printPop pastor Davey Blackburn is a disgrace; undeserving of his late wife, Amanda Blackburn, and her unborn child. The voodoo Blackburn practices is pop Christianity or Christian dhimmitude, not authentic faith.
Amanda Blackburn’s brutalized, pregnant body—raped and murdered by the two haters pictured below—was not yet cold before the despicable left-coast preacher, Blackburn, offered up instant forgiveness to the men who did unspeakable things to this lovely, young woman—men who’ve not asked for his forgiveness or repented in any deep meaningful way. Besides, WTF is all this forgiveness by proxy?
Only the dead have the right to forgive their killers and they, conveniently, can’t.
These are, allegedly, the two mugs lovely Amanda Blackburn saw before she expired in agony; theirs is the touch she felt:
From “No-Fault Forgiveness Is Fatal”:
… These all-too familiar spasms of no-fault forgiveness, however, are more a distillation of the mass culture than a reflection of any real religious sensibility. If anything, they are a sign of people adrift in a moral twilight zone. In so charitably absolving and embracing alleged killers and their culprits, well-meaning clergy and flock are supplanting the power of the God whose mercy they claim to represent; evincing religious doctrinal failure; and doing injustice to the victims, to society, and, inadvertently, to the offender.
For mercy without justice is no mercy at all.
If punishment is a declaration of those values we wish to uphold, then pardoning a killer or an accessory before he has made amends and paid for his crime perverts and subverts those values. Redemption can be achieved only when the consequences of one’s actions are faced. With each easy act of absolution, the sanctity of life is diminished and murder becomes a little less abhorrent.
In the Jewish perspective, justice always precedes and is a prerequisite for mercy. A Jew is not obliged to forgive a transgressor unless he has ceased his harmful actions, compensated the victim for the harm done, and asked forgiveness. Even then, he can but is not obligated to forgive. This is both ethically elegant and psychologically prudent. It upholds the notion of right and wrong and lends meaning and force to the process of asking for and extending forgiveness. And it doesn’t mandate the incongruous emotion of compassion for someone who has murdered, maimed, or committed other unforgivable crimes.
A Jew is, however, obliged to seek justice. And so are Christians.
In their much-missed “Orthodoxy” column, in the (now-defunct) Report Newsmagazine, Ted and Virginia Byfield confirmed that the Christian and Jewish doctrines are very similar. Christian forgiveness is also contingent on the sinner’s repentance, and can be granted only by the one sinned against, and not by the various proxies of popularity. Instant expiation flows more from the values of the 1960s than from any doctrinal Christian values. The corollary of the current practice of minute-made forgiveness is that “it not only abolishes the necessity of repentance; it abolishes sin itself,” the couple wrote.