Two for me:
-
The moment you feel tipsy it’s time to ease down. You have a stomach full of booze that’s going to make you more drunk even if you stop immediately.
-
If you think people are good, you’re probably right and if you think people are bad, you’re probably right.
People are good IMO.
“By their fruits you will recognise them.” - Big J
When people say A but they have only done/been B, assume B (even more so if they don’t even acknowledge the discrepancy).
And yes, I agree, people are fundamentally good 😊, which is why great immorality shocks and disgusts us (well, most of us around the world at least): we’re witnessing someone deny their humanity and act against it.
I prefer Bonhoeffer’s take: we should judge people less by what they have or do and more by what they are made to suffer.
If by that you mean “how they do when they suffer”, making it as little of a problem to anyone else whilst also trying to stay hopeful and clear-headed enough to figure ways out of it/cope with it if it’s unavoidable, then I guess I agree with Bonhoeffer? 👍
More like Jesus became a big problem for people with power and was made to suffer for it. Bonhoeffer was not saying that we should conceal our suffering in a way that it isn’t a problem for others. This was is in a larger essay about how people cope with Nazism at the time, very clear-headed but was calling out those who did little because they didn’t want to suffer and how we judged harshly those who lost everything.
The Funamental Attribution Error is relevant here.
Wikipedia describes it like this:
Or, as it’s often described in common parlance, we judge others by their actions but ourselves by our intentions.
I don’t really think it’s helpful to collapse a persons character into “good” or “bad”. The vast majority of people think they’re good, and that those actions they’ve undertaken which others might describe as bad were either misunderstood, or justified.
First of all, sorry for the long, rambling reply!
I agree that most people worldwide will probably not transgress in heinous ways but there’s certainly a “collapse” to happen on the Day of Judgment, and we will find out which threshold we crossed with our acts (this is the framework at least a quarter of the world is working on, more or less, and mine too ofc)… evidently, we’re not God so we cannot fully account for everyone’s deeds or even fully comprehend the scale on which to place them but in our day to day lives we usually understand some people are lovely to be around and boons for everyone and others are selfish and immoral to wicked and despicable and we spend our time with them/avoid them accordingly. We can avoid the hard categories “good” and “bad”, but IRL we do classify people in groups of “good enough to have in your life” and “bad enough to avoid” and, whilst some people are just difficult and mentally not ok/intellectually challenged but spiritually/ethically ‘on the right track’, others just show complete disregard for everyone else and are aware of it, they just simply don’t care…
TLDR: There is such a thing as a “good” and “bad” people, even accounting for ignorance, stupidity and mental instability, and we can tell them apart by their objectively good and bad decisions and takes on those decisions (ethically speaking, ofc)… we just can’t make a final judgment on it. We know the direction these things go but we don’t know the equation on the scales nor have the computing power to figure it out. 🤷
I can’t argue with a position that requires faith, sorry.
That’s pretty fair (and polite!). 👍