BILL
Your translation is highly interpretive. You are extrapolating to evoke a
meaning you believe John must have had. Of course your criticisms of the
other author's confused translation were indeed correct, but let's not swing
in the opposite direction. "There is a ditch on both sides of the road."
First of all, you add the loaded words "have the habit of", which, besides
the linguistic issues, pretty much precludes most Christians from being born
of God, eh? I mean, you could almost say, since John is arguing from the
perspective of Christians having a new nature, the very thing that we must
overcome is "old habits" (Romans 12:1-2, Romans 8:1-2).
For translation, sticking to the text requires a reading more like "is not
sinning" (in the first phrase), and "...is powerless to be sinning" (in the
second).
To *interpret* these verses, without doing violence to the literal, I would
argue that John is saying that a true Christian has a new nature ("born of
God"), one that cannot sin (ie: God is Light, God is Love, "he was
manifested to destroy the works of the devil", "all that is of the world is
not of the Father","this is the true God", "keep yourself from idols". From
this he says, in effect, a Christian will have a walk that corresponds to
this sinless nature, or else we are right to ask "how does the love of God
dwell in them"?