Thursday, November 02, 2006

Bring on the segregation!!!

LOL. What a scandalous title huh? Well I needed something to get your attention!
I have recently been fed up with the "let's include everyone in everything" syndrome and the "let's empower everyone to equality" syndrome.
I was recently having a conversation about "labeling" and "grouping" things. I noticed that when it came to "judging" things like style of clothes, people do not get all bent out of shape, but when I talk about "judging" people, they get all crazy and unreasonable. They often spout something about Christians not judging people and such, but I think they misunderstand me and misunderstand what the Church actually teaches. So let me take this moment to clarify:

Judging people is not right according to the teachings of Christ, only God can judge a person. We are called to "love the person", but not their bad deeds. So when a person is doing something that goes against me or my beliefs, I should love them as my brother or sister in Christ and pray for them, but condemn their actions and call them on to greater accountability. That is true love of a person - to care for the betterment of their entire being. So there is nothing wrong with judging peoples deeds/choices; as long as people understand that to judge someone actions does not mean judging the person as a whole. Hate evil, not people.

On the other hand, we as humans need a way to deal with the barrage of colors, shapes, and other input our senses receive every moment of every day. Think about a newborn baby: to them they know nothing of shape and pattern - everything is a conglomeration of colors constantly moving and changing (so say the "experts"). In order to deal with their new world, the human brain starts categorizing patterns of sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. It even starts relating certain patterns in one sense to patterns in other senses by cause and effect relationships. All said and done, when a person reaches a certain cognitive threshold, they are able to cope with and interact with the world around them. They learn by putting things into categories, which requires that they make a judgment about anything and everything. Is 'a' like 'b', or more like 'c'? How about 'd'? Adolescence is all about pattern matching and categorizing. It is the only way that we can make sense of the world around us. So why is it that when a person becomes an adult they get torn apart for categorizing people? This is only a natural way of dealing with the world around us. Some people are old, some young, some male, some female, some heterosexual, some homosexual, etc., etc. There is nothing wrong with this as long as we don't judge the people within the groupings. We can judge their deeds, but not the people.

So bring on the categorization and "segregations" of a population! It is a good and useful thing to do by helping us cope with our world and making sense out of it. Just don't go too far with the whole condemnation thing.

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