Do I believe the above title? Nope. Not only do I not agree with it, but those who can still think clearly and critically (and we seem to find fewer and fewer such folks nowadays) will see instantly the logical absurdity involved in the statement.
When you tell a person that it is wrong to judge, what are you doing? If you are not sure, let me spell it out for you: you are making a moral judgment! To say that moral judgments should not be made, the person saying this of course is making a moral judgment.
The truth is, we are all moral beings and we all make moral judgments all the time. We cannot avoid it. So one of the silliest and most useless things a person can ever say is that it is wrong to judge. By making such a statement, the person is doing the very thing he or she says we should not be doing: making a moral judgment.
If you think it is wrong when others make moral judgments, you yourself are doing exactly the same thing. You are making a moral judgment that it is wrong to make moral judgments. I belabour the obvious here since I get this all the time from unthinking and undiscerning people.
We have managed to so dumb down an entire generation that we find ourselves getting into hot water for stating simple and obvious truths. Even to say that the Holocaust was wrong will get a lot of people worried, concerned about your “judgmental” thoughts.
This of course is sheer madness. If we cannot come out and boldly say that something like the Holocaust was wrong, then we have become mental misfits and moral midgets. But this has also come about because of our thoroughly mistaken modern understanding of tolerance.
Today the only virtue is to tolerate everyone and everything, while the only sin is to be morally discerning and cautious. So today we have a whole lot of people who are supposed to be educated telling us that tolerance is an absolute which we all must adhere to.
Of course the old understanding of tolerance had to do with respecting a person while disagreeing with his views, beliefs, behaviours, actions, and so on. But the perverted understanding today of tolerance is to embrace and accept everything, and never disagree with anything.
Thus we are told to be tolerant of all things. But if you prefer to act in a more rational and moral manner, using instead the older and correct understanding of tolerance, you will quickly discover how much you will not be tolerated for doing so.
The tolerance brigade becomes very intolerant whenever you dare challenge them. Their insistence on tolerance comes across in a very intolerant fashion. Yet the amazing thing is they seem totally unaware of their own gross hypocrisy and double standards here. They really don’t seem to get it.
As J. Budziszewski wrote in his important 2009 volume, The Line Through the Heart, “If you really believe that the meaning of tolerance is tolerating, then you ought to tolerate even intolerance. If you really believe that the best foundation for toleration is to avoid having strong convictions about good and evil, then you should not try to harbor the strong conviction that intolerance is bad.”
But all this silliness about judging and tolerance are part of a greater malaise: a failure to believe in absolute truth and universal morality. Moral relativism and epistemological scepticism are the hallmarks of our postmodern times, and it is getting us into all sorts of trouble.
And once again, such relativism is clearly self-refuting. One simply cannot absolutely insist on there being no absolutes. One cannot be sure that there is nothing one can be sure about. A person cannot insist with certainty that there are no things about which we may have certainty about. As Peter Kreeft puts it:
“The simplest refutation of the tolerance argument is its very premise. It assumes that tolerance is really, objectively, universally, absolutely good. If the relativist replied that he is not presupposing the objective value of tolerance, then all he is doing is demanding the imposition of his subjective personal preference for tolerance. That is surely more intolerant than the appeal to an objective, universal, impersonal, moral law. If no moral values are absolute, neither is tolerance. The absolutist can take tolerance far more seriously than the relativist. It is absolutism, not relativism, that fosters tolerance.”
The really tragic thing is how so many Christians – who really should know better – have fully fallen for all this PoMo nonsense. Countless Christians are utterly steeped in relativism, the false notion of tolerance, and the unbiblical understanding of judging.
They have traded in their brains and their Bibles for the latest pap from the secular humanists and the surrounding culture. They have failed utterly in renewing their minds, and refusing to let the surrounding worldviews mould their thinking, as Paul commands us to do in Romans 12:2.
Indeed, it is quite bewildering to behold how so many of these supposed Christians are making moral judgments about things that I and others say, yet all the while so very strongly insisting how terribly wrong it is to make moral judgments about others! They are censoring us for our views, while wanting us not to censor others for their views! It would be rather funny if it were not so serious.
As an example, I elsewhere posted this quote: “Abortion does not make you merely un-pregnant. It makes you the parent of a dead child.” Now that happens to be a perfectly true statement, and others have reposted it. But not only secular lefties, but other Christians, flew into a rage about this. Consider a few of the really idiotic things which were said in one exchange:
-“The God I love and serve is a gracious God and probably cringing at this post, he is love and mercy and He and only He will judge people. The way you judge others you will be judge ion that same measure. You don’t have to agree with what people do you’re called to live them like Jesus would.”
-“I dont believe a man should tell a woman what to do with her body.”
-“show me in the Bible where it says thou shalt no abort? and dont bring muder or killing into it, without spinning scripture”
-“a lot of people like to get on their high horser and judge other people for doing things they disapprove of for what ever reason, i just dont get it , Only God can judge we all will stand before God each and im sure the self rightous will have a nasty surprise”
Leaving aside the apparent inability to even spell or string out a complete sentence, the moral mushiness and biblical illiteracy displayed here is absolutely mind-boggling. One could write an entire essay on all the logical fallacies and moral myopia based on these foolish remarks.
But we have an entire generation of people today – including far too many Christians – who have lost the ability to think straight, and to apply the Word of God to current events. They have jettisoned rationality and morality for the PoMo mush which is on display everywhere in the West.
And we are paying a big price for this. As D.A. Carson says in his new book, The Intolerance of Tolerance: “The new tolerance swamps penetrating discussion about truth and morality: tolerance is widely perceived to be more important and more enduring than either. The result is a greater tendency to believe lies and to come adrift in immorality.”
Or as John Piper has rightly written: “Relativism is a revolt against the objective reality of God. The sheer existence of God creates the possibility of truth. God is the ultimate and final standard for all claims to truth—who he is, what he wills, what he says is the external, objective standard for measuring all things. When relativism says that there is no standard of truth and falsehood that is valid for everyone, it speaks like an atheist. It commits treason against God.”
The truth is, it is time to start getting intolerant about tolerance – at least the phony new understanding of the term. It is not only dumbing down an entire generation, but is turning us into moral zombies, with no discernment, no conception of truth, and no adherence to the biblical worldview.
We expect the secularists to live this way, but when believers do so as well, then we are all in really big trouble indeed.
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