How bad is that sin, really?

Now that you know that I’m such a big fan judging people, we ought to talk about how I do judge. As much as everyone does judge everyone else, it’s actually not that easy to judge correctly.

As often as I’ve wanted one, I just don’t have an evilometer. Wouldn’t it be handy to walk up to someone with something shaped like those infrared thermometers, scan someone’s forehead, and let it tell you that they’re nearly 666 degrees of evil? I’m actually pointing out two problems here. First, and silliest, that we don’t have a physical way to measure someone’s evilness. Second, and more important, that we don’t have a scale to rate that on.

Popular culture has tried to create a vague scale of evilness by putting extremes at either end. I’ve heard people talk about “on a scale of Hitler to Mother Teresa.” While that works for some toy problems, it doesn’t work for anything meaningful. Those ends get chosen because of the popularity of those figures, and which side we generally put them on. I say “generally” because you know there are people who put Hitler on the good side, and I have to believe that there are some people who put Mother Teresa on the bad side. That, again, points out just how hard it is to rate someone on a badness scale. But the point is that we don’t have a good measure of just how Good or Evil something is.

So what if we tried to create one? It sure would be useful (especially for finally deciding just how wicked mothers-in-law actually are :wink:). We could assign values for different things. The scriptures tell us that no one is forgiven for denying the Holy Ghost, so we can call that 1,000,000,000 badness points. Murder is 100,000. Stealing candy from a baby is 1. The scriptures say that a sorceress goes to Hell. So she could get 70,000 points. But even when we assign all of these numbers, we can’t always tell how they should be awarded. In the laws of most countries, murder gets different penalties depending on the circumstances. If you didn’t have malice, but someone died anyways, then we call that manslaughter, and you get a lighter sentence. If you planned it long before and made it very painful, then you might receive a death sentence. You also get a punishment if you tried to kill someone but didn’t succeed. We just have to look at the variety of penalties in the criminal codes of any country (and especially the fact that they leave some discretion to the judges) to see how hard it can be to create this kind of a scale.

Let’s take a short detour to talk about how we measure things in the physical world. Any time you measure something, you have to pick a proxy. Picking a proxy means that we actually look at something different, and use that as a way to measure the real target. For example, we can talk about how people measure space and time. Measuring space with a tape measure is pretty direct. You have an object that has a known length, put it up against another thing for comparison, and then you know the amount of length that the other thing takes up. You can also measure space by shooting a laser from one place to another and measuring the time it takes to bounce back. That is using time as a proxy for space. You’re not actually measuring length. You’re measuring time, and then computing the length. And for that matter, you can’t actually measure time. A mechanical stop watch actually measures the oscillations of gears under spring tension, and a digital stop watch actually measures the electrical impulses from a quartz crystal (or from a digital circuit). Measuring those oscillations is close to the concept of sticking a measuring tape up against the thing that you want to measure, but it’s not quite the same. In both cases, we have an existing thing with a known measure (length of the tape measure, or time between oscillations). But we still can’t put the oscillations up against the time span we want to measure to look at the whole thing. So measuring with a tape measure is more direct, measuring time kind of uses a proxy, and measuring distance with a laser definitely uses a proxy.

How does that apply to our internal evil scales? Well, let’s go back to the start of my career. I had graduated from college and started at my first job. I was a Junior Engineer. I worked my tail off to prove myself. I was the only Junior Engineer to be hired at that place for the entire 7 years that I was there. Everyone I worked with had at least 10 years more experience than I did. After about a year I got a new boss; he seemed friendly enough. I talked to him a couple of times about getting promoted out of Junior Engineer. My understanding, which he seemed to agree with, was that people generally got promoted from Junior Engineer to Software Engineer between 1 and 3 years into their career. I was well respected by my peers, I was working solo on critical system components, I was bringing up crucial concerns in meetings and often giving good solutions for them. Everyone I have talked to about that situation agreed that I was worthy of a promotion. But I was a Junior Engineer for a full 3 years. One day, I had finally worn down my boss enough with my asking, that he finally did the paperwork to give me the promotion. He didn’t tell me that I was so much better at the 3 year mark than the 1 year mark (although I’m sure that was true). He was just so lazy about my interests, and so involved with his own, that he didn’t do the paperwork when it should have been done. In my internal scale of evil, I give an evil-bonus to anyone who has a responsibility for others, but they neglect that for their own self interest. Because of this and other experiences, I’ve used this manager for decades as an example of what not to be. When writing notes for myself on what to look for when hiring people, I have written down that one qualification is “not Jay.” I don’t mean that I just wouldn’t hire him personally, but I mean to look for someone that has those same signs. Internally, I use Jay’s as a proxy for one style of evil.

