On Judgments and Cultural Relativity

   People around the interweb keep saying it's wrong to judge the beliefs of others. This is not true. There are accurate portrayals of reality and there are inaccurate portrayals of reality. So long as one's judgments are based on logic and willing to change based upon the presentation of new evidence, there is never a problem with making judgments. Another thing people do everyday is to enforce these judgments when they're about to do other people harm.  The government constantly intercedes on the behalf of victims of other people's judgments that have been taken too far.  We do it every day and it's how we've survived for so long as we have.  If we didn't make judgments, we wouldn't have even made it to the monkey portion of evolution, as even they make judgments.

Family Guy's "Evil Monkey", casting a judgment.

   This being said there is a huge difference between judging whether or not someone's belief or opinion is of sound logic and bigotry. I think people far too often confuse the two. It could be said that judgment is deciding whether or not a notion is stupid or useful, etc., based on whether or not it makes sense; bigotry is deciding whether or not a person is stupid or useful, etc., based on their label as a person (black, white, Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Rich, Poor, Tall, Short, American, Russian, Bro, Yuppie, Goth, etc.). And there is such a thing as unsound judgment which is not logical, but even this is not necessarily the same as bigotry.


   Far more than I witness bigotry in religious discussion, I witness overly touchy religious people who go out of their way to disagree with you and then get defensive when you start dissecting their arguments and asking them to justify their positions, which they claim is unfair. They say they don't have to justify their position. And they're right, they don't have to, but in return they also cannot have any logical expectation of respect from me, as they have not given me enough to at least answer my line of questioning on their point of view. The bottom line is, if you don't even try to defend your position after making an assertion you don't get to whine about being persecuted.


Cultural relativists are the sort of people perpetuating the myth that judgments should not be made.  Earlier tonight one of them saw this aphorism and fired back with this delightful tidbit:
   
   "I understand your point, but reality isn't the same for every individual. For people who take a significant amount of comfort in a belief in God, God exists to them on a meaningful (but not material) level. Denying that is like denying that another person feels emotions like sadness or comfort. Just because something doesn't exist in your reality, that doesn't mean it doesn't appreciably impact someone else's life. 

A Computer Generated Rendering of Bertrand's Teapot

   If someone believed in Russel's teapot so firmly that it actually impacted his view of astronomy, it is real to him, even if it makes no rational sense to me. If I believed in fairies strongly enough that it affects the way I garden or decorate, they'd be real to me. Irrational beliefs can still have a significant impact on a person's life. Who are you (or anyone else) to try to alter that?"

   Whaaa? That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that we all still reserve the right to make judgments about the strength of a person's logic, whether we ever decide to share it with them or not. Their right to their belief doesn't change this. And no one is saying they have to defend their belief, I'm simply saying they can't come on other people's facebook walls, blogs, network t.v. talk shows, etc., proceed to disagree, and then get offended when their beliefs get challenged, and I think most people would agree that this isn't unreasonable. I also firmly believe we all have the human right to forcibly alter any belief of any person when it starts to do more than "appreciably impact" someone other than theirself in a negative way. For example, does a person still have a right to their beliefs if their child dies as a result of denying them medical care because they "believed" in their holistic medicine over scientifically proven modern medicine? I should think not. That's where I draw the line, and thankfully the government sides with me. They charge those parents with homicide. We have to face facts that there are universal parallels within all of our perspectives on reality, and whether you believe these truths to be true (for example, getting a tetanus shot upon cutting yourself with a rusty blade is a universally good idea no matter what one believes, as we all have a universal biological make up that doesn't change even if a person might be ignorant or oblivious of the fact, and even if that belief is "meaningful" to them) or not, meaningful or not, there is only one version of reality, and despite what our individual perspectives might be reality does not bend, change, or fold to cater to these.

A fun slogan for cultural relativists!

   It's exactly this sort of cultural relativity that gets people killed, and is why I also felt inclined to say something about this person's particular comment. It's this idea that we should respect a person's beliefs even when they're doing something dangerous, that comes along with cultural relativity, that I am especially attacking.I let someone, who was very much a cultural relativist, talk me into drinking the kool-aid of cultural relativism one time. And when it really counted, when I could have perhaps stopped someone from being reckless, I didn't. Why? Because rather than valuing their humanity and respecting them as a person who has value and who is capable of being fallible, I respected their, supposedly inalienable, right to their belief. They're dead now. They left behind a wife and 3 young daughters. The youngest one is 5 now. It's a dangerous game to value pride and respect of concepts over logic and reason and people. I often ask myself, in retrospect, what would have been more respectful, standing up and telling them what I thought the flaw in their logic was, or letting their belief "appreciably impact" them into cement at 120 miles an hour.  The point I'm making here is that cultural relativism isn't just a naive notion, it has the potential to be, and is at times, incredibly destructive, as it breeds apathy for the potentially harmful, and at times, incredibly destructive beliefs of others.

And to this point here, someone else disagreed earlier stating,

   
   "Individualism inherently has a breaking point to which anyone's comfort level is crossed. And since not everyone subscribes as strictly to logic as others, you will always be faced with argument of any kind, in any given society. Difference of opinion, and conviction in one's belief is what gives rise to the offense one takes when challenged or presented with any concept. However, do not be so naive to think that you can successfully alter someone's belief or deny them respect if their rationale does not follow the same standard as your own; it is counterproductive to gaining a higher-level understanding of the world we live in. Not everybody wants to be changed, nor challenged, and some do. But all are equally deserving of respect, at the very least, as equal human beings."

   I don't disagree with people's beliefs being deserving of respect, I only argue that I lose all respect for any belief that endangers the lives of others. At this point there cannot be respect for it would not be mutual. Why should I respect a belief that does not respect a certain value of human life?  


In closing, and as a friend of mine who is a Psychology of Religion professor would say, "You just got truth bombed!"