John 8:7

There was a time in my life when I looked at all religious folk as flocks of sheep guided by cunning shepherds, who would sooner fatten their animals with juicy morsels of faux morality than actually guide any one of them to the truth. I thought it was the classic case of Nietzsche's slave morality, and while it may in fact be so, I've come to learn that there are a lot of little truths hiding in bloated carcasses of religious works. Who knows what the original stories of The Bible were trying to depict - whether it was all symbolic, or whether it was meant to be reality in as grandiose terms as people in those days could put it. Either way, through thousands of years of translations, crusades, cover ups, and lies, Christianity, like all religions, has had much of its truth stripped away, leaving a quiet, almost terrifying, bureaucracy in its wake. Yet there is still wisdom to be gleaned from The Bible, and over the past weeks I've been dwelling on a particular verse which caught my eye when it was brought to my attention.

John 8:7 "So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." (KJV).

I've highlighted the part which I think is the most compelling. This quote is in reference to a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. In those times, the punishment for this crime was to be stoned. So the group of men which had brought her before Jesus ask him if they should stone her, and he replies by writing something in the ground. They ask him again, and again, and again, until he says, "He that is without sin amongst you, let him cast the first stone". Then he continues writing. One by one, the men leave, and the woman is left alone. Jesus forgives her, and tells her to sin no more. There is an intriguing conversation which ensues, and I may get into that later, but this little bit really struck a deep chord with me.

So often we're quick to judge on moral grounds, and it's no secret that on the internet (particularly in the dense-minded echo chambers of comments sections on news pages), there are millions of people ready to crucify someone for the slightest mistake, as though they've never made a mistake in their lives. I see this especially instantiated in "cancel culture", in which people will find a person who has made a mistake, whether it be recent or decades old, and will relentlessly try to dog them until they either quit social media or lose all of their status and following due to intense malign. Oftentimes, these "crimes" are perpetrated against a base morality which is shared by every user on a platform besides she/he who is being canceled.

Sometimes, the crime is real, and the person may deserve to be cancelled. In those cases a public outcry and ostracization may be the answer. But this is rarely the case - most of the time, someone gets "cancelled" for a small mistake made years ago which does not at all speak to the depth of their character. If we were all defined by our mistakes, we'd be a sorry excuse for a society. Yet the mongoloids of the internet will relentlessly bully these "criminals" into submission until nothing is left of their legacy except the one mistake they were so unfortunate to make; as if they should have been omniscient to foresee it. I feel that the large majority of "cancellers" are a mixture of sad people chasing the feeling of power and moral superiority. People who haven't accomplished anything worthwhile in their lives, so they seek to bring down those who have by whatever means necessary short of physical confrontation, and in the same stroke they satisfy their urge to assert their moral high ground and validate their existence.

Whenever there is a controversy over some celebrity whose past mistakes have come to light, my first thought follows along the lines of John 8:7 - have I not also made mistakes in my life? Mine may not be as public, and perhaps not as severe, but that doesn't make me any better than them, and it certainly doesn't give me the right to judge them. The same can be said for errors made by those around us. It's simple to point out all of a person's flaws and bury them under eight feet of rubble, but it's much harder to look at yourself and realize that the same rubble exists above you, suspended in the void of your ignorance. Once you become aware of it, as you make others aware, it crashes down on you.

Of course, this post will do nothing to solve the "cancel culture" problem, but if more people chose to look inward rather than outward and realized their own pile of sins is far from small, then they might have a second thought before berating another person for a mistake. Behind the pixels and electrical signals of the internet, it's all too easy to throw stones at people - the rocks are limitless and your arm never grows tired. But we need to consider if we are worthy judges before we destroy someone for a sin. Find me the perfect person - he or she who has never before sinned and has made no mistakes. Who always knows the right path forwards and never looks back. Who understand the underlying objective morality which governs the world and informs their judgements. Only that person is worthy of being judge, jury, and executioner. The rest of us need to be more concerned with healing - with forgiveness and growth, so we can move to being a society predicated on what we do with our mistakes, rather than the mistakes themselves. We need to remember John 8:7 and move forward with introspection into the deepest, darkest parts of our own psyche before we denigrate others. Clearly, that is easier said than done.