There’s a reasonable expectation that you haven’t had a manager like that, or that you haven’t failed an audition because someone else cheated to grab your spot, or that you weren’t extremely abused as a child. How do you rate someone’s evilness at that point? Thank goodness that humans are social animals. We talk to each other, most every day. We discuss the news and how bad or good it is. We discuss our neighbors, and try not to gossip about them (hopefully). We discuss the latest celebrity and whatever antics they’re getting themselves into. But we also have books and articles to read. And isn’t writing just the act of talking to someone else at a future date? When we don’t have the experience ourselves, we rely on others to tell us how bad it is. We build up explanations inside ourselves of how good or bad certain things are, and then we spend a lot of time trying to fit parts of our world into those explanations.

But what is the point of all of this discussion of proxies and measuring? We’re supposed to do no evil, so why does it matter that murder is worse than lying? They’re both wrong and will both kick you out of heaven. I think there are plenty of points that I could make, but I want to focus on just one: we need to draw a line in the sand. We need to decide what we’ll tolerate and what we won’t. I would very much prefer to have a perfect world, so would you, but that world isn’t this one. And we need to each decide what we will live with and what we won’t. If my son decides to cheat on a test then I’ll still let him live at home. But if my son intentionally murders someone, or gets addicted to drugs, then I’m taking him to the police. Those things are on the other side of my line. When I read books or watch movies, I will put up with a certain amount of fighting, but if the descriptions are too graphic, or if the fighting is of a nature that hurts my heart too much (like child abuse), then I turn it off. I don’t need that in my life. I know if I were to go to war then it would be extremely graphic. I know that if I were to do the work that Operation Underground Railroad does then my heart would hurt. And I could do either of those if there was a good cause. But I won’t subject myself to that kind of hurt just for entertainment.

Judging evil (and good) are very necessary parts of life. We have to do it to make sense of things. We have to each have our own internal scales (because we can’t make those scales external). These things are crucial. There are two things that I would encourage you to do with this knowledge. First, learn to judge appropriately. All too often, people talk about “not judging” and it comes across as “the evil that guy did is not sin, because society/illness/nature made him do it.” Second, use your own scale appropriately. It’s too easy not to draw a line in the sand given the constant parade of “don’t judge” advocates. I know that I’ve had trouble drawing that line in the past. Please draw a line in the sand. Refine that line’s position over time. There are books I’ve read (and enjoyed) in the past which I won’t recommend to my kids, because I’ve adjusted my line. So draw a line, even if you’re the only person who knows it or understands it or sees the result. Draw a line, and stand for something.

To end this section, I’m going to awkwardly start a thing that will be much more useful later. I’m going to point you to new articles (which I haven’t written yet), that will be good threads to read down. So this paragraph is a placeholder, to be replaced at some point in the near future, when I have more things written, and can tell you what you might want to read next.

I’m a big fan of Judging

Now that I have the click-bait title out of the way, let me explain what I mean by that.

I would wager that Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” is one of the more popular scriptures to quote. Most Christians can quote that one verbatim, and many non-Christians can too. It’s an easy way to tell the religious people “back off and mind your own business.”

I very much prefer the text of the Joseph Smith Translation instead: “Judge not unrighteously, that ye be not judged; but judge righteous judgment.” For further context, let’s add Matthew 7:2 (going back to the King James Version): “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” I’ll also give honorable mention to the next verse, which I doubt very many of us could claim to know follows these judging verses: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Of course the beam and mote scriptures continue for a bit (which I won’t quote here), but the point is that this is all one thought. That thought is: Whatever type of judgement is important to you, will be the type of judgement that condemns you on judgment day. That’s a pretty heavy statement, so it’s best that we understand what that means.

