No, basic Christian decency demands nothing of the sort.
Basic Christian decency states that the death of Trayvon Martin is a tragedy, period, full stop.
And? It does not mean that George Zimmerman is to blame for that tragedy, nor does it demand punishment. The tragedy is old. Your present reaction can only be seriously seen as against the verdict.
Basic common sense says that following a kid through your neighborhood with a gun is also probably a bad thing.
Are you some sort of moron? If George Zimmerman had not done so, he might be dead. Just because the thug who almost certainly attacked him was younger than he does not make Martin's death more of a tragedy than that of a good citizen and a community volunteer.
You've put a great deal onto me from the three sentences I wrote here, and you're telling me to judge not? Basic Christian decency says: you're a hypocrite. But nothing new there from you, eh?
And you're doing it right back. I know more of you from your many posts on this site, as you know of me from your inference, and more than either of us know about Trayvon Martin & George Zimmerman. Except that the guy with injuries from a beating, who is a community volunteer is alive and the kid known to have been caught in possession of burglar tools and women's jewelry and quoted making racist slurs against the man he is reported to have attacked is being treated as the victim.
Maybe the prosecution over-prosecuted. Maybe justice was done. But it is the self-righteous idiots like yourself, who fail to see that a CHILD WAS KILLED BY AN IDIOT WITH A GUN AND THIS IS A BAD THING who make the story of the Good Samaritan so hard to preach today.
I've said this before, but if that's your attitude, you might be in the wrong line of work. If you can't see that the evils of human nature are the whole raison d'etre of your ministry and that of Our Lord Himself, if you are looking for perfection in this world to the extent that a jury decision with which you disapprove throws off your ability to preach...think about it. Perspective, man.
As for your argument, it is pretty much a huge logical fallacy. You demand that everyone focus on the tragedy of the person who died on the wrong side of an arbitrary legal line of demarcation between adulthood and childhood, and are incensed that some people choose to concern themselves with the possible unjust imprisonment of an innocent man. Nothing you and your ideological kindred do or say will bring back Trayvon Martin, but those of us with a different perspective saw a possible injustice that could be averted.
How dare you call a man you have never met an idiot! You seem to imply that the outcome of his actions proves this condition, but to the contrary, by all legal standards, including a jury of his peers, in spite of an unjust prosecution (as claimed by a far left legal expert, Alan Dershowitz), he committed an act of self-defense. Carrying a gun may be the sole reason he is alive today, and a jury that was presented with the best evidence the state could procure against him, believed he had valid reasons to use that gun. Objectively speaking, that makes him rather smart for carrying it.
So judge me, while you talk about judging not.
I judge you on your words, though you lack the courage to stand by them. You judge Zimmerman on partisan reports and cast doubt on the evidence and cases presented in our legal system. You criticize solely on the outcome of his actions, as if your emotional preferences are some sort of objective standard, and you undercut your faith with your belief that death is automatically a tragedy to be angry over, rather than being called home to God, Whose justice is infinite and perfect. You speak, not for the first time, of being unable to discharge your pastoral responsibilities out of your personal reactions to iniquities in the world, which are of highly doubtful provenance, and refuse to entertain the idea that a good man saved his own life and maybe the lives of others who might not be so fortunate as to be armed when they unwittingly offended a large muscular young man in their own neighborhoods.
I am judging your words, not you personally, but you presume to judge the character and intentions of a man you have never met. I am the one making allowances for him because I do not know enough to condemn him. If I have not spoken in defense of Trayvon Martin as much, he has had more than his share of people willing to do so, of much greater stature than myself.
You're like the teacher of the law the parable talks about, who tries to determine who he is supposed to love, when the lesson is to love all people regardless of race.
I know who my neighbor is, and I give him the benefit of the doubt, rather than condemn him because of the color of his skin or that of the man he fought. I am not going around calling people idiots, because of the lies others tell about their actions. A national news network edited the recording of Zimmerman's 911 call to make it seem as if he made racist statements, and other media doctored the photographs of Zimmerman to conceal his injuries, all while showing childhood pictures of a strapping six foot jock to give the impression that Zimmerman had gunned down a small boy.
Keep defending the oppressors,
Aren't we supposed to love them too? As for oppressors, who is the oppressor here? The man who was criticized by the president of the United States, or the man towards whose family the president expressed racial solidarity, and who US Congressmen dressed in the same fashion to honor him? Can you honestly say that blacks are the oppressed when they are the perpetrators of most criminal interracial violence? Or maybe the shoe is on the other foot, given the ongoing history of whites being made into scapegoats and falsely accused of racism and violence towards blacks. No white man would still have a public career after actions akin to Al Sharpton's stirring up anti-Semitic mobs that murdered a Jewish man, the Tawana Brawley case and his siding with every false racism claim to come down the pike in the last three decades.
Who is the oppressor? The man who was singled out for political reasons, whose accusers concealed evidence in order to put him on trial and imprison him, then tried to change their accusations without trying the new charges when their case was damaged? Doesn't fit the usual definition....
Or maybe we are supposed to just keep heaping injustices on other people until the ancient wrongs done to blacks have been equaled? That's the old law of an eye for an eye. The new Law is to look past the old racial hostilities, as the Good Samaritan did in helping the Jew. Lest you forget, the Samaritans, like George Zimmerman, were half-breeds.
keep saying its okay to kill if someone might be dangerous, sorta maybe.
If that was remotely what happened, you'd have a point. But no one is rejoicing in the death of Trayvon Martin, not even Zimmerman (even the worst interpretation of his character must concede that), those rejoicing in this verdict are doing so that a sentence was not handed down on a man who does not meet the criteria necessary to so move the wheels of justice. According to the expert witness, AND an eye witness for the prosecution, the dead man was on top of and pounding the man who shot him. That easily fits the definition of definitely dangerous. "...might be dangerous, sort maybe" is only the claim of the mendacious & biased and those who are completely in ignorance about the trial.
You will face justice one day. God will probably forgive you, too. But right now, I have a great deal of trouble seeing why.
If you mean that, God help you. How you can make a pretense of preaching His Word when you cavalierly speak of placing your own emotional reactions over understanding His goodness is beyond me. If you really don't get it, why are you wasting your life this way? Why not become a lobbyist or activist or something, anything but a promulgator of a belief system in which you fail to grasp the central thesis?