Proverbs calls lashon hara -the evil tongue - foolish, saying,
"whoever spreads slander is a fool...
he that refrains his lips is wise. " (Prov 10:18...19)
"A man who lacks judgement derides his neighbor" (Prov 11:12)Why does it say it is a bad idea to verbally attack someone? Let's face it. If you run around saying, "John Smith is a nasty so-and-so....." , then John Smith may decide that the best way to defend himself is to discredit you. So you now have an enemy in public on your tail and after everything you say and ready to criticize you back in return!!! So if you can avoid speaking badly about people, you're better off to avoid it.
Even worse is when those attacks are wrong. Because when you are falsely accuse someone of something they are not guilty of , just to get a falsely percieved edge in a debate, you not only build an enemy, but do damage to society - something you may have to pay for in the next life by having what would have been your reward taken away from you.
Isaac Newton's life has a great story along these lines. Many people recognized Newton's brilliance very early. But some of his colleagues felt threatened by his intelligence - as if Newton would rise above THEIR stature in the academic world by virtue of being smarter. A man by the name of Robert Hooke began criticizing Newton very unfairly, writing articles in trade publications attacking his findings. Newton published his work on optics and mechanics anyway, largely because the evidence he had was unrefutable to those who were objective. Robert Hooke was not being objective.
In the end, Hooke did more to make himself look bad than to make Newton look bad. He was criticising work others recognized as brilliant, and making himself look bad in the process. In the annals of history, Newton went down as a great scientist who contributed much to society. Hooke went down as contributing little to nothing, and almost destroying great contributions with his mouth.
While Newton published his work on physics, he kept his math ideas quiet. In a world where Geometry and Trigonometry was the highest math men knew, he was silently developing ideas on how to measure a slope by making the distance between two points infinitely small. And measuring the area under a curve by adding up an infinite number of infinitely small areas. He knew his theory on "fluxes" would get criticized by Hooke and other haters out there who would criticize dealing with infinities not enumerable, so he kept his work quiet and shared it only with a few of his colleagues he felt he could trust.
Gottfried Leibnits of France was one of those colleagues he felt he could trust. He shared some of his basic ideas in order to explain planetary motion to him. In short, Newton and Leibnits needed the math to solve science problems.
Leibnits was intrigued by the math ideas and developed it even further, advancing it to a even more workable stage. He published the ideas and calculus was publically born.
When Newton saw that Leibnits' work was well recieved, he was upset, because he knew those ideas were his first. So Newton (an Englishman) published his ideas and a biased war erupted between English and French mathematicians about who invented calculus first. After a century or so, most people on both sides finally broke down and recognized that Newton developed the base ideas first, but Leibnