Interesting, you are now presenting a more grown up tone. Wonder what thats about? You didn’t answer my question as to whether you think it is trivial to hurt people? I wonder if you think that a person’s internal experience is also trivial? If you think that how people feel is trivial, do you also think that one’s internal experience is trivial? Do you think like Descartes in the sense that humans are machines and all that matters is behavior?
I’m curious about that and I’m also curious – do you think that qualities like love, kindness, compassion, gratitude are nice but less important than doing and taking action – with being right? Do you associate qualities like love, kindness, compassion, gratitude with weakness?
Your latest post attempts to twist the meaning of condemnation to telling the truth. It’s clever :-) - but it is not honest and I am not willing to go with it. I am not talking about times when, in caring a friend or doctor tells someone the truth. I am talking about when people willfully condemn others – which is what was going on on this thread.
Condemnation is hurtful and when one consciously condemns – one is consciously harming.
Here are a couple of example statements that were written to me:
Give us a break! Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a liberal opportunist, and Rick Warren is a self-serving, egotistical, narcissistic money machine. Follow the money.
What Rick Warren has done is tear churches all over this country apart.
It is ridiculous to say that those were simply statements of truth - those were statements of condemnation and they are hurtful.
But, for the record -- there are times when painful words MUST be spoken, to prevent even greater hurt. It is neither arrogance, nor sin, nor lack of love, to speak the necessary-but-hurtful words in those situations.
Are you saying that the ends justify the means?