Sunday, June 13, 2021

Jesus Did Not Concern Himself With The Red Herring Of Reputation

Jesus did not concern himself with reputation.  Despite how Mosaic Law would obviously classify speaking with sinful beings, refuting alleged religious authorities, and making any kind of truthful statement no matter how uncomfortable it might be as strictly nonsinful activities, he encountered quite a few ideological opponents within the very group he was born into.  The Jews were as divided in their responses to Jesus as those with no sincere philosophical interest in what he spoke were.  In spite of their often fallacious misrepresentations of his ideologies and blatant hypocrisies that violated God's own Mosaic Law, never did Jesus so much as pretend that reputation truly matters in any ultimate sense beyond sheer pragmatism.

To take the reputation of someone one does not know at face value is to make an assumption, succumbing knowingly or unknowingly to stupidity, instead of aligning with reason.  To tale the reputation of someone one does personally know seriously except in order to defend them from slander is to settle for individual or group perception of someone's character instead of the truth of the matter.  In either case, reputation is absolutely not a logically infallible reflection of someone's true intellect, philosophical acuity, moral standing, and personality!  It is irrelevant, contrary to the idea of so many people who strive to seem a certain way to others rather than show their authentic self and actually align with reason and morality.

As someone the Bible clearly describes as facing the stupidity of those who fail to look past incomplete perceptions, the Jesus of the gospels would have known firsthand how much of a red herring reputation actually is to philosophical stances and personal motives.  One characteristic of fools like the subcategory of Pharisees that pointlessly opposed Jesus is a concern with the superficialities of reputation, a fixation on how others might randomly or even maliciously misperceive actions due to their own stupidity.  It is vital to clarify that it is not happening to feel an unwanted desire to "fit in" with one's community that qualifies as folly; only an epistemologically or morally unsound belief that fitting in with others or passively deriving one's worldview from them amounts to a characteristic of fools.

No one can ever be at fault for how an irrational, unjust person will react to them when they have not actually believed, done, or said anything that conflicts with reason and morality.  This is as true of an ordinary person as it is of Jesus himself.  The difference is that many Christians like profess allegiance to truth without regard for social pressures, no matter what those truths may be, and still fit in with some groups at the expense of consistent rationality, intellectual autonomy, and individualism.  Like the specific Pharisees that practiced legalism while ignoring God's actual commands in the Torah, these Christians either judge people's character inconsistently with what they might admit is Biblically valid or judge character in the context of a heinously arbitrary, extra-Biblical framework.

Jesus says to "Stop judging from mere appearances" (John 7:24), and to judge others rationally one must distinguish between perceptions--or appearances--and someone's true self on a conceptual and relational level.  A Christian who wants to dispute the fact that reputation is at best an unnecessary companion to someone's standing must push back against what Jesus himself states and what logic reveals to anyone who dwells on the issue without committing fallacies.  Perhaps a given person has or will eventually have the reputation they deserve.  Perhaps not.  Nevertheless, one can prove that it does not follow from having a certain reputation that reputed information about someone describes their true self.  That alone is all that one needs to care nothing for reputation except as a tool of manipulation to exert influence over simpletons.

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