Judging spin-off

[Lori]

What does it mean to judge something or someone? Is it good to judge? Bad? Depends?

[Jennee]

i guess i feel that judging is a negative thing, that if you are judging someone then you are looking down on them. i dont think it is right to judge people. we all do things we could be judged for.
no one is perfect, we all make mistakes, and i think everyone deserves a second chance.

[Lori]

The other thread had me thinking about this.

I was just thinking that it's hard for me to know what's even meant by "judge." On the one hand, judging something might just mean thinking personally that it's wrong. On the other hand, judging something might mean lobbying to pass laws so that everybody is barred from doing something. There's so much difference between the two, that I think it's a very hard concept to pin down or talk about in any reasonable way.

I was listening to the radio before, and they were talking about a doctor who has resigned from some government post because, as they described it, "he believed that sex before marriage was wrong." But, that wasn't the issue. The issue was that, in his private practice, he was denying birth control prescriptions to unmarried women, and that in his government position, he was advocating for actions that would limit birth control access to women he didn't think should be having sex. Those are two WAY different things. On the one hand, we're talking about a personal judgment, and on the other about taking actions to push one's personal judgment upon everyone.

That's mainly why, personally, I feel reluctant to make public moral judgments, and why most people I know are, as well. I've heard people say that nobody wants to judge things because they don't want to "offend" anyone, but I don't know anyone who that's true for. I think the situation is that calling things wrong is so tied up in U.S. society with pushing for discriminatory legislation or laws banning things that people don't want their personal judgments to be confused with political sentiments.

I don't like pornography, and in general think it's pretty wrong, but I wouldn't make a public statement about it, because I'd be misinterpreted as saying I wanted pornography banned. I think that people should wait until a committed relationship to have sex, but I do think that saying such in many settings would be taken as meaning I wanted to keep young people away from having information about and access to condoms and birth control, which is completely NOT what I want. I think that in nearly all cases it would be morally preferable for someone to carry a pregnancy to term than to have an abortion, but I most certainly don't mean that I think that the government should use its power to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, and that's exactly the position that saying abortion is morally wrong or problematic is associated with. I disagree with him, but Sean thinks that most people who are gay are gay because of negative environmental factors and would ideally be straight, but he doesn't want gay people to be discriminated against and supports their right to full partnership rights, so he would never state that in a public way, because of the political assumptions people would make.

So I guess my point is that ethical judgments have gotten so tied up with political efforts that it's very hard to separate the two, even though many people, myself included, would prefer to. I don't think that legislating one's sectarian moral judgments is okay, but I also think that having sectarian moral judgments is just fine. I don't think, personally, that Jesus was saying that judging is flatly wrong, but that we should judge in the same way that we would want to be judged. For me, that means not forcing others, by the coercion of the law, to conform to my moral judgments, but it doesn't mean that having a set of moral standards is unacceptable.

I think it's also a matter of making a distinction between moral standards and real people's behavior. I think that to judge fairly and rightly you have to take the real-life circumstances that people are living in into consideration. You can't just apply an abstract moral standard to real-life people in any fair or compassionate way. So in many cases that might mean still holding the belief that certain behaviors are immoral or at least less than ideal in the abstract, but also understanding that in the world as it is, people who engage in those behaviors are not worse people than anyone else.

[Jejune]

As I said in the other thread, I see the ability to judge as a tool. It's too broad a word to be positive or negative. The word "judgment" can go either way very easily. It's a good thing to have good judgment, and that assumes that one makes good judgments, so the act of judging is neither here nor there.

Judgment can be used to look down on people, but that's only considered to be a bad thing when people fear that it's being used to broadly. I've yet to hear complaints about judgmental people in regards to poor rapists. (I have heard people complain about what others think should be DONE to rapists, but never that judging rapists is wrong, just to be clear.) When people fear that judgment is too broad, they're usually afraid that it will be applied to them, or to someone they care about. It's a valid fear.

Judgment can be catty, but catty can be fun for folks, too. I know a lot of lovely people who enjoy judging celebrities no end, and it's mostly a harmless activity.

Anyway, I see the meaning as making some sort of call about someone, good or bad. I don't think we'd be able to function without it, but I also think we often use it to feel superior. It's just sort of there.

[Christine]

I think it's perfectly natural to judge someone's behavior as desirable or not.

I think it's wrong when you make assumptions about someone based on superficial facts or jump to conclusions too fast.

[Shana]

I reserve judgement on most things.

There are your basic evils that of course, I know are wrong.

However, I cannot judge someone's heart. I can feel irritated by a person. I can feel like someone rubs me the wrong way. I can disagree with a person's point of view.

But I **cannot** see inside a person. I cannot tell one's true motives, I cannot read minds, I cannot know a person's thoughts/wishes/desires.

This I leave to God.

As someone who HAS BEEN JUDGED by many, many people.... who had absolutely no clue as to what was going on in my life.... I just can't do it.

That is just me ;)