We Have to Judge!

A comment on a recent blog of mine has me fretting. I said something about Jehovah Witness people proselytizing in a country that has a rich and rewarding belief system that has worked marvelously for a very long time. Why would anyone want to screw with someone else's good thing? The comment was "Don't judge."

That kind of got me stewing. I do judge. We all judge. In some cases judging can be a very good thing. In the instance about the Jo Ho people I wasn't so much judging as making a slightly ironic point. Kind of in the line of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

If millions of people hadn't judged that apartheid was evil in the USA and finally in the 1960s made enough noise and great leadership emerged, we still would have "Whites Only" signs all over the south. If Nelson Mandela and the ANC hadn't judged that apartheid in South Africa was evil, we wouldn't be celebrating Mandela's remarkable life today.

We have to judge. Leaving aside all the thousands of years of astute theological arguments (which we all know) about the existence of evil, I have to weigh in on the side of simple minded belief that sometimes there are bad things afoot. And if we can't make judgements about them, we can't do anything to stop them.

And, I am compelled to admit that I like irony and a bit of fun with ideas and seeing the humor in things. I know from experience that this is more of an east coast thing that west coast. I also like to be provocative. It gets the juices flowing. And not to single out the Witnesses in particular, if you think about it there has been a lot of weird shit forever everywhere in the name of religion. Don't get me going.

I am grateful for the comment. It got me thinking.