I assume that you are referring to my post. If so your statement is simply incorrect. You have changed what was said and then commented on it. Here is what you said;
"In almost no state is it a crime to fail to report a general felony"
Here is what I said.
" Every state that I know of has a law on the books that requires all individuals that suspects or knows of certain types of crime to report it or you can be considered as helping the person escape the law."
Your OP listed general felonies "(robbery, murder, drugs, and so on)". You never qualified this. Thus it was only reasonable to assume that you were making your argument about general felonies.
So, in post 5 you implied (by asking a question which appeared to assume an affirmative answer) that it was wrong to not turn in people for the crimes listed in the OP. Then in post 18, you make an explicit argument to that effect:
In the case of the OP to decide not to turn in any criminal even our own flesh and blood is to reject (hate) God because the scripture says we are to obey those in authority.
So, by referring to the OP, then by explicitly arguing that failing to turn in "any criminal" is a failure to obey authority, the reasonable conclusion is that you were including, at the very least, the crimes listed in the OP as crimes which the law required everyone to report. That is inaccurate.
You changed what was said. There was nothing saying "general felony"
I was taking the whole of your argument. Now, maybe you overstated your argument and failed to give clear qualifications of what you meant, but to say that I changed what was said is false. I did nothing but make reasonable inferences from what you explicitly argued. And, FWIW, I didn't even contradict your qualification of "certain types of crimes" since that could be construed as inclusive of general felonies.
One of those crimes that has to be reported is child abuse or crimes against children.
Only people in certain positions are required to do so. For instance, teachers and medical personal. Again, an inaccuracy.
You need to qualify your statements more precisely if you are going to use them as premises in your arguments. Your argument appeared to make a general rule about turning anyone in for general felonies. Now you seem to be limiting it to specific types of people in specific situations turning certain types of criminals in. You may want to go back and clarify exactly what your argument is with regards to the law before going any further.
However the point of the OP was not to see if we could get around doing what was right simply because there is not some specific law.
Yet your argument so far has centered around it being the right thing because it was required by law. So, if turning someone in for a crime is "right" please demonstrate why. So far your only explicit argument has been tied to the specific laws and how we are to obey them. If you are going to assert that turning in your family is the right thing to do (even if the law doesn't require it), you are going to need to come up with some other reason than "because the scripture says we are to obey those in authority".
The point of the OP was to weigh our hearts against what we make claims to as being in Christ. Do we have double standards or standards that are contrary to the character of God? We are told to do all we do as unto the Lord. Are we suggesting that God's standard is to not report crime if we suspect or know of it regardless of its severity or who has done it?
Me personally, yes I would suggest that.
Double standards are NEVER of the Lord nor is shirking doing right because there is no law. Since when does a Christian need a law before they do good (what is right)?
You have yet to show its right. Your "we should because the law requires it" was a decent argument...except for the fact that the law doesn't require us to. So, now you have to start over from scratch and demonstrate how turning someone in is the right thing Scripturally speaking.
We are to be the salt for this world, but I fear we have lost our savour. If we choose to not do good then we can not expect the lost to do any better. This is why we see women raped in public (on a public subway while people just turned their heads) and no one says or does anything. This is why we see someone being robbed and those passing by do just that (this man died from bleeding to death after being stabbed in front of a store while he was trying to help a woman from being robbed. She ran away and people just stepped over or around him). This is why some teenager robber finally murders some store owner to get money for drugs. (the parent thought the child was doing drugs, but did not report it. Perhaps they wanted to wait for the child to turn themselves in. Too late!)There are many others. We dare not complain to the Lord or even the authorities about crime if we turn our heads with godless excuses as to why we will not do good instead of evil and withholding any information when we know or even suspect a crime has been committed cannot be of the Lord. Even if it is our own child. How else can we teach our children that there are consequences for sin if we are not the first to step up or do not stand up to the plate at all to do what is right especially if there child is involved in wrong doing?
Lets be very very clear on something. It is one thing to say that its wrong to ignore a crime altogether, pass it by, or let it continue without doing something. It is another thing to argue that reporting it to the police is a Scriptural imperative. I definitely agree that doing nothing is wrong, but that does not lead to the logical conclusion that failing to report it to the police is wrong. Do not make the fallacy of confusing "doing nothing" with "failing to report to the police".
raying: