Law – Juridicial

Natural Law Conversation Continues

“For Christ did not come into the world to teach precepts about (civic) morals, which man already knew by reason, but to forgive sins, in order that he may give the Holy Spirit to those who believe in him.”

Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560)
Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics

“Reason cannot precede faith or consist of clearer knowledge, and as such, reason cannot be the foundation of faith.”

– Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676)

Voetius shows that reason comes after faith because reason makes inferences from one proposition to the next, and therefore reasoning cannot get started unless there is already a proposition to reason from. This includes any reasoning about any area of life since any reasoning about all areas of life is a reasoning that is faith conditioned. Once reasoning about Jurisprudence or Education or Art or Politics is a reasoning that comes after some faith commitment. So, this teaches us that Melancthon was just in error.

Now Francis Turretin, who would share Melanchthon’s Aristotelian premises offers;

“If various wicked laws obtained among the heathen, repugnant to the natural law (such as those sanctioning idolatry, human sacrifices, permitting theft, rapine, homicide, incest), they do not prove that no light of reason was granted to men by nature… Rather they prove only that men with *leisure ill employed* have wickedly abused the conceded light and, by struggling against and striving with all their might to extinguish it, were given over to a reprobate mind.”

Turretin
IET 11.1.19

I don’t disagree that Natural Law was against the wicked laws among the heathen. Neither do I disagree that the heathen have wickedly abused the conceded light. What I do disagree with, as pushed by Natural Law afficiandandos, is that the heathen ever do not struggle against and strive with all their might to extinguish what Natural Law teaches. Now in different non-Christian social orders will fluctuate in their opposition to what Natural Law teaches due to the waxing and waning of the salt and light influence of Christianity. However, as the antithesis works itself out ever more consistently Natural Law is interpreted as as to teach the very opposite of what it does indeed teach when read through the lenses of special revelation.

The reality that Natural law is a myth, as an independent tool by which to organize social orders did not hit until the 20th century in the West because prior to that Christendom was largely presupposed. When Christendom is no longer presupposed Turretins can’t and won’t get traction no matter how much they bleat about “the light of reason.”

How Stupid Can A Supreme Court Justice Be — Reflection on William O. Douglas

“To say therefore that the search for truth is not man’s mission may seem to some to be the ultimate sin. But those who construct a political system on the basis of their truth create Totalitarianism…. Truth is not the goal, for in most areas, no one knows what truth is.”

William O. Douglas — 1898 – 1980
Former Supreme Court Justice of the United States
Book — Freedom of the Mind

Wm. O. Douglas was the longest serving SCOTUS Justice in US history. He was remembered by TIME magazine as “the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court.” The quote above demonstrates that. Wm. O. Douglas also demonstrated his lack of concern for truth in his life as he burned through three marriages before finally marrying a fourth time to a woman 46 years his junior.

Wm. Douglas wanted to avoid truth in his political system so as to avoid totalitarianism and he says this not realizing what an idiot he is as he is now pursuing the construction of a political systems based on the truth of no truth, sure to end up in the totalitarianism of relativism.

And this is EXACTLY where we have come. Douglas’ vision has won the day.

Look, in the end those who are opposed to whatever truth is incarnated in a political system (even if true truth) are going to scream “totalitarianism.” If God’s truth was made the standard in our political system wicked men would insist that they are living under tyranny, just as I scream “tyranny” having to live under a political system that gives us the truth of Satan’s truth.

This statement also ties in for us the inevitable connection between theology and law. All law is a conviction regarding truth. Even the law of relativism is a conviction regarding truth. Truth can never be arrived at without theology. Wm. O. Douglas’ Theology was “man the center,” since Douglas presupposes there is no transcendent God who can provide truth for any political system.

The fact that anybody ever thought that Douglas was some kind of judicial intellect is just amazing. This guy is a full blown idiot. A college sophomore could write such drivel.

The Nature Of Law-Order

“All law order is warfare against criminals and against enemies of the social order.”

Rousa J. Rushdoony
Law: Partial and Impartial
Pocket College

When you see the law being used to criminalize those who will not bake cakes for sodomites or who will not provide flowers for a sodomite wedding there you find that the official statist law order is supporting a religion that is counter to Christianity and that this new law order is intent on making you as a Christian, a criminal. When you see the law being used to normalize deviant and abominable perverted behavior so that any normative behavior that opposes said perverted behavior is criminalize there you find lawfare against Christianity. Where you find any legal movement that criminalizes a Christian championing of Christian law there you find warfare against Christianity. Where ever you find the law allowing breasts to be cut off of girls and hormone blockers being given to boys there you find a law order system that is seeking to bury Christianity. Where ever you find a law order supporting Transgender day of visibility on the highest Holy Day of the Christian calendar there you know that Christianity is under attack.

The law can be neither tolerant nor neutral. It is always intolerant of whatever it casts as deviancy, and it, not being neutral, hunts for the those who fall outside its constraints.

The fact that law orders, which organize all social orders, always are working to normalize and criminalize one behavior or another demonstrates that all governments are inescapably religious since the law demonstrates a standard by which right and wrong are being measured. That standard, whatever it is, is the religion or God of the state. This in turn demonstrates that R2K is idiotic when it champions a a-religious state, or a non-theocratic state. Such a beast has ever existed nor can it ever exist.

Of Eliza Fletcher, Black on White Crime, & Similar Observations

Smell of White female heiress and young mother Eliza Fletcher’s rotting corpse led police to her discovery. Suspect arrested for the murder is a black male with a prior history of kidnapping as well as having served 20 years in prison for a violent crime….

Police were searching near a vacant home in Memphis, Tennessee, when they discovered Eliza Fletcher’s body and a discarded garbage bag containing what appears to be her running shorts.

Online Articles

Eliza Fletcher was a professing Christian who liked her routine morning jog. Cleotha Abston on the other hand was a seasoned criminal who was waiting on DNA test kit results to prove that he was guilty of a previous sexual assault from 2021, when in September 2022 he got the hots for Eliza Fletcher and allegedly abducted, raped, and murdered her.

https://news.yahoo.com/watch-took-long-tie-eliza-221944889.html

All of this is somewhat reminiscent of another Tennessee black on white rape and murder from 2007 when Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., 23 were abducted, brutally raped, tortured and murdered.

This kind of crime when committed follows a particular paradigm as exposed by a little booklet put out by the New Century Foundation titled;
The Color of Crime; Race, Crime, and Justice in America. There we find reported that when Interracial Crime is considered;

• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Fortyfive percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

• Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

• Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Now, all of what I have reported commits the sin of noticing … yea, even the crime of noticing. It seems we have arrived at the point that when it comes to the “bad taste” scale, that it is in more bad taste to bring to the fore the above statistics than it is bad taste to rape and murder a white female and mother of two small children who is out for a morning jog. At the very least bringing forth the above statistics is at least in the same category of bad taste as abduction, rape, and murder.

One indicator of that is some of the responses of people to this hororfic crime.

1.) What was she doing out jogging that early in the morning?

As if she brought her own abduction, rape and murder on herself by daring to assume that early morning jogging was forbidden by the presence of black thugs in the city.

2.) Did you see what she was wearing?

As if her jogging outfit explained why someone might do to her what they did.

This is not to argue that young women should be out jogging in scantily clad apparel during the wee hours of the morning in questionable environs. It is to say that we shouldn’t be looking for reasons why she made mistakes as if those mistakes excused the behavior of the beast in question. People who do less than wise things shouldn’t be visited with abduction, rape, and murder.

One more thing before we shift gears. If God’s law had been followed and if the murderer of Eliza Fletcher had received the required death penalty for the rape he committed in 2021 then the children of Eliza would still have their mother. Love for Eliza and her family required us to bring God’s subscribed death penalty to Eliza’s assailant before he was her assailant and when he was another woman’s kidnapper and rapist. But because we as a culture think that we can be nicer than God Eliz’s murderer was free to kidnap, and rape again this time topping it off with murder.

While I’m here on this subject on crime I find it fascinating and mystifying at that same time that the Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers is emptying out Wisconsin prisons granting parole to the worst kind of offenders behind bars. Likewise Democratic US Senator Candidate and current Lt. Gov. of Pennsylvania John Fetterman is also doing much the same. Add to this there has been a change in laws in Illinois that will begin 01/23 that will prohibit a judge from imprisoning someone arraigned before them until the trial can take place for the following crimes

Aggravated Battery
Aggravated DUI
Aggravated Fleeing
Arson
Burglary
Drug-induced homicide
Intimidation
Kidnapping
Robbery
2nd-degree murder
Threatening a Public Official

So, it will not be that criminals can’t be arrested but it will be that the arrested criminals of the above crimes can’t be held in jail after arrest but before trial. People guilty of the above crimes in Illinois may well be arrested but at the criminal’s arraignment on the charges the judge, by force of law, will not be able to remand the criminal into custody until the trial. The accused criminal will be right back out on the street with no bail or monitoring to make sure they don’t commit additional crimes or bother to show up for their trial.

Now, when you combine Gov. Tony Evers work in Wisconsin in emptying his prisons (Gov. Evers has a goal to reduce the Wisconsin prison population by 50% via this parole process he is pursuing) with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s similar course of action in Pennsylvania, with Illinois above law change with the reality of who disproportionately commits violent crimes one sees a pattern that forces one to ask;

Cui Bono? For whose benefit?

Or switching it around, who is going to be most victimized by the loosing of criminals upon society?

I have an answer that I think makes sense in this climate? Do you have an answer that makes sense to you?

Ask the Pastor … Guns in Church?

Dear Pastor Bret,

In light of recent tragic church shootings, should churches consider having members carry concealed weapons to church?

Thanks in advance,

Shawn Channing

Dear Shawn,

Thanks for writing.

I will answer this question in terms of the laws of the State of Michigan. In Michigan, Shawn, those with a concealed carry license cannot carry on any property or facility owned or operated by a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or other places of worship, unless the presiding official allows concealed weapons. So, in Michigan, one can legally according to Michigan state law conceal carry in Church if one has secured the presiding official’s permission.

Some would counsel to consult law enforcement for expert advice and perhaps even training for those who desire it before the presiding official allows such carry and I would concur with that as long as it was only one factor in the decision-making process. People must realize that law-enforcement officials could well have an interest in making sure only they are the ones carrying weapons. All because someone is in law-enforcement doesn’t make them singularly able to provide counsel on this decision. The decision process should also realize that a Church that is declared as a gun-free zone is a church that is advertising to potential wolves that the gathering of the saints is also a gathering of easy picking sheep. The decision process should also include considering the many recent church shootings where the mortality rate may have been far lower if someone in the congregation where the shootings occurred had begun shooting back at the sociopaths who were discharging their weapons against judicially innocent church-goers.

Secondly, common sense teaches that owning and carrying a gun is a reasonable means of protection. A recent Pew survey reported that two-thirds of American gun owners cite protection as the major reason they own guns. Now, Shawn, some well-intended but misguided people might somehow extrapolate that Pew survey to mean that people are relying on guns as idols instead of relying on God for protection. Such thinking is most unfortunate. Carrying a weapon no more proves that one is not trusting in God than carrying a chainsaw proves that someone who wants a tree cut down is not trusting in God for the tree to come down. Carrying a weapon no more proves that one is not trusting in God than a Chef carrying a frying pan proves that the Chef is not trusting God for the meal to be prepared. A gun is a tool, much like a chainsaw or a frying pan. Having the proper tool for the proper job that might need to be done should not inch us towards concluding that the one carrying a chainsaw, a frying pan, or a gun, is treating that tool as an idol. Such reasoning is quite beyond suspect. American gun owners carry guns because that is one tool God has provided in order to to be protected.

