Table of Contents

We are forbidden to judge people; we are commanded to judge rightly about the difference between good and evil. We may not call evil good or good evil!

Judge not, lest ye be judged

“Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you” (Mt 7:1-2).

The error of indifferentism

Secular humanists and liberal Christians have made an absolute out of Jesus' prohibition against judging whether other people are going to Heaven or Hell. For them, all religions are the same–equally meaningful or equally meaningless, because all are nothing but human constructs or projections.

John Lennonism: In, "Imagine," Lennon portrays religion as the root of all evils. He predicts that if religion were abolished, we would have heaven on earth.

Some people find some forms of Hinduism attractive because they endorses all religions indiscriminately. Ramakrishna (a 19th-century Hindu) taught that whoever ascends the divine mountain reaches the same summit, so it does not matter whether one begins in an Eastern or Western religion. Of course, this is a radically Eastern view of religious reality; Ramakrishna was expressing the Hindu view based on belief in reincarnation and the law of karma.

The wisdom of tolerance

Parable of the weeds and wheat: “Let them grow together until the end.”

Judge rightly

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be” (Mt 6:22-23).

“Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good” (Rom 12:9).

“Beloved, do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 Jn 4:1).

Just judgment is one of the joys of Heaven

“Jesus said to them, 'Amen, I say to you that you who have followed me, in the new age, when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of glory, will yourselves sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel'” (Mt 19:28).

Natural theology and natural law

The Church believes in the power of the human mind to recognize the existence of God (natural theology) and to distinguish between what is good and evil (natural law).