WHY JUDGE THE MORALS OR OTHERWISE OF OTHERS?

We judge the morals or otherwise of others anyway.  That is natural.  But there are other pressures to judge.

If we cannot judge, religion gets a way around it

The Bible, which claims to be God-breathed, covers a lot of subjects. Thus instead of telling somebody they are doing wrong you can quote a Bible verse so that they think about what it is saying. So the Bible corrects them for you. You cannot be accused of sticking your nose in if God wrote the Bible. God however may end up accused!  You are essentially giving them the chance to use the Bible to self-correct themselves.  There is nothing in this about you criticising others for sins when you sin yourself.  The same Bible applies to everybody.

Christians do not judge when their religion says they should and this leads to much destruction.  They mask moral cowardice in the guise of tolerance and welcoming.  In fact even if they don't want to judge, they can do something as good.

Liberal Christianity is not Christianity for the Bible claims to be from God who wishes to cover loads of different scenarios and situations so that everybody can learn what to do.  The liberals deny that and turn the Bible into man's word.  Nobody is going to quote the Bible against sin if the quotation is not really from God!

Should implies judge
 
You cannot help thinking people should or shouldn’t do whatever it is they do. When you use the word should you are making a judgement. When the Humanist who denies free will uses the word he or she means that nature should have programmed things better and is referring to the mental and emotional forces that drive a person when he says a person shouldn’t have done something. But the free will believer has to mean it either as praise of the correct use of free will or as condemnation of the person for the misuse of free will. Thus those who say they do not judge are not stating facts. They are liars.

 

Some examples of judging
 
Sayings such as, "What goes around comes around", only serve to encourage your loved ones to blame you if they suffer because of something you have done.
 
To tell somebody, "You can do better than what you are doing" is judging.

 

People know you judge them

If people really believed anybody can judge sinner not sin they would not be so enraged when accused of sin.

 

It is the judging of the person that is the problem. Judging and hating go together. You even judge the good person you hate, "That person is bad in my eyes and I want to see that person suffer". We don't get too upset if an insane person hates us for we know they are ill and unable to judge us of their own accord. When you see that love the sinner hate the sin is really saying judge the sin not the sinner you see how silly it is. "I judge your bad character but I don't judge you." It is pure contradiction and it is insulting.
 
To criticise a woman’s boyfriend is to criticise her choice and therefore her. Therefore to hate or judge or criticise the sin is to hate or judge or criticise the sinner.
 
The idea that you must judge the sin but not the sinner is pure absurdity. You cannot do one without the other. To judge a sin is to judge a person. To say John committed adultery is to say that John is an adulterer. It is to judge him. If you cannot judge a person as bad then you cannot judge them as good either. They say you are only good if you are capable of evil and becoming evil. They insult the good as well. It is okay to hurt the good to bless the bad while pretending to oppose them. Presumably you must not hurt the poor sinner by judging him but you can judge the sin! What sense does this make? You are not even allowed to say, “Bobby, you hit Tracy. You are a good person but bad in so far as you hit Tracy.” That is admitting that the sinner and the sin are inseparable and what is done to one is done to the other.
 
You go to the therapist. The therapist helps you see that you are the cause of your problems. The therapist will claim to be non-judgemental. But if you do bad things to yourself, you are bad. So they are judging you but pretending they don't. If they are non-judgmental they will be thinking that your evil is really good or at least not bad - in other words that it is just too good for you. This example is another evidence of the lies involved in claiming to hate the sin and love the sinner. "You are responsible for this mess but I don't judge" is a contradiction just the same. It is a proud boastful lie to say you can do what is not rationally possible and which most people see and feel is impossible.
 
The Church often says it can judge actions as bad but cannot judge the persons who perform the actions. If it really means it, then why does it encourage the legal system and the canon law system and psychiatrists to judge persons? It says it is not actions that are judged guilty but persons. Suppose the Church did mean it. Then it follows that if an evil act took place as a result of mental illness, the Church would say the act is still evil though the person is not. The Church judges the act as evil whether the person was sane or insane. It is hardly flattering that when somebody condemns your sin, they say they do not condemn you in case you were insane and didn't mean to sin! It is downright insulting to be sane and suspected of insanity just because you do wrong. You are not judged as a sinner but as a lunatic. But you are still judged. The non-judgemental love is pure hypocrisy.
 
As people tend to judge some sinners and not others or some criminals and not others, their attitude in itself is an attack on society in general. After all anybody can commit a crime. And they are telling us they would treat us arbitrary if we committed a crime so that is an insult in itself. The Catholic who judges paedophile priests but not homosexuals actually is implying by her embracing of the faith that she should judge homosexuals. She implicitly endorses the judgement. What we do or don't do is more than just what we do or don't do - there are always wider implications.

 

Why judge?
 
