Following the Amish

I appreciate Rick's mixed feelings about the Amish's response to the horrible schoolhouse massacre, but I have a hard time seeing how their response is anything but Christ-like.  Jeff Jacoby's failure to see "how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward, even if he shows no remorse" misses the point, in my view.  First, nothing I've seen in the news reports suggest that the Amish would have discouraged an effort to capture and imprison the killer if he had escaped the scene.  The killer's role in this tragedy and prospects of danger to others ended with his suicide; what's left is our response to the horror of a completed act.  Second, following Christ is not conditioned on its compatibility with our own societal cost-benefit analysis; Christianity is supposed to be a scandal to the world, as the Amish have proven.  Third, the Amish were not, in my view, signaling a minimization of the horror of this slaughter.  (And if they did, my opinion of their response would change.) As I see it, they were speaking of the person behind the horror.  In the debate over gay rights, it is common to hear Christians recite the mantra, "love the sinner; hate the sin."  What were the Amish doing other than loving the sinner?

Rob