Saturday, I went hiking with a group of friends by the bluffs of the Missouri River. As we were walking along, talking, and I had been pondering the uproar about The Passion of the Christ, I had a series of thoughts which are, on one hand, rather elementary (in the sense that others have voiced these same ideas before), but also struck me as rather helpful, because they explained phenomenon from one end to the other...

There are, I think, only two ways of juding one's self-worth, "rightness", or morality. One is to use some kind of fixed, absolute point of reference. Another one is to look to the next person, and judge who you are in comparison to them.

One of the most serious problems of using relativistic judgements of self-worth is that it demands, emotionally, that we have a good number of people "below" us in order to feel good about ourselves -- we must be seen as "not the evil ones", and "much better than that large group of people over there". The more people below us, the "better" we appear to ourselves. So we find a group of people to demonize.

Hollywood is, by in large, composed of people who care what other people think of them. (If desiring fame and universal adulation isn't an expression of insecurity, then what is?) And I often suspect the same is largely true of the political left. If so, then we shouldn't be suprised to find that Hollywood is strongly leftist.

Now, here comes someone -- a Christian or other conservative -- who is saying, troublingly, that some act I or my friends perform, or some belief we have is wrong. Not just that they personally don't like it, but that by some fixed, universal standard (the word of God, economic theory, accumulated wisdom, etc.) what I'm doing actually flies in the face of reality itself.

Being disliked is bad enough. But being told the whole universe (and/or God) "disagrees" with what I'm doing or saying is much, much worse. Talk about some seriously ego-deflating commentary!

I crave the approval of others, and here is another who is saying these incredibly offensive things. I must find a way of dealing with this dissent.

Since I am, at some level, a relativist, and I believe there are no fixed standards, I tend to choose my beliefs by what's expedient or flattering to me at this moment. Moreover, since these fixed standards cannot exist, my critics can't be influenced by such, either.

(Since God doesn't exist -- or at least, doesn't act -- he certainly couldn't have told those Christians anything about morality. Since the laws of economics don't exist, they couldn't possibly be persuading conservatives that my ideas are nonsense.)

So, then, I must find another explanation for my critics' words. Since I myself tend to pick beliefs on expedience and self-flattery, I think my critics do too. And since I must find a large group of people to be "less good" than I am, and thus elevate myself in comparison, I think my critics do too.

So, like me, I believe the Christian has adopted her belief system for vanity: She believes it solely because it tells her she is one of the "good" people. Moreover, like me, I imagine she needs to put people down in order to feel righteous.

When she speaks against abortion, homosexual acts or marriage, or drug use, I see this not as an expression of a genuine conviction that such acts are harmful, but as a way of stigmatizing people who engage in such as her moral inferiors, as I am doing with her at this moment.

I fail to acknowledge what I already know, at some level: That becoming a Christian means admitting that one is quite, quite morally wrong. Again, I may know this already at some level: It's why I don't want to seriously consider the whole topic; if their God exists, that could make me not feel very good about myself and require some seriously inconvenient and socially costly lifestyle changes. It could have bad implications for loved ones or friends.

Yet I don't imagine this was what those Christians went though: Nobody could ever admit they were wrong in such a way. Either their libido is dead (unlike mine), or they're just as bad as me, but they won't admit it -- hypocrites! I can't concieve they'd actually break down, admit their entire set of motives and lifestyle would be wrong, and make some changes. I'm not interested in doing such, and they're not better than I.

(And they're not, it's just that they feel God had a run-in with them.)

So now I play my final trump card: I know that their religion -- which I adopt parts of, when it's convenient -- talks about not judging other people. By calling something sin, I imagine they must be feeling judgemental in their hearts and doing it to flatter themselves (as I am doing right now).

Aha! Now I have caught them! They are hypocrites who judge other people and violate even their own religon. I may have many faults, but at least I'm not a hypocrite like these people.

Thus, I stand as judge and jury over them, safely labelling them as "less good" than me, consigning them to the large group of people below me, and thus relatively elevating myself.

Never noticing I myself just judged them.

And did so in precisely the way Jesus warned about: Not of naming sins as wrong (which Jesus himself did frequently), but of standing smugly as the superior of another, passing ultimate judgement on the person, not the act. Of passing judgement in a way that fails to admit my own guilt as well.