Let’s start by illustrating a few different types of judgment. I’ll pick on models that I’m calling Condemnation, Tolerance, and Permissive. Condemnation is probably the mode that most people think of from these verses, and the one most closely aligned to the beam and mote idea. Under the condemnation model, you look for the faults of others and condemn them when you find them. I might be driving down the street and find someone cutting me off, so I promptly give them a tongue lashing that they’ll never hear. But if they could actually hear what’s going on in my car, then ohhhhh, they would be so sorry for cutting me off. In the worst case (or maybe just the most immediate case), I use that opportunity to speed up and cut them off out of spite.

Very clearly we can see how damaging this attitude and behavior are. By letting my anger run wild, I’m allowing my anger to dictate my actions. I might be the direct cause of a car wreck instead of them. But if we look back to the text of the verses, we can see that that’s not what Jesus is teaching at all. Jesus is cautioning people not to Condemn others because at the final judgment then they themselves would be Condemned. No one wants to get to the final judgement and have Jesus say “your mode of judgment today is Condemnation. Now let’s list off all of the tiny errors you made throughout your life.”

The opposite of this mode of judgment is what I’m calling Tolerance, and unfortunately, I think many people default to this mode as a way to stay as far from Condemnation as they can. I don’t use the word tolerance in the sense it was used 100 years ago (or even 30 years ago). I’m using the modern definition here: “whatever you choose to do is right, as long as you’re following your truth.” I’m actually more scared of this mode of judgment than I am of Condemnation. In Tolerance, anything goes, as long as you think it’s right.

When you follow the Tolerance mode of judging, you’re essentially saying that there is no universal metric for good. There is only your own metric for whether or not it is good for you. We see this style of judging everywhere today. It is the attitude pushing forward the LGBTQIA+ movement. It is the attitude that says worshiping a Flying Spaghetti Monster is equal in value to worshiping the God of Abraham. It is the attitude that says I can consume pornography every day and it won’t ruin my relationships. Many, many people follow this path, but it runs into a brick wall when you start to talk about entry into Heaven.

3 Nephi 27:19 says it best: “And no unclean thing can enter into his kingdom.” 1 Corinthians 6:9 also says it well: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?” If we judge with Tolerance, saying “whatever you do is good, as long as it’s following your truth,” then when we get to Judgement Day, I believe that God will not turn that one around on us in the same way he turns around Condemnation. I believe that he will say “yes, whatever you do is good, as long as it’s following My Truth, and My Truth is everlasting. You cannot come here unless you follow My Truth.” The Tolerant won’t be able to abide that. They will see Heaven as a place of intolerance, because they won’t be able to follow their own truth.

Another way this might play out is by God saying that you have been so tolerant in life, that you must inherit a kingdom where everyone can continue to follow their own truth. Since no unclean thing can enter the presence of God, then that kingdom where we encourage people to follow their own truth is not God’s Kingdom.

And before we jump away from Tolerance, I want to point out what I consider to be a gateway drug to full Tolerance. As a precursor to full Tolerance, you might hear someone saying that you shouldn’t condemn someone because you don’t know their situation. That statement alone is very true, but at the same time it excuses the bad behavior. I have heard many people try to say that stealing is a natural byproduct of poverty, so a poor person stealing is not bad because they wouldn’t have to steal if it weren’t for the greedy capitalist. And yet this justification overlooks the simple fact that God told us not to steal. Don’t let your compassion blind you to the simple fact that we all sin. And especially don’t let your compassion lead you down a path to further and further blindness.

Let’s turn now to a model that I think is closer (but still not quite perfectly aligned) to what Christ intended to convey: Permissiveness. I’ll paint the Permissive as being halfway between Condemnation and Tolerance. In this, you do judge people all the time, but you also allow them to do their own thing. You might be 100% correct in your judgements, knowing perfectly well when someone else does good or evil. But you also recognize the danger of condemning. You won’t forbid someone else doing something bad because they have their own agency, and they can choose for themselves.

