How do we avoid judging people?

In my quest to systematically eliminate character flaws, I hit upon this one recently. And it’s a doozy. I honestly don’t have the slightest idea how to go through life, to go through a single day, and not judge someone. Very rarely do I make my judgment known – most of the time it’s an internal process. But it happens. All the time.

I know I’m not alone on this one. It’s extremely difficult to avoid being a judgmental person. We have all grown up with certain prejudices, and they go way beyond the biggies we traditionally think of.

I personally place judgment on children born into wealth. My natural instinct is to think of them as spoiled and lazy. Accurate? Absolutely not. Do I know how to stop thinking it? Not a clue.

We all judge each other constantly. The Christian judges the non-Christian. The non-Christian judges the Christian. They both judge the Mormon. Everyone judges Paris Hilton.

Do these people possess, or at least exhibit, the characteristics we judge them for? Perhaps. But that doesn’t change the nature of our judgment or make it any less wrong.

What’s particularly ironic is the ever-increasing trend of judging those who judge. We’re becoming particularly gifted at looking at someone and calling them “close-minded,” which is another way of saying “judgmental.” But doing so by definition makes us close-minded as well.

Here’s the thing that very few of us get. In order to be “open-minded” in its truest sense, we have to be willing to accept the beliefs of others who aren’t open-minded. So that means that the atheist needs to understand and respect the fact that the Christian feels they have an obligation by faith to talk to said atheist about their God. The atheist is by no means obligated to change their mind about anything, but they do have an obligation, in the interest of being open-minded and avoiding hypocrisy, to say “I respect their belief, and their felt need to spread the word about it.”

A difficult thing to do.

For the Christian, who believes in a world where there are moral absolutes (something that’s technically impossible in a world without a Creator,) the problem becomes even harder. I have to be able to say that there are certain things that are right and wrong. I have to be convicted about that fact. I have to be unafraid to say when I think something is wrong. But, I have to tread the very fine line between talking about a person’s actions or lifestyle and talking about the person themself.

Extremely hard to do. But until I can do that I’m a hypocrite.

Hypocrite. I hate the way that word looks and sounds. I hate that I look and sound like that word.