Moving this

[noevilmusic]

I was originally typing this as a response to a thread on Tara's journal and then decided it was preachy and I felt bad leaving it there. So instead I moved it here

Comments

[findtara]

thanks for your thoughts on the subject. also, those are really moving song lyrics.

[katlynel]

Actually, "Judge not, lest ye be judged" was what started me on my whole thing of trying hard not to judge others' actions. I can't always keep myself from evaluating an action as good or bad, but I try to keep from acting on that except in really egregious cases. I think most of us believe our grasp on what we'd do in someone else's shoes is better than what it actually is.

[noevilmusic]

I guessed that was where your comment came from, honestly is was the first thing that jumped to my mind when I read Tara's post and what other people wrote too. But the more that I thought about it the more I considered that that passage (when taken as a whole in context) does not forbid all judging, just one kind of judging. Trying to do this briefly enough to be just one comment

[noevilmusic]

Actually on a little reflection I think I do wanna say one last thing. Perhaps judge isn't really the right word here. Judge does imply condemnation. That's not really what I'm going for. I do think that we have to judge in the sense of recognizing what is good and what is bad (by God's standards, not by any subjective standard of our own) and that we must look at that both in ourselves and in others. But I think that judge could be better replaced by "reprove

[jackryan622]

Coming from a Catholic background, I was always taught that we can judge actions, but not people. My parents very strongly believed that Catholics were the only people who were saved. However, they believed that others could be saved if they "didn't know any better." Were trying their best to get to heaven and just weren't well=schooled in Catholicism. Anyway, I see how we can say that Hitler and Stalin were horrible men. But, I believe that we can't say for sure that they're in Hell. We can say that they did tons of horrible things, that certainly merit Hell. But, we can't judge them. We can judge people's actions, but we can't possibly know or judge what is in people's hearts. We can't know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hitler and Stalin didn't repent in their last moments. They were horrible people who did horrible things, just as we break God's laws all the time. But, we can't know for sure that God damned them, because we can't know what went on behind the scenes right before they died and we can't know God's

[noevilmusic]

Hahaha! DISCUSSION! *raises both arms in victory

[zacronos]

Woohoo, I'm so glad this topic came back up because I was really thinking my original comments were going to be mostly ignored with no more discussion than a bit of back and forth with you -- not to diss discussion with you, but it's cool when more people get involved and voice their thoughts.

I'm glad you brought up that verse, because I almost quoted it back in the original discussions (in response to something someone else said, can't remember who).

Anyway, for now I'm going to post back to findtara's post on this because I want to address small-scale judgment (or reproof) in the context of small situations in everyday life; this thread has gotten more onto "judgment" in the big, dramatic sense of the word.