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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

In Defense of Injustice?

This blog is a good place to think. Sometimes, it simply helps to get all my thoughts out on paper in 1s and 0s. Never am I truly certain that others will respond or even read these posts; but blogging is mostly done knowing that a vast amount of the earth's population will never come across the written material.


Anywho, here's a situation for you:
You know someone who is being criticized for an action (Person A), whether singularly large or seemingly minute and habitual. He or she is not being confronted directly, but the criticizer (Person B) is talking to you. Do you defend the person being verbally (albeit indirectly) oppugned? Or do you go along with it and say, "Yeah, A is such a jerk!"?

Oh wait, a couple more small details: the person being attacked is actually probably in the wrong, and you know it. How do you respond?

Although the latter provided response above is decidedly un-Christian, there are other options, but none of them seems very good:
  1. You defend A. You might not even like this person, but you attempt to justify A's actions. However, does this make you someone who defends injustice? A is (most likely) in the wrong, but you seek to understand all sides of the problem. B has found fault before, and was (most likely) right before. Are you trying to help B?
  2. You keep your nose out of it. It's really not your business anyway, right? You're not particularly involved, yet there is some constant, loud sucking noise that pulls you ever closer to this vortex of problems you don't know how to handle anyway.
  3. You confront A. B comes to you, saying A has wronged him. Thus, you take it upon yourself to go directly to the wrongdoer, only to find you know much less about this situation than previously thought. Really, though, there was no way you could have known or anticipated every aspect of a problem.
  4. You confront B. B comes to you, saying A has wronged her. Thus, you take it upon yourself to tell B to get over it. It can't be that big a deal, right? Essentially, this is just a variation of option #1, but you're not nearly as nice about it.
  5. You bring A and B together to talk things over. You attempt a guidance-counselor move, but you have no training and just might make things worse.
What do you do? It appears there is no easy answer here. This sort of qualifies for a Scriptural assessment (cf. Matt. 5.21-26, 18.15-20), but there is no guarantee that this can be resolved using the Bible (which is true for lots of problems, but that's a discussion for another time).

Prayer is a good catch-all, so it is worth starting there (my assumption being that you know you're reading a Christian blog). But after that, what if no one ever does anything? What then?

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