How bad is that sin, really?

Now that you know that I’m such a big fan judging people, we ought to talk about how I do judge. As much as everyone does judge everyone else, it’s actually not that easy to judge correctly.

As often as I’ve wanted one, I just don’t have an evilometer. Wouldn’t it be handy to walk up to someone with something shaped like those infrared thermometers, scan someone’s forehead, and let it tell you that they’re nearly 666 degrees of evil? I’m actually pointing out two problems here. First, and silliest, that we don’t have a physical way to measure someone’s evilness. Second, and more important, that we don’t have a scale to rate that on.

Popular culture has tried to create a vague scale of evilness by putting extremes at either end. I’ve heard people talk about “on a scale of Hitler to Mother Teresa.” While that works for some toy problems, it doesn’t work for anything meaningful. Those ends get chosen because of the popularity of those figures, and which side we generally put them on. I say “generally” because you know there are people who put Hitler on the good side, and I have to believe that there are some people who put Mother Teresa on the bad side. That, again, points out just how hard it is to rate someone on a badness scale. But the point is that we don’t have a good measure of just how Good or Evil something is.

So what if we tried to create one? It sure would be useful (especially for finally deciding just how wicked mothers-in-law actually are :wink:). We could assign values for different things. The scriptures tell us that no one is forgiven for denying the Holy Ghost, so we can call that 1,000,000,000 badness points. Murder is 100,000. Stealing candy from a baby is 1. The scriptures say that a sorceress goes to Hell. So she could get 70,000 points. But even when we assign all of these numbers, we can’t always tell how they should be awarded. In the laws of most countries, murder gets different penalties depending on the circumstances. If you didn’t have malice, but someone died anyways, then we call that manslaughter, and you get a lighter sentence. If you planned it long before and made it very painful, then you might receive a death sentence. You also get a punishment if you tried to kill someone but didn’t succeed. We just have to look at the variety of penalties in the criminal codes of any country (and especially the fact that they leave some discretion to the judges) to see how hard it can be to create this kind of a scale.

Let’s take a short detour to talk about how we measure things in the physical world. Any time you measure something, you have to pick a proxy. Picking a proxy means that we actually look at something different, and use that as a way to measure the real target. For example, we can talk about how people measure space and time. Measuring space with a tape measure is pretty direct. You have an object that has a known length, put it up against another thing for comparison, and then you know the amount of length that the other thing takes up. You can also measure space by shooting a laser from one place to another and measuring the time it takes to bounce back. That is using time as a proxy for space. You’re not actually measuring length. You’re measuring time, and then computing the length. And for that matter, you can’t actually measure time. A mechanical stop watch actually measures the oscillations of gears under spring tension, and a digital stop watch actually measures the electrical impulses from a quartz crystal (or from a digital circuit). Measuring those oscillations is close to the concept of sticking a measuring tape up against the thing that you want to measure, but it’s not quite the same. In both cases, we have an existing thing with a known measure (length of the tape measure, or time between oscillations). But we still can’t put the oscillations up against the time span we want to measure to look at the whole thing. So measuring with a tape measure is more direct, measuring time kind of uses a proxy, and measuring distance with a laser definitely uses a proxy.

How does that apply to our internal evil scales? Well, let’s go back to the start of my career. I had graduated from college and started at my first job. I was a Junior Engineer. I worked my tail off to prove myself. I was the only Junior Engineer to be hired at that place for the entire 7 years that I was there. Everyone I worked with had at least 10 years more experience than I did. After about a year I got a new boss; he seemed friendly enough. I talked to him a couple of times about getting promoted out of Junior Engineer. My understanding, which he seemed to agree with, was that people generally got promoted from Junior Engineer to Software Engineer between 1 and 3 years into their career. I was well respected by my peers, I was working solo on critical system components, I was bringing up crucial concerns in meetings and often giving good solutions for them. Everyone I have talked to about that situation agreed that I was worthy of a promotion. But I was a Junior Engineer for a full 3 years. One day, I had finally worn down my boss enough with my asking, that he finally did the paperwork to give me the promotion. He didn’t tell me that I was so much better at the 3 year mark than the 1 year mark (although I’m sure that was true). He was just so lazy about my interests, and so involved with his own, that he didn’t do the paperwork when it should have been done. In my internal scale of evil, I give an evil-bonus to anyone who has a responsibility for others, but they neglect that for their own self interest. Because of this and other experiences, I’ve used this manager for decades as an example of what not to be. When writing notes for myself on what to look for when hiring people, I have written down that one qualification is “not Jay.” I don’t mean that I just wouldn’t hire him personally, but I mean to look for someone that has those same signs. Internally, I use Jay’s as a proxy for one style of evil.

There’s a reasonable expectation that you haven’t had a manager like that, or that you haven’t failed an audition because someone else cheated to grab your spot, or that you weren’t extremely abused as a child. How do you rate someone’s evilness at that point? Thank goodness that humans are social animals. We talk to each other, most every day. We discuss the news and how bad or good it is. We discuss our neighbors, and try not to gossip about them (hopefully). We discuss the latest celebrity and whatever antics they’re getting themselves into. But we also have books and articles to read. And isn’t writing just the act of talking to someone else at a future date? When we don’t have the experience ourselves, we rely on others to tell us how bad it is. We build up explanations inside ourselves of how good or bad certain things are, and then we spend a lot of time trying to fit parts of our world into those explanations.

But what is the point of all of this discussion of proxies and measuring? We’re supposed to do no evil, so why does it matter that murder is worse than lying? They’re both wrong and will both kick you out of heaven. I think there are plenty of points that I could make, but I want to focus on just one: we need to draw a line in the sand. We need to decide what we’ll tolerate and what we won’t. I would very much prefer to have a perfect world, so would you, but that world isn’t this one. And we need to each decide what we will live with and what we won’t. If my son decides to cheat on a test then I’ll still let him live at home. But if my son intentionally murders someone, or gets addicted to drugs, then I’m taking him to the police. Those things are on the other side of my line. When I read books or watch movies, I will put up with a certain amount of fighting, but if the descriptions are too graphic, or if the fighting is of a nature that hurts my heart too much (like child abuse), then I turn it off. I don’t need that in my life. I know if I were to go to war then it would be extremely graphic. I know that if I were to do the work that Operation Underground Railroad does then my heart would hurt. And I could do either of those if there was a good cause. But I won’t subject myself to that kind of hurt just for entertainment.

Judging evil (and good) are very necessary parts of life. We have to do it to make sense of things. We have to each have our own internal scales (because we can’t make those scales external). These things are crucial. There are two things that I would encourage you to do with this knowledge. First, learn to judge appropriately. All too often, people talk about “not judging” and it comes across as “the evil that guy did is not sin, because society/illness/nature made him do it.” Second, use your own scale appropriately. It’s too easy not to draw a line in the sand given the constant parade of “don’t judge” advocates. I know that I’ve had trouble drawing that line in the past. Please draw a line in the sand. Refine that line’s position over time. There are books I’ve read (and enjoyed) in the past which I won’t recommend to my kids, because I’ve adjusted my line. So draw a line, even if you’re the only person who knows it or understands it or sees the result. Draw a line, and stand for something.

To end this section, I’m going to awkwardly start a thing that will be much more useful later. I’m going to point you to new articles (which I haven’t written yet), that will be good threads to read down. So this paragraph is a placeholder, to be replaced at some point in the near future, when I have more things written, and can tell you what you might want to read next.