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Originally Posted by renie408  I think I can honestly say that I would not repeatedly rape little girls and bury them alive under my back steps under any circumstances. Perhaps that is because I am a woman, I dunno. |
The point I am trying to make in my example is that, even though it appears as if people do terrible things for no valid reason, one always exists if you look deeply enough. It is not that child molesters or any of the various other types of criminals are just "bad people" and that's the way it is. These people become the way that they are because of terrible experiences that have happened to them in the past. Help these people get through those past experiences, and you will stop them from doing terrible things as well.
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Listen, I understand WHY they are doing bad things. I understand that the end based thinking we now have isn't going to work. Punishing behavior is not nearly as effective as preventing it. Ideally, we should try to identify abused children and give them as much support and therapy as they need. Eventually, there wouldn't be any child molesting. Its the same thing with all crime. Happy, well adjusted people don't go around committing crimes for no reason. If we would start NOW thinking more about getting ahead of the motivators for dealing drugs and committing crimes we would be able to limit crime to a negligible problem within the next century (BTW, I read somewhere that it would be cheaper in the long run to do that than to house and punish all the criminals over the next 100 years). I get all that. I am a liberal Democrat, for god's sake. I still think raping and murdering kids is wrong. Call me crazy, but that is a judgement that no matter how I think about it, I can't stop having.
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Why would you want to stop making such judgments? These types of judgments define your values, which in turn, define you as a person.
The only type of judgment that is destructive is when we feel that others are "bad people"
because they hold different values from our own. For example, I personally feel that child molestation is one of the most atrocious things to exist in the world today. But how can I say that someone who commits such acts is a bad person, when I personally have not experienced the terrible events that must have occurred to form the values that define such a person?
I can't. I know that, if I were in his position, I would behave in the exact same way. So who am I to say that people who commit such acts are bad people?