Another truth we might offer here Shaun is that guns do not create the problems they solve. The problems guns solve are men with wicked hearts who wish to bring harm to us, our friends, or our families. Guns don’t create sociopaths who might well show up in Church to do harm. Guns are just one solution to sociopaths who might well show up in Church to do harm.

We should be a people who rely on God as we rely on more potential shooters as the solution to a potential active shooter situation. If we don’t rely on God this way we should seriously examine our hearts to ensure that we have not misplaced our faith by trusting in God in such a way that doesn’t include using all the tools that He has put at our disposal for safety. We need to be careful that we don’t become the butt of that well-known joke,

“Soon a man in a rowboat came by and the fellow shouted to the man on the roof, “Jump in, I can save you.”

The stranded fellow shouted back, “No, it’s OK, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me.”

So the rowboat went on.

Then a motorboat came by. “The fellow in the motorboat shouted, “Jump in, I can save you.”

To this, the stranded man said, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”

So the motorboat went on.

Then a helicopter came by and the pilot shouted down, “Grab this rope and I will lift you to safety.”

To this, the stranded man again replied, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”

So the helicopter reluctantly flew away.

Soon the water rose above the rooftop and the man drowned. He went to Heaven. He finally got his chance to discuss this whole situation with God, at which point he exclaimed, “I had faith in you but you didn’t save me, you let me drown. I don’t understand why!”

To this God replied, “I sent you a rowboat and a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”

If we refuse to carry weapons to Church and end up getting shot by sociopaths in Church God may well reply to us upon our discussing the matter face to face with him,

“I sent you a Ruger, a Smith & Wesson, and a Glock, what more did you expect?”

Scripture clearly teaches that self-defense is biblically set forth (Exodus 22:2-3). To insist that one should not make provision to defend themselves so they might instead just trust God is its own kind of specious idolatry.

Finally, on this score, we should consider our history on guns in Church. There is a long storied history of guns in Church that even found, at times in history, guns be required by force of law to be carried to Church. In her book, ‘The Sabbath in Puritan New England,’ we learn this from author Alice Morse Earl,

“For many years after the settlement of New England the Puritans, even in outwardly tranquil times, went armed to meeting; and to sanctify the Sunday gun-loading they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at any object on that day save an Indian or a wolf, their two “greatest inconveniencies.” Trumbull, in his “Mac Fingal,” writes thus in jest of this custom of Sunday arm-bearing:–

“So once, for fear of Indian beating,
Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,–
Each man equipped on Sunday morn
With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn,
And looked in form, as all must grant,
Like the ancient true church militant.”

In 1640 it was ordered in Massachusetts that in every township the attendants at church should carry a “competent number of peeces, fixed and compleat with powder and shot and swords every Lords-day to the meeting-house;” one armed man from each household was then thought advisable and necessary for public safety. In 1642 six men with muskets and powder and shot were thought sufficient for protection for each church. In Connecticut similar mandates were issued, and as the orders were neglected “by divers persones,” a law was passed in 1643 that each offender should forfeit twelve pence for each offence. In 1644 a fourth part of the “trayned hand” was obliged to come armed each Sabbath, and the sentinels were ordered to keep their matches constantly lighted for use in their match-locks. They were also commanded to wear armor, which consisted of “coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian arrows.” In 1650 so much dread and fear were felt of Sunday attacks from the red men that the Sabbath-Day guard was doubled in number. In 1692, the Connecticut Legislature ordered one fifth of the soldiers in each town to come armed to each meeting, and that nowhere should be present as a guard at time of public worship fewer than eight soldiers and a sergeant. In Hadley the guard was allowed annually from the public treasury a pound of lead and a pound of powder to each soldier.

