this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
340 points (96.7% liked)
Showerthoughts
29612 readers
1954 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand. I think bad things (e.g. cancer) can happen to everyone (e.g. small childrens/babies, selfless people...). Is your argument that no one is really good?
It's easier for religious people to believe in original sin than to accept that one day they're going to die and they won't get to meet Space Santa.
Damn, Space Santa sounds so cool. Where can I meet him? Does he have buildings dedicated to him that I can go to?
I should make a religion out of that.
The argument is that you cannot really know. You don't know everything a person did. You don't know the motivations with which they act. You cannot look into their heart.
That is why you should refrain from judgement over a human in his entirety. You can and sometimes should judge individual acts that you have witnessed or are proven.
This is explicit the Bible i.e. Matthew 7:1 and the Qur'an i.e. 1:4. I don't know how it is written in the Torah, but generally in the abrahamic religions the final judgement is reserved to Allah, as He is the only one to truly know a human.
But also outside religion, why is it that anyone should rise to judgement of whether someone is "good" or "bad" in face of serious illness or injury? Saying someone is good so he doesn't deserve cancer implies that there is people who deserve cancer.
I know the statement is usally meant to signal compassion. The compassion should be unconditional though, as it is a fellow human that is suffering.
Yeah, we shouldn’t judge Hitler. Sure, we know he had millions of people killed, committed genocide and wrote a book detailing his exact motivations, but you cannot look into his heart and don’t know everything he did, so we should not judge him. He might just have been misunderstood and actually a really nice guy.
/s
You don’t need to know everything a person did to judge them. Good deeds do not erase bad ones.
Maybe include the second part of that paragraph i wrote:
But given the example of Hitler. Why is it important to consider the person in his entirety as evil? Aren't the intention and act of genocide by themselves an evil that needs to be condemmend and prevented?
I find Hitler and Fascism are great examples, because the story of the fascists being evil people is a form of "othering". They are the evil people, but we are not the evil people. This can all to easily lead to ignorance to how easily Fascism can spread and infect any people. And we see it in the way Germans wiggled themselves out of responsibility for their crimes after WW2.
To quote the Ausschwitz survivor Karl Stojka:
„Und das haben Menschen gemacht, so wie du, du und ich. Diese Leute kamen nicht von einem anderen Planeten. […] Es waren Menschen, so wie wir. Und nicht Hitler hat mich verhaftet, nicht Göring, nicht Goebbels. Der Greißler, der Hausmeister, der Schneider, der Schuster, der Bäckermeister, die haben auf einmal eine Uniform gekriegt, eine Hakenkreuzbinde, und da waren sie die Herrenrasse…“
Or to say it with a caricature In Nuremberg and other places - "but he had ordered me to it":