This attitude is seen in a lot of current US legislation (and I imagine in other countries, but I’m less aware of their politics). In most any large movement, there are people for, people against, and people who are indifferent. If we take the pro-abortion movement as an example, we see lots of arguments to justify the killing of unborn children (I’ll bet you can tell which side of the fence I’m on). But the argument which got the best results for abortion activists was not that killing babies is good. It’s the argument that restrictive laws are interfering with a woman’s right to choose. It’s the argument that we’re welcome to think that it’s wrong, and we’re welcome not to have abortions of our own, but that we’re wrong when we try to forbid the exercise of agency. They promote the attitude that we should all choose our own path and let others choose theirs. When all of the arguments have been made, we find that the only people who are in favor of very restrictive laws on abortion are those people who recognize abortion as murder. The clear majority of people say that there should be legal abortions for at least some elective cases. The vast majority of people say that regardless of the other restrictions, we should not restrict abortion when it comes to rape, incest, or life of the mother. The Permissive arguments have pushed most of the nation into a position of allowing evil so long as they don’t have to participate. We also see these arguments crop up in the legal marijuana debate, and the gay marriage debate, and any number of pushes for permissive behavior.

How is Permissive different from Tolerance? In both of them you allow other people to follow their own paths, but while Tolerance celebrates the different paths, Permissive shuns them. A Permissive man might know what’s right and what’s wrong, but only applies that judgement to himself.

So if we can’t condemn all evil, and we can’t allow all evil, then what is righteous judgment? Luckily for us, Jesus happens to be a great teacher, as long as we listen to everything he says. We stopped reading earlier after just a couple of verses so we could talk about them, but Jesus never intended for us to stop there. We need to add verse 5 here: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Now we need to translate this into the same terminology that we’ve been using.

The standard teaching that we hear about the beam and mote story is that we shouldn’t judge other people, instead focusing on ourselves. I think that the standard teaching closely matches a Permissive attitude, but that ignores the second half of verse 5. Jesus said “and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Again, Jesus didn’t intend for us to stop reading too early. We need to see that in verse 1 he is very clearly cautioning us to not judge unrighteously. We need to see that in verse 5 he is very clearly telling us to take care of ourselves first. But we also need to see that in verse 5 he is clearly telling us that it is our job to try to cast out the mote from our brother’s eye.

So we should not Condemn, telling people that they are wrong for every little thing. We should not Tolerate, pretending that anything and everything is good. We should not be Permissive, focusing just on ourselves and letting others do whatever they want. We should be Godly, fixing ourselves first, and then doing everything we can to help other people live righteously.

We absolutely should judge people, and situations, and ourselves. We just need to get that in the right order. We should judge ourselves, and situations, and then people. And we should fix ourselves, and situations, and then people. After all, that’s exactly the order in which God Himself did it.

To end this section, I’m going to awkwardly start a thing that will be much more useful later. I’m going to point you to new articles (which I haven’t written yet), that will be good threads to read down. So this paragraph is a placeholder, to be replaced at some point in the near future, when I have more things written, and can tell you what you might want to read next.

Why am I doing this?

I’m writing this as a web serial. I’ve read some pretty interesting serial stories, and I think the format lends itself well to some situations. If you’re not aware, a “serial” is a story or series that is published one chapter at a time. The great Alexander Dumas published all of his Three Musketeers stories as series, as well as The Count of Monte Cristo. In his day and age, his writings were much more consumable if the reader could buy one chapter at a time, each week, possibly along with the rest of the newspaper.

In our day, the popular formats for idea consumption are all online. You don’t find a lot of articles that take more than 10 minutes to read. Many platforms are geared towards shorter form content. Twitter is the king of short form content, where they limited messages to 144 characters for many years. Most video platforms (especially YouTube) now focus on Shorts (videos of one minute or less) if you want to increase your viewership. TikTok may not have invented anything new, but they seem to have perfected the platform for people with short attention spans.

When I was a kid and we first got a cable TV package, we suddenly went from the standard six to ten channels, to a whopping 40 channels. With that change, “channel surfing” became a thing. We would sit down to spend time watching TV, without any particular idea of what TV program/show we wanted to watch. So you pick up the remote and start flipping through channels. You would spend a few seconds on each station to decide if you wanted to spend more time on that station. This was an existing cultural phenomenon that was new to my house. I look back now and can clearly see that when you have an audience of channel surfers, the TV producers and ad producers have to make things more flashy and more enticing, if you want to get people’s attention.

And so, in my time writing this serial, I’m taking a little bit of influence from popular culture. My articles here, which I imagine will some day be bound together into an omnibus volume (which we still today call a “book” 😉), will be more of the short form. There will be links from one to another. As any web marketing person will tell you: any good advertisement needs a call to action. My calls to action will always be twofold: first, to make your life better and second, to move on to the next article.