No details that could add to safety on the Sabbath were forgotten or overlooked by the New Haven church; bullets were made common currency at the value of a farthing, in order that they might be plentiful and in every one’s possession; the colonists were enjoined to determine in advance what to do with the women and children in case of attack, “that they do not hang about them and hinder them;” the men were ordered to bring at least six charges of powder and shot to meeting; the farmers were forbidden to “leave more arms at home than men to use them;” the half-pikes were to be headed and the whole ones mended, and the swords “and all piercing weapons furbished up and dressed;” wood was to be placed in the watch-house; it was ordered that the “door of the meeting-house next the soldiers’ seat be kept clear from women and children sitting there, that if there be occasion for the soldiers to go suddenly forth, they may have free passage.” The soldiers sat on either side of the main door, a sentinel was stationed in the meeting-house turret, and armed watchers paced the streets; three cannon were mounted by the side of this “church militant,” which must strongly have resembled a garrison. …

In spite of these events in the New Haven church (which were certainly exceptional), the seemingly incongruous union of church and army was suitable enough in a community that always began and ended the military exercises on “training day” with solemn prayer and psalm-singing; and that used the army and encouraged a true soldier-like spirit not chiefly as aids in war, but to help to conquer and destroy the adversaries of truth, and to “achieve greater matters by this little handful of men than the world is aware of.”

The Salem sentinels wore doubtless some of the good English armor owned by the town,–corselets to cover the body; gorgets to guard the throat; tasses to protect the thighs; all varnished black, and costing each suit “twenty-four shillings a peece.” The sentry also wore a bandileer, a large “neat’s leather” belt thrown over the right shoulder, and hanging down under the left arm. This bandileer sustained twelve boxes of cartridges, and a well-filled bullet-bag. Each man bore either a “bastard musket with a snaphance,” a “long fowling-piece with musket bore,” a “full musket,” a “barrell with a match-cock,” or perhaps (for they were purchased by the town) a leather gun (though these leather guns may have been cannon). Other weapons there were to choose from, mysterious in name, “sakers, minions, ffaulcons, rabinets, murthers (or murderers, as they were sometimes appropriately called) chambers, harque-busses, carbins,” …

The armed Salem watcher, besides his firearms and ammunition, had attached to his wrist by a cord a gun-rest, or gun-fork, which he placed upon the ground when he wished to fire his musket, and upon which that constitutional kicker rested when touched off. He also carried a sword and sometimes a pike, and thus heavily burdened with multitudinous arms and cumbersome armor, could never have run after or from an Indian with much agility or celerity; though he could stand at the church-door with his leather gun,–an awe-inspiring figure,–and he could shoot with his “harquebuss,” or “carbin,” as we well know.

These armed “sentinells” are always regarded as a most picturesque accompaniment of Puritan religious worship, and the Salem and Plymouth armed men were imposing, though clumsy. But the New Haven soldiers, with their bulky garments wadded and stuffed out with thick layers of cotton wool, must have been more safety-assuring and comforting than they were romantic or heroic; but perhaps they too wore painted tin armor, “corselets and gorgets and tasses.”

In Concord, New Hampshire, the men, who all came armed to meeting, stacked their muskets around a post in the middle of the church, while the honored pastor, who was a good shot and owned the best gun in the settlement, preached with his treasured weapon in the pulpit by his side, ready from his post of vantage to blaze away at any red man whom he saw sneaking without, or to lead, if necessary, his congregation to battle. The church in York, Maine, until the year 1746, felt it necessary to retain the custom of carrying arms to the meeting-house, so plentiful and so aggressive were Maine Indians.

Not only in the time of Indian wars were armed men seen in the meeting-house, but on June 17, 1775, the Provincial Congress recommended that the men “within twenty miles of the sea-coast carry their arms and ammunition with them to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they meet for public worship.” And on many a Sabbath and Lecture Day, during the years of war that followed, were proved the wisdom and foresight of that suggestion.

The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe exit of the latter. This custom prevailed from habit until a late date in many churches in New England, all the men, after the benediction and the exit of the parson, walking out in advance of the women. So also the custom of the men always sitting at the “head” or door of the pew arose from the early necessity of their always being ready to seize their arms and rush unobstructed to fight. In some New England village churches to this day, the man who would move down from his end of the pew and let a woman sit at the door, even if it were a more desirable seat from which to see the clergyman, would be thought a poor sort of a creature.”

Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 19-25.