“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.” - Hannah Arendt
“The first casualty when the ethical core of society evaporates is freedom. Law (government) fills the void -- directing by threat of force those aspects of life that formerly were governed by our ethical standards.” - Lawrence Reed
“I think perhaps people in the universities have externalized the idea of vice and virtue. Instead of seeing vice and virtue as personal categories to be used by individuals to guide their own actions, vice and virtue have become exclusively political concepts. A bad person is someone who offends prevailing sensibilities.” - Dinesh D'Souza
Ok I have had it. I’ve tried desperately to refrain from bringing this up but I believe that the other side has so saturated the public mind with its morally bankrupt value system that most are now thoroughly convinced that people who think the way I do are the new Salem Witch Hunters. What has me so in a huff you ask? The PSA’s (Public Service Announcements), which admonish us not to judge others. While I find them all to be somewhat odious, this particular PSA was run immediately following a news story regarding the resignation of Governor James E. McGreevey.
This announcement has the actor saying, “unless you’re sitting on a bench and banging a gavel, you shouldn’t be judging anyone.” So we are now required to perform a morality lobotomy and turn over our common sense and sound judgment to a lawyer in a black robe? I want everyone to know here and now that I am extremely judgmental. I pass judgment on people, places and things. My judgments are based upon my personal experience, my knowledge of the world around me and a firm foundation of Judeo-Christian values. I submit to you that the problem in Western Culture is not the fact that we judge, rather that we have suspended any and all forms of reasonable judgment. We have completely abdicated our moral responsibility to distinguish right from wrong and good from bad. This is a prescription for Societal Insanity.
Persons charged with the commission of a violent crime may still claim in a court of law that he/she is "innocent by reason of insanity", temporary or otherwise. Insanity is determined by the inability of a defendant to distinguish right from wrong. How then, are we as a society to determine who among us is insane if we collectively allow ourselves to become devoid of our ability to judge.
Some people claim that Jesus proscribed judgment. This is total malarkey! What Jesus was warning his followers against was hypocrisy. He warned that we must be cautious in our judgment of others, as we will be held to the standards to which we hold others. This is exactly as it should be.
When we have completely lost, not just our ability, but more importantly our desire, to pass judgment we will have lost the moral foundation of our system of jurisprudence and that is but a short step away from the loss of civilization as we know it.
It never fails that whenever I attempt to see the inherent goodness of man, my vision is obscured by mankind.
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