No. You are still confusing an absurd caricature with an unstated exception.
The issue is not whether newborns and five-year-olds differ. The issue is whether you have any clear, objective, non-arbitrary principle for your exception.
You still do not.
No, you have asserted it multiple times.
That is not the same thing as defending it.
You keep repeating “science,” “common sense,” and “obvious,” but none of those gives you a clear standard. They are labels standing in for one.
Whether I understand human development or not is not the controlling issue. The command is “You shall not murder,” and the penalty is death for murderers. My personal grasp of developmental psychology is not a prerequisite for enforcing the stated rule.
You are the one asserting an exception to that rule, so the burden is on you to justify the exception.
Revulsion.
Which is exactly what you keep appealing to.
Thank you for confirming the point.
And no, I am not going to manufacture your exception for you. You are the one asserting the carve-out. The burden is on you to justify it.
That is a category shift, not an argument. You are moving from the question of a child committing a grave crime to a case where the child is treated by law as the one being victimized. That does not settle the principle under dispute.
And again, that is assertion, not warrant.
You are still trying to turn developmental observations into a legal principle without actually showing how the line is derived.
Five, ten, fifteen, eighteen, “barring impairment,” “rare conditions,” and so on. Once you abandon the rule for a sliding developmental model, the line moves wherever you want it to.
That is not an objective principle. It is a social convention draped in scientific language.
Yes, we have all seen the above. What is above is still assertion, not justification.
Exactly, because I am not the one inserting “children” into the text at all.
The text gives the rule, "put murderers to death." You are the one adding the exception.
So the question is not whether I can find a verse that explicitly says children are included. The question is what textual warrant you have for excluding them when the text itself does not.
The burden is on you to justify the “but not these,” not on me to prove the text includes the exception you want to read into it.
Because the broader point remains the same: law is not merely reactive. It sets the public boundaries that keep a society from decaying.
It does not simply answer evil after the fact. It teaches beforehand what a society will and will not tolerate, and what consequences attach to crossing those lines.
Once those boundaries are softened by sentimental exceptions, society learns the wrong lesson. It learns that justice is negotiable, that guilt can be diluted, and that even grave evil may be explained away if the case is emotionally difficult enough.
In the end, a society will sink to the level its laws are willing to tolerate.
If you excuse children for committing serious crimes simply by virtue of their age, you teach society that childhood can function as a shield for grave evil. And, as you yourself already admitted, that sets a bad precedent.
Discernment is not a license to invent exceptions without warrant.
If Scripture states a rule, command, reason, or judgment, we are not justified in carving out unstated exceptions unless Scripture itself gives us warrant to do so.
Silence is not warrant. Compatibility is not warrant. Discomfort with the rule is not warrant.
If by “discernment” you mean permission to insert an unstated exception into the text, then no.
Discernment is for rightly understanding what the text says, not for carving out exceptions the text itself does not give.
You are asking whether “they’re just kids” is enough, by itself, to supply an exception where Scripture states none.
My answer is no.
If Scripture gives the rule, then the burden lies on the one narrowing it. You are the one saying, in effect, “Yes, murderers are to be put to death, but not these murderers.”
So again: what is your warrant for the “but not these”?
1 Corinthians 13 is about love, not about silently rewriting judicial standards by importing your preferred exceptions into unrelated texts.
Love is not the refusal to punish evil. Love and justice are not opposites.
You can complain about the phrasing, but the substance is unchanged. Britain had a major rape-gang scandal, and the failure to deal with it decisively is one more example of what happens when law becomes selective, cowardly, and subordinate to social pressure.
Both the Guardian and Reuters have covered the scandal and the institutional failures around it, so this is not some ‘social media myth’ you can hand-wave away.
Public inquiry will examine repeated failures that prevented abuse against children being properly investigated
www.theguardian.com
That is just another assertion.
You have not shown that from Scripture, from any objective principle, or even from the forum rules you were waving around earlier. You have simply declared it.
And that is still just an appeal to popularity and revulsion.
Whether most people recoil from a hard case does not determine whether the underlying principle is true.
That is disgust language, not argument.
You keep reaching for adjectives because you still do not have a clear, objective, non-arbitrary principle for your exception.
Fine. Then drop the forum-history grievance too.
If you are not arguing for suppression, then whether I supposedly would have been kicked off years ago is irrelevant.
The issue is still the same: you have not defended your exception. You have only asserted it, appealed to revulsion, and condemned the position in stronger and stronger emotional terms.
No, “sanity” still is not a standard.
That example only proves that people call things insane when they strongly dislike them. It does not turn the word into a legal or moral principle.
And the parent remark is just another insinuation in place of argument.
You have still not defended your exception. You have still not given any clear, objective, non-arbitrary warrant for it. You have still not shown where the text itself authorizes it.
You have not shown any of that from Scripture, from any objective principle, or even from the rules you were waving around earlier. You have simply declared it.
And saying that most people would recoil, or that you find the position sickening, twisted, and abhorrent, still does not answer the argument. It only shows that your response to it is emotional rather than principled.
