Tag Archives: Judgmental

Commentary

Is the Jesus of the Bible meek and mild, or harsh and judgmental?

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Stan from Bird of the Air explains.

Excerpt:

Here, test yourself. Is your view of Jesus “meek and mild”, perhaps a “laughing Jesus”, a quiet, soft-spoken guy? Is He the compassionate one who never said a harsh word? Well, then, I suggest that you are correcting Jesus, because that’s not the biblical image. Consider the following.

Jesus wasn’t some “nice guy” when He instructed His disciples on their traveling mission:

Whenever you enter a town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’ I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town. Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more bearable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. The one who hears you hears Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me, and the one who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me” (Luke 10:10-16).

Oh, my, that’s pretty harsh language. Even more so when you understand that the biblical “woe” isn’t our standard “woe is me”, but a curse pronounced against a sinful person or group. I mean, seriously, how is a Jew of His day supposed to take it when He says “it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom”? That can’t be considered “warm” or “sensitive”. It is certainly not “inclusive”. Wasn’t Jesus supposed to be the lover of all sinners? What’s all this?

His diatribe in Matthew 23 is much worse. At least seven times He describes the local religious rulers as “hypocrites”. He has “friendly” (not very) descriptions like “white-washed tombs”, “vipers”, and “blind fools”. He accuses them of making converts and then “you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” Oh, it’s big, and its an entire chapter. Seriously, Jesus, describing them as “a child of hell”? That’s not friendly at all. It doesn’t coincide with our “nice guy” image of Jesus. The image of Christ in the Temple with whip in hand doesn’t really fit well with the soft-spoken, laughing Jesus we like so well. His repeated references to people who will “be thrown into the fire” (Matt 7:19; 13:40; 18:8-9; 25:41; John 15:6) don’t come across as humble or kind. Jesus, in fact, has the most definitive descriptions of eternal judgment in terms of “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”.

We have a lot of compassionate readers who are always disapproving of me for being mean. Well… how do you like those verses? Jesus isn’t always Mr. Nice Guy, which is fine because I really like mean Jesus. Matthew 10:34-38 is one of my favorite passages – I like to bug my mother with it. She’s not a Christian, so it’s pretty fun.

Commentary

Is it arrogant and judgmental to defend your answers to ultimate questions?

1 Comment

Here’s a post on Tough Questions Answered that got 66 comments!

Excerpt:

Four times in the past year I have heard the following kind of statement from atheists: “Religious people are dangerous because they think they have answers to ultimate questions.”  Twice these comments were uttered by personal friends of mine, and twice I heard them expressed by atheists in debates that I listened to via mp3.  The first few times I heard the comment I didn’t think much of it.  The fourth time, however, has bothered me enough that I need to respond.

What are the ultimate questions that religious people think they know the answers to?  Generally, these are questions like the following:

  1. Where did the universe come from?
  2. How do we know what is right and what is wrong?
  3. Does God exist?
  4. What happens to us after we die?
  5. What is the purpose of our lives?

Atheists seem to be alarmed by the fact that religious people think they have answers to these questions.  The argument is that people who think they have answers to these questions are often dogmatic, uninterested in reason, irrational, arrogant, and exclusionary.  The flip side of this argument is that people who claim to have no answers to these questions are open-minded, reasonable, rational, intellectually humble, and [inclusive].

They go on to answer the objection in the quote. But I’m not showing that here, you have to click through!

You may also be interested in this one question that you should ask all your atheist friends about their “moral” views. Ask them the question, then have a discussion with them about what morality really is, and what worldview grounds what morality really is.

News

MUST-READ: What worldview emerges from serial hook-up sex?

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This blog post was linked from RuthBlog. And I didn’t even write it! (H/T RuthBlog)

The article talks about a hypothetical woman who hooks up with a man for premarital sex, presumably after a night of drunken partying, and then feels shame for what she has done. Should she feel ashamed? It depends.

Excerpt:

If her shame is telling her the truth, a truth that surpasses all social constructs, then she made a mistake.

[…]But what if a moral thinker steps forward and declares that she is wrong to feel shame, that her bad feelings simply show the extent to which she has bought into a social construct. Ethics is relative; it serves the power elite. She ought to reject her shame for lying to her and promoting the accepted social construct.

[…]Consoling words do not really have much of an effect. Better would be a new group of friends, a new social nexus where everyone will hold her in high esteem for having mastered the art of the hook up, or better, for having fully explored and expressed her sexuality.

Is there such a group? And could this group provide her with a new and revised identity? If being a woman, according to society’s standards, makes her feel ashamed of herself, why would she not transform her identity and become… a feminist. Some feminists do not look too kindly on hook ups, but still and all, feminists are not judgmental. They will welcome her into their midst and tell her that she has done nothing wrong.

[…]If society disapproves; if her classmates look down on her; that is their problem. They are committing one of the great sins of the therapy culture: they are being judgmental!

Note also that this perspective has absolved the coed of all responsibility for her own behavior. Those who are at fault are the ones who look down on her. Now, the new moral thinking holds them responsible for making her feel bad.

But what about those who continue to hold to standards that consider sex outside of marriage harmful to men, women, children and society as a whole, who must pay the social costs of irresponsible sex?

…she will proselytize her beliefs. You only ignore other people for so long. Eventually the numbness will start wearing off. Therefore, our coed must work to transform the culture to make it more attuned to her values. She and her group will work to affect a cultural revolution, a transformation of cultural values.

All of this implies that if you can change the way the culture sees certain behaviors then you can transform the value of the behavior. But, how do you go about changing the way everyone values behavior?

You have probably guessed already, that this way of making our coed feel better about herself contains what I would call a totalitarian will to control the minds, hearts, and speech of everyone.

Feminism isn’t an intellectual framework, it’s an emotional-fueled rationalization of sinful behavior. It becomes the problem of taxpayers when it uses government power and social programs to coerce others into celebrating and subsidizing sinful behavior.

(Note: I am not talking about first-wave “equal opportunity” equity feminism, I am talking about gender feminism – I’m drawing from Christina Hoff Sommers‘ book “Who Stole Feminism?” and “The War Against Boys” for my definitions of feminism)