How we respond to being judged

 

In a psychiatric clinic, you have to be non-judgemental for the goal is to help the person help themselves to change and a clinic is not for judging.  In modern times, there is pressure to be non-judgemental all the time!

 

The fear of judging or being judged only makes sense if being accused of being evil or bad or dangerous or morally uncommitted is a terrible thing and should bring down the rancour of others and society in general and you may include God.  So there is no such thing as being non-judgemental.  It is there in the background but it is still there. Sometimes the background is really all that counts.

 

Judging wrongly is so bad for moral wrongdoing or sin is judged as hideous deceptive and evil in itself and so is the sinner

 

There is something contrived about being non-judging for it is clearly trying to resist admitting to yourself you are judging - its judgement suppression.  One who is non-judgemental protests too much and the fact is we always have an impulse to judge.  If sin or wrongdoing is more than just bad but cursing the perfect love of God then the judging if avoidable 50% of the time will never be avoidable then!

 

When others judge us we may react in one of the following ways.

We may get defensive. This may be caused by a lack of self-acceptance. Then we try hard to prove the judgement wrong.

We may be ashamed.

We may get detached.

We may feel open to ourselves and to the other.
 
Why do we hate being judged?

Because deep down we feel by instinct and experience that those who say they love sinners but not sins which they hate do in fact harbour denied hate to us.  We are fully aware that we are being judged not just our sins.

 

Because from childhood we feel we depend on others for our basic needs and we need their approval for that to happen. If they think of us as bad or to be feared we will not feel fulfilled by our relationships and we will fear that they will not help us.   Moreover, we want people to help us because they feel warm toward us. Kind deeds from a cold person mean nothing.
 
Our hate of being judged may lead us to tell ourselves that God/people may judge our sins and disapprove but they must never disapprove of us. They judge the sins as not being part of us. That is a coping mechanism for the problem is NOT the harmful actions but you being harmful.

We hate being judged for we live in a world where people care more about what they want right to be than what right actually is. They cherry-pick morality. Thus we see their judgment as being very arbitrary if not wholly arbitrary. It is hypocritical to judge some bad people and punish them and not others or to make lesser criminals suffer more than bigger ones.
 
Judging involves -
 
Judging involves,
 
# Telling or communicating to another that they are doing wrong.
 
# It involves judging them as immoral - deserving of condemnation and feeling guilty and feeling shame.
 
# It involves viewing them as worthy of punishment. Punishment means making a person pay with suffering for having done wrong. It is done on the basis that a law without a penalty is not a law at all. It is done to uphold good laws.
 
# Judging is about the administration of justice whether in a moral or legal capacity. You cannot punish the bad intentions a person has except when they carry the intentions out for that alone shows you the intentions are there. They are punished for proving their bad intentions by their actions and not for their actions. The sinner is punished and never the sin. The sin cannot be punished for it the sinner that needs punishment.
 
# To say somebody is blaming you is judging them. Blame is about wishing to see the person suffer through their action being condemned and declared worthy of punishment. To declare a person responsible is about saying without malice or criticism that the person could have done different. You cannot then automatically assume that the other person is blaming you.
 
# Some say that judging means defining a person only by the evil they do. For example, the person who steals may be regarded as totally bad when they are not. Slamming somebody completely is not judging for we know that nobody is totally bad. It is pretending to judge the person in so far as their evil is exaggerated. It is creating a caricature of the person and judging that. It is not judging the person but violating the person. It is misjudging not judging. It must not be confused with judging.
 
# Tolerance is about putting up with deeds or people who are regarded as evil and you are forced to put up with them because intolerance only makes the problems worse. Tolerance of the person is a form of rejection of the person. Tolerance rejects the notion of loving sinners and hating sins. Acceptance of sinners would imply that you treat them as equal to good people. A God who accepts sinners will welcome them into Heaven regardless of how bad they are. He will put the person before their sins. The happiness of the person matters most. The person matters most. The sins have to be forgotten for the sake of the person. This is not the same as loving the sinner and hating the sin. In fact it is choosing to overlook the hatefulness of the sins for the sake of the person.
  
Judging is confrontational and attacking the person
 
Judging is seen by religion and society as a necessary evil. They concur that it is not nice but the alternative is worse.
 
People hate being judged. They cannot be hated without being judged. The hate is their being judged. 
 
