lack a negative quality which he does not; namely, being guilty for a serious moral offense. I am “better” than a murderer in the sense that, by most people’s standards, I would be more likely to be spared than the murderer if for some reason someone had to choose which of us would live in a variant of the Trolley Problem.The type of judgment He spoke against is the notion that one is somehow better than another.
I suspect you will somehow compare me and the murderer to God and argue that, relative to him, we are on equal ground in some sense. And if you choose such a defense, I would assert that I mustn’t have ever judged anyone in my life. I don’t believe in God, so I don’t make claims about him, which means I don’t compare my relative worth to others by God’s standard.