Judgmental - why is this such a dirty word?

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lizaanne

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I have to wonder. Why is it such a bad and horrible thing to be judgmental? Aren’t we, by the very virtue of being Catholic, being judgmental of those who don’t agree with the teaching and tradition of our Faith? And why is this bad?

Jesus judged all the time. We judge all the time - in how we choose to live our lives, and raise our children, we judge what is right and wrong based on what we see around us and select our direction, based on judging between choice A and choice B. We can’t not judge, it’s part of our human nature.

I just think that we are always so worried about being politically correct and not hurting feelings, that we say that we are “not judging” when that is exactly what we are doing, and what we are CALLED to do.

I’m not talking about being nasty or hateful in our comments, but always “speaking the Truth in love”, as a dear Protestant friend used to say. We can be charitable in our speech, yet still making a judgment on what someone may say or think. I just hope we can get away from always feeling like we have to say that we are not judging someone, when in fact that is EXACTLY what we are doing.

~Liza
 
Hi Lizaanne,

Jesus told us not to judge that we should not be judged. Period.
“Judging” is presuming to know the interior dispositions of a persons, and only God knows that.

Defending or proposing Catholic doctrine is not a judgment. It is a statement of belief.

In other words, you can tell someone that it is wrong to “live together”, but you cannot think or tell them that they are bad people, sinners and that they are going to hell. Only God knows
what is in their heart.

Verbum
 
It depends on whether we are speaking genuinly on the basis of truths which accord with our conscience and exist in harmony with the community we live and worship, and with trying to force views down someone’s throat because of an inflated sense of self-pride and self-righteousness. The CC is a church full of sinners, not of people who are perfect and without sin. Therefore any correction and sharing of truth should be done in the spirit of charity, not pride, and Catholics should also always keep their minds open to the spirit of seeking the truth in an open way.
 
Verbum said:
Hi Lizaanne,

Jesus told us not to judge that we should not be judged. Period.
Click to expand...
So He did - He also said to reprove the Sinner and so forth. 🙂

Judge not lest ye be judged. Go right ahead - judge me. It doesn’t actually make any difference unless I have a guilty conscience . . . 🙂

Judgements are what thinking human beings do - we make judgements all the time. That is how we opperate. We have to make judgements otherwise we won’t get anywhere.

Now, the reason judgement is such a dirty word is that people who have guilty consciences don’t like being judged and having that pointed out.

To say that someone is going to Hell for their actions is entirely in keeping with Catholic doctrine; it states that anyone who dies in mortal sin goes to Hell. Period.

Now, one can argue back and forth about mercy, but the point of doctrine remains - if one expresses it in simple terms as that, one is perfectly okay.
 
Because we live in a society today that accepts evil as good, and people get offended if they are exposed as possibly advocating evil.

There is a famous saying,
“I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.”

This is ok in some circumstances as we should always discuss every subject to discern truth, in that sense we need the freedom to speak, even if others disagree on the possibilty we are correct or they are correct.

Yet it is utter stupidity to finish conversations with, “well let’s agree to disagree.” Or “I don’t agree, but that is what is true for you.”
So if someone is advocating evil should we just allow them to?
Currently in our society it should be. People want to advocate evil and feel good about it.

For some reason humility is discouraged and even humble people are accused of arrogance if they advocate truth. But as man has become the ultimate arbitrator of truth these days instead of God then it offends sensibilities to question and point out what is true.

In Christ
Scylla
 
lizaanne said:
I have to wonder. Why is it such a bad and horrible thing to be judgmental? Aren’t we, by the very virtue of being Catholic, being judgmental of those who don’t agree with the teaching and tradition of our Faith? And why is this bad?
Click to expand...
If someone accuses you of being “judgemental” then it is important to establish whether they agree with you that the behaviour is wrong.

If they don’t agree that the behaviour is wrong, then they are misusing the word. They are not complaining about you being judgemental but about your judgement. E.g. a teenager who thinks that cannabis is cool versus Mum who thinks it brings disgrace on the family.
However if it is common ground that the behaviour is wrong, often there is very little point in dwelling on the fact that such and such engages in it. It just gives the person who is drawing attention to the misdeeds a sense of superiority which is possibly spurious.
 
My understanding is that we are to judge in one arena and not judge in another. We can and should judge what we can weigh and measure. We can’t and shouldn’t attempt to judge what is beyond our ken. So we can judge an action as good or bad – but we cannot judge how virtuous/sinful was the person who did the action. The latter information just is not available to humans, at least not here on earth.

Like, Joe and Jane may be living in what looks like a state of mortal sin–they are baptized Catholics living together as man and wife without marriage. We can say they are living in a state of mortal sin, but we cannot say that Joe actually has mortal sin on his soul, or Jane either. The *objective fact *can be identified, but we actually may not know the whole reality. There may be some secret known only to Joe and/or Jane and/or God, which reduces or even removes culpability. What if, just take a remote possibility, maybe they are both just too proud and resentful for some reason, to admit that they are actually married. Or maybe they have some ignorant basic misconception about marriage?

My point is not to distract with the example, it is to show that there are things humans can weigh and measure (that is judge) and things we cannot judge.

We cannot judge how much someone is to blame in God’s eyes for what we know is objectively sinful. All we can do is call the one, refrain from calling the other.

Did you shrink, as I did, when President Bush called Sadaam Hussein an evil man at the beginning of the war? If the Pres had stuck to calling Sadaam’s deeds evil–that would have been indisputable; but, that the Pres. presumed to judge the man’s soul revealed for me a problem in Mr. Bush. When we go that far, we presume an ability we simply do not have. Only God has the ability to see and weigh all the secret movements of a man’s heart, to judge the degree of consent and of knowledge against the seriousness of the matter, and arrive at a true and perfect judgment.

“Jjudgmental” is a dirty word, I think, because we confuse the wrongness of judging another’s soul with the rightness of judging another’s ill-deed.
 
Hi All,

Some of you are still confusing judging with condemning or admonishing. Judging is presuming to know a person’s interior disposition, which only God knows.

Verbum
 
You wanna judge? Knock yourself out.

Matthew 7:1: "Judge not, that you be not judged.
2: **For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. **

I don’t want to face that.

The actual Greek word used in the passage (1st Corinthians 2:15) that says that the spiritual man “judges” all things actually is better translated as “discerns”, and the difference is like this.

Judge:

  1. *]Examines evidence.
    *]Decides if law has been broken.
    *]Passes sentence.

    Detective:

    1. *]Examines evidence.
      *]Decides if law has been broken.

      Important difference, right?

      We are called to discern…we are enjoined not to judge.
      Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum.
 
This is just another case of trying to use the same word for two different things. Another example is pride. To have pride in something that we or another does is fine but to be prideful - act with hubris is a sin.

The judge is just a basic function of the rational intellect and from the Christian perspective St. Charles Boromeo states that we can judge a persons internal disposition by their external actions. We are in fact called to do this all the time in our priestly role and our kingly role as the baptized. However, to take judgment, which is reserved to God, as ones own task is what Christ is warning against. We have neither the authority to condemn to hell or raise to heaven a single soul on our own authority thus we should not appropriate for ourselves the rights God has reserved to himself (and in some instances the Church).

Also, as one as stated already in an earlier post our culture is filled with people who want to be accepted for who they are (which is a perfectly normal trait as it is a desire for God) but they do not want to turn from vice. They would have us accept not only them as a person but the vice that they cling to which they have come to identify as part of who they are as a person. This is false and no Christian in fact no reasonable person would accept vice where virtue should stand, but, in our modernist, permissive, hyper-sexualized, decedent, uneducated, hyper-emotional culture; reason has become unreasonable.
 
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