Biblical ignorance has found its way into the Supreme Court in London, U.K.

Aidan O’Neill Q.C., barrister for Joanna Cherry MP, declared today to the Supreme Court justices that “the mother of parliaments has been shut down by the father of lies”. The BBC referred to “robust exchanges”.

If this is meant to be meaningful comment, it is time to educate O’Neill and political commentators on the source of his allusion. We can trace it to the Lord Jesus Christ:

“You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

Jesus Christ: Gospel of John 8:44

It does not augur well for Britain when such arguments are used in the highest court in the land about serious and complex matters necessitating the collective knowledge of eleven justices of the UK Supreme Court.

What confidence can we have in the knowledge of those who do not know their sources? Christianity has always called debate back to ‘the sources’, which the Lord Jesus Christ taught in His day, which the 16th-century European Reformation recovered and which ‘the children of truth’ appreciate and practice to the present day. Truth is at a premium.

What are lies?

There have been many accusations of lies in the Brexit debate. However, if it takes nothing less than a Supreme Court bench of eleven justices to determine the law in such a case as this, with differences of opinion between the English Divisional Court and the Scottish Court of Session, one can hardly call the Prime Minister’s judgment a lie. It may be mistaken, but this can be proven only in retrospect, and can hardly be called a lie. The Court of Session judgment claims to read the Prime Minister’s mind by determining that he was wrongly motivated in proroguing Parliament. This is straying into subjective mysticism, continuing the dangerous subjectivism entering the legal and judicial sphere.

It will be useful for all concerned to consider the words of the Lord Jesus Christ and to examine themselves in the light of His opinion.

Tonight, on BBC Newsnight, Richard Dawkins told us that children need to be taught to outgrow their need for God. He was publicising his latest book Outgrowing God to be published tomorrow. Richard Dawkins is hardly the person to point the way forward, who has called the Christian education of children ‘child abuse’, showing another abuse of language, whereas Christianity teaches the critical thinking that exposes the fallacy in Dawkins’ reasoning. As long as top barristers do not realise that they have called the UK Prime Minister the devil, the UK educational system has indeed failed both him and those who fail to recognise this.

Update:

19 Sep 2019: Boris Johnson’s father on lies and truth: “We all tell the truth as we see the truth.” A half-truth truism with a touch of post-modernism added to the mix: truth and error mixed together.

1 Nov 2019: Ann Widdecome MEP explains that Theresa May’s lies as Prime Minister was her “moment of truth” for leaving the Tory Party, and the lies continued with Boris Johnson.