Monday, February 11, 2008
judging on beliefs
Greta Christina had a great article today on her blog about judging people by their beliefs and the rightness or wrongness of said judgment.
Most of us are brought up in traditions where it is considered wrong to judge a person by their outward selves, preferring instead to let God or someone else truly judge them. The moral here is supposed to be that we cannot see what is on the heart and, thus, it is not our place to judge others.. But while this may work for feelings and inward conflicts that form the basis of an individual's course of action, it doesn't really address how we should react to those individuals whose actions stem from inward convictions and their mouths are quick to publicize said convictions--the Christian who not only thinks gays are abominable to himself and to God but who wants to punish or force them into surrender of such actions, or the religious individual who thinks the world may end at any moment and, so, doesn't take care to be a steward of his/her portion of the planet where environmental protection is concerned.
In such cases I believe that it is not only right to judge someone, but that we already do so anyway even if we don't fully recognize it for what it is. We compare and contrast their beliefs and the actions that follow with those of our own and form an opinion on the merits of their beliefs accordingly. Those religious among us will, of course, revert back to a course where they chastise themselves for thinking such "judgmental" thoughts, but really, we are all just exercising part of the wonderful qualities that make us humans--our sense of justice and desire to discern correlation from causation.
So let us judge and judge fairly.
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