[Michael Chui]

Originally Posted by purplepower

At what point does being kind ( for kind substitute your own word to suit your own spiritual persuasion ) become weakness; can it be posing as something morally superior when it may more likely be a disinclination to make the effort to refuse to submit to unacceptable demands. ie does weakness and LOMF sometimes masquerade as kindness/charitableness/peace-seeking.

As a rider to that, does kindness (turning the other cheek - or its equivalent for non-Christians ) simply result in TWO slapped cheeks ? Does it in fact, sometimes act as an incentive to unethical behaviour ? (thereby becoming "wrong" itself ?)

Well, to begin with, it's possible to dissociate this question from the Christian context, in my opinion. That out of the way...

Strength (or weakness) refers to the reason you do something (much like, I notice, polarization). For example... If you do something because you've been told to and you're going along with it, it's weakness. If you do something because you've been told not do and think it should be done, then it's strength.

If you make a matrix out of it, you get

                     Obedience   Defiance
                   ------------+----------
Believe it's right             | Strength
Believe it's wrong   Weakness  |

To take kindness as an example, since that was your question...

The actual act of kindness would be strong if everyone believed you should be uncharitable. If you've seen the movie 300, or know much about Spartan culture, it would be an act of strength to be kind to someone who was cast out of the city and equally, an act of weakness to fail to be kind to someone who was disabled or deformed.

Acting in a kind manner would be weak, however, if you looked at a bum and thought to yourself, "He's clearly not going to help himself no matter what I do," but because your friend gave him a dollar, you give him a dollar, too.

On the other hand, consider the case of the bum again: you wouldn't call an act of kindness strong if you gave him a dollar because he looked like the kind of guy who was just down on his luck and would do better the next day. Nor would you call it weak to turn away from someone who you think would simply drown himself in beer and even your friends think so.

The actual actions can all be called kind: whether they are strong, weak, or neither depends on why you did it and in what context.