Counsellors have to follow this - "There are two notions at work in describing the role of judgement in client-centred counselling. First, - being non-judgemental - is the requirement that the counsellor avoid imposing his/her values on the clients with whom he/she works. The second - unconditional positive regard - prescribes an attitude towards clients in spite of any judgments which may have been made. In brief, we can describe this as ignoring the evaluative consequences of clients' behaviour, whilst maintaining a positive view of them as persons."
 
Source http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27718404?uid=3739256&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103002993917
 
To judge people who have done terrible things and who don't care as people to have a positive view towards and to feel it is in spite of what they have done isn't every nice.  The in spite of shows it is just passive aggression.

 

Judge as bad is not same as judge as immoral
 
Sin is a moral concept. It teaches the concept of moral law. It implies that punishment for sin - where possible - is a duty. Love the sinner and hate the sin translates as, do not judge the sinner but judge the sin which is inseparably related to do not punish the sinner but punish the sin. That is a paraphrase and it shows that it is utterly ludicrous. Surely if a person cannot be punished in jail they can be punished by being reminded often of their sin and society's disapproval?
 
People think the person who tries his best to harm nobody is a moral person. That shows they don't understand that morality and goodness are related but they are not identical. Morality is a kind of law - it advocates that the person who disobeys its regulations must suffer punishment in the form of disapproval and suffering for it. The person who is in jail does not suffer because he is has lost freedom but because he is reminded how he is disapproved of. The loss of freedom doesn't give him suffering - what that loss of freedom says to him does. It says to him that he is condemned and worthy of it.
 
A law that does not permit punishing at least in principle is not a law at all. The moral person has to be willing - if able - to hurt the sinner.
 
Some say we must judge people by their deeds and not by their capacity for evil. We judge people not for the evil they can do but the evil they do. But while this is true one way it is not true when we are doing the evil. When we do the evil it is our capacity for evil that is to be judged through the deeds. We judge what the deeds say about the person and how they are using their capacity.
 
To judge a person as immoral is bad because it is not needed. To judge them as sinful is even worse for it is even less needed. You cannot say you judge sins and not sinners when you go too far with the judging. Those who believe in love the sinner and hate the sin teach that a person who condemns something too much is not condemning the sin but the sinner even if they imagine they are condemning only the sin. It is a pity they don't want to realise that if you can love sinners and not sins then it does not matter how much you condemn the sin as the sin does not reflect on the sinner! They as good as give themselves away that they do hate the sin with the sinner and vice versa.
  
Grades of Judging
 
If you are Christian and regard homosexuality as a sin, what do you do when you meet gay John?
 
It is judgement to say he possibly is sick. It is a bigger judgement to say that he probably is sick. It is even bigger to say that he actually is sick.
 
It is judgement to say that he possibly is sinning when he has gay sex. It is a bigger judgement to say that he probably would be sinning. It is even bigger to say that he actually would be sinning.
 
To say that he sins before man is bad but to say that he sins before God is worse. So if you hate and judge sin, it is primarily NOT because it hurts the sinner or anybody else but because it intends to hurt and defy God. If you can hate the sin and love the sinner, you only have a chance of doing so if you DO NOT believe in God. No sinner would feel loved by you if you hate his sin not out of love for him primarily, but out of love for God. No sinner could then be loved by you. Love the sinner cannot go with hating the sin unless you hate the sin only because it harms the sinner.
 
Even if you say that only God sees how bad a person intends to be, this does not say that we must not judge, it only says that our judgement is not as accurate as God's. If you say you cannot know if a person means to be bad or good, it means you would judge them if you could. So you cannot say you do not judge them but that you cannot judge them. If they are pleased at not being judged, it is because they want you to approve of them no matter what they have done. But the fact remains that you are saying you provisionally approve of them because you don't have enough evidence or proof that they are to be disapproved of. It is "I approve but-". That implies acceptance of the right to disapprove and judge.

 

Saying “God will judge this” is a way of condoning for God forgives and forgets the past if the person repents halfheartedly. Plus it is saying “I don’t want to judge so let God do it for I don’t really care what this person has done.”  You are still judging the person as worthless.  If you value a person you will judge their degradation of themselves when they do wrong.

 

To say that only God or Jesus will judge is to say you are judging by proxy through God or Jesus.  You say you agree they should judge and the person should be judged.  You are saying you are not fit to do it but God who sees all is.  You are saying you would judge if you could.  Saying God will judge is passive aggressive.  It is meant to scare.  And if you think judging is pointless or wrong it is just vicious as well.