There’s a homily about gossip from the film “Doubt.” In my mind it sorta ends the discussion on the topic, not that there was ever an argument for it being any good. I sent that video to a friend whose immediate response was that it was probably an attempt to silence a woman in the film. For the most part she was right, which is interesting. But I don’t think it takes what he’s saying any less true. Just because gossip can serve the purpose of spreading bad news that people ought to hear doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing.

We all do bad things, we’re all bad. If our knowledge of each other was perfect, but our compassion remained as imperfect as it is, we would hate one another I expect. Or at least fear one another. We are under the impression that gossip is educational, that it reveals things. It does not. We should just assume that people are bad and doing things we disagree with. Gossip is merely an angle of a view of that badness we are receiving at quite a bias.

Despite the assumption of that badness, we know how to behave, with love and compassion and patience. Having our imperfectly compassionate minds informed of imperfection which was already there just makes what we ought to do harder to do for no good reason.

Quite a departure from some of my earlier thinking on how to behave with people. I think they call that repentance.

Where this breaks down is with regards to protection. Some badness is the sort that is dangerous. Much of it is, really. And while I won’t deign to judge badness, there is some of it I would like to avoid, and more importantly, have Robinia avoid.

Our neighbor is a pedophile. He abused his granddaughter. I don’t want him to be killed, but I also don’t want him to set foot in my house or his eyes on Robinia. He has lost that privilege to participate in my life given the knowledge I have of him and his past behavior. That’s just self protection.

Clearly there is a gap in the philosophy and the behavior. Or at least there is a gap in my understanding of the philosophy, or even theology.

There really does seem to be a difference between martyring oneself willingly and allowing innocent people to be put into harms way.

I’ll have to think on it.