I imagine that my main audience here is full of people who have a desire to be better than they are now, but who don’t know how to do that. You are working jobs each day, providing for your families, or you might do a lot of work that doesn’t pay (like a housewife or a caretaker for elderly parents). You spend your time mainly in doing things. You probably do take some time to yourself every once in a while to recharge. It might just be an hour or two, or that rare, but needed, vacation. But mostly, you’re actually trying to make a difference. I’m here to give you ideas on how you can do that. And by the way, that paragraph described me as well. So I guess I’m also writing this to myself.

I’m often going to drop into a mode of speaking where I only point vaguely at the true answer. This is to help people digest things. If I were to say, “the answer is Jesus,” then many people (possibly even myself), would dismiss what I’m saying. Because Jesus isn’t here looking over my shoulder. He isn’t sitting next to me each day as I work a boring job. He isn’t helping me to make dinner as I scramble to try to feed everyone on time. He isn’t driving my kids to their next activity so that I can work on laundry. Since we don’t see Jesus every day doing each of these mundane things, then we often forget that in reality, he is actually there in each of those cases. But I’m not here to just reinforce the fact that Jesus is watching everything you do. That only leads to paranoia if you happen to remember it in random moments throughout the day. Instead, I’ve learned to use different words and concepts to get the effect that I’m looking for. And those different words and concepts turn out to be more useful for me, while only pointing in the general direction of the true answer.

Let me give you an example. If someone from work were to ask me what is most important in life, then I would usually respond along the lines of “improvement is most important.” I would then explain that if we’re never improving then we’re stagnant. You can’t ever be perfect or the best, but you can always be better. Just yesterday (as I’m writing this), my son was trying to bake some sourdough bread. This is the first time he has tried to do that. It’s quite the family project to get sourdough starter, make the sourdough culture, feed it for days on end, and then eventually get to make something with it. And we’re learning all of this from books and videos and a little bit of help over the phone from my mother in law who lives 800 miles away.

As we were trying to stretch the dough so we could then shape a loaf to bake, the dough was a lot stickier than our books said it should be. My son was trying his best, but he really has only baked bread a couple of times in his life, and he had never baked sourdough. And with all of that limited experience to draw upon, this dough wasn’t cooperating. It was all over his hands and generally making a mess of the counter. It was lumpy and also had some holes in it. It was so frustrating that he started to cry. Now in that moment, it would have been next to useless for me to say “It’s not worth crying over, because Jesus is watching.” Even if I was a bit stronger (and arguably more accurate) and said “It’s not worth crying over, because Jesus is helping,” then he would not have been consoled. He probably would have been skeptical and doubting. “How could this bread be such a mess if Jesus, the only perfect person to live on the earth, was helping me to make it?” And I wouldn’t blame him for feeling that way.

Instead, I talked to him about how experience is necessary for everything. I told him about failed cooking projects that I had done. My favorite is when I tried to make sugar free peanut brittle for a friend who was diabetic. All I did was make peanut brittle but without adding any of the sugar. I didn’t substitute in anything else, so it was like making cornbread with no corn. It was a complete mess and inedible, and I was devastated at the time. I told him about how easy it is to walk, and how babies somehow aren’t smart enough to do even that (he recognized the playful sarcasm in my voice at that example). I even pointed out to him that lifting your head up must be the easiest thing in the world, but new born babies take weeks to learn to do that effectively. Those examples were much more helpful to him than if I were to point directly to the answer and say “It’s okay if you’re struggling with this, because struggling helps us grow closer to Jesus.”

So you’re going to get these articles in bits and pieces. And sometimes one topic is going to be broken up into multiple sections. I generally think that long form essays allow you to be more expressive and comprehensive, but I also recognize that even I (maybe especially I) have a limit to my attention span.

I do hope that you enjoy this format. I genuinely want to bring people to Christ, and make your life better by doing so. I draw closer to Christ because I know that my life is (and my next life will be) so much better when I do. I want you to experience the same.

To end this section, I’m going to awkwardly start a thing that will be much more useful later. I’m going to point you to new articles (which I haven’t written yet), that will be good threads to read down. So this paragraph is a placeholder, to be replaced at some point in the near future, when I have more things written, and can tell you what you might want to read next.