Why do we talk about evil actions and sins at all? It is to penalise those who do them so that those who do harm and who do good are not treated the same. It is to identify what kind of personal traits are unacceptable. All that is swept away by "Judge the sin and not the sinner". This is about treating the sinner as a saint while pretending to be opposed to evil. It is about paving the way for evil while enjoying a smug warmth. It is to try and make yourself see evil/sin as a theory not as a reality.
 
If you really think people adore you like a saint no matter what you do then clearly if they judge your action not you and punish it not you, you have nothing to stop you doing evil. Fearing being thought of as a bad person is the biggest deterrent to most of those who would hurt others. And indeed if your action is not reflective of you, then there is nothing wrong with doing it even if it is evil. The evil is not your problem or anybody else's. It just is.
 
Many feel that you have to assess and judge people on a moral basis, judge how morally good or bad they are. They say that society cannot function if we give up all beliefs and opinions about how others behave. They say we cannot grow morally unless we judge and let ourselves be judged and accept that others have the right to judge us fairly. Some of the anti-judging brigade say that instead of judging what others do, we should just believe they are always doing the best they can even if it seems they are not. But that is judging! To really avoid judging we hold that people have the right to help or hurt others if they wish.

 

Challenging Non-judgementalism

 

The judgmental person is one who seeks to hurt others by looking for the evil in them instead of trying to help them heal from it.  Christianity does advocate judging but not judgementalism.

Jesus said to judge fairly which would imply you must challenge the sinner to get the full story.  Trials everywhere then.  So even if you are commanded to be non-judgemental this means nothing in practice for people want you to not care what they do in certain things.

 

He said the penalty you inflict on others will be the one you get if you don't judge correctly and fairly.  Some think this means that you cannot really see the evil in another unless it is in yourself.

 

Gaslighting
 
Trying to create a disconnect between a person and the bad they do, is a form of gaslighting - a cruel psychological trick where a person is manipulated so that they cannot process reality properly for they don't trust themselves or their thinking. The person who sees the bad person as the problem and the action as a symptom is made to feel insane and evil and sinful and stupid. This will happen because one is trying to make the disconnect and it takes years and a lot of religious conditioning to succeed.
 
A popular trick is to tell people that they will judge the sin not the sinner if they keep their focus on how good the sinner is in many ways.  Then the badness of the sin is drowned out like a lovely tune is drowned out by traffic noise.

 

The notion that sinners are not all bad has nothing to do with judge the sin not the sinner. You can judge a person while recognising his good side. You can hate a person over one of his negative traits. The notion that we cannot see the intention of another so we cannot judge him as a person but merely judge the wrong action implies, "If I knew I would judge." This is conditional - "If you are bad then I condemn you." It is still judging the person. If you judge the action as wrong or harmful but not as a deliberate sin this is not love the sinner and hate the sin. It is love the sinner and oppose the harmful deed without implying that he intended to sin. You would treat it as an accidental bad event but not as a wilful sin.

 

Exaggerating our inability to assess good or bad actions
 
Many exaggerate their inability to judge and the reason is they are pretending they don't judge.

Some say that if people bully and abuse us that we should try to reason that it is down to very complicated things we will never understand and we must try to see that it is fine and not really as about us as we think. They add that you must not use their nastiness as an excuse for being nasty yourself. That is contradictory.

 

People say, "Don't judge people until you walk in their shoes". Does it mean people or actions? It has to mean both for it says you don't know what is in their mind or going on in their lives until you walk in their shoes or become them. It means you cannot accuse anybody of intentionally doing grave evil even if they do it for they might think they have no choice. The saying is one thing that people like to say but don't mean. Nobody would be reported to the police if people really agreed with the saying.

 

Prayer
 
Christians pray for sinners. Sinners who feel they can trust them because they pray for them are misplacing their trust. Here is why. Christians say they can condemn actions as vile and evil and abominable when these actions are carried out by people who are reasonably sane and who knew what they are doing. They deny that they can condemn the doers of the actions in the same way. They say only God can do that. That means they say that if God condemns you and they know it then they will hate you. To say you love a person because you don't know if they are unlovable or not is not really loving that person. It is taking a chance. The love is conditional. It is loving the conditions not the person.  Unconditional love means wanting nothing back so to love a person because you want them to convert is not love.  This is no good. If Charlie loves Andie because she is rich then it is really the wealth he loves not her.

 

If God does not judge

 

If God does not judge people then what use is judging sin?  It is like he is looking for something to judge.  If he is not judging the sinner it won't be long before he does for he goes out of his way to judge.  What can we say of attempts to explain why he might let innocent people suffer and be at risk of the grip of evil and immorality all in the name of treating one action and one person as good as another (non-judgemental)? Then free will becomes devalued. It becomes a permission and a way of doing evil with impunity. There is no judgment to worry about - no punishment. Some answer to all that that you can be good without God.  If you want to be good then the idea of a non-judgemental God is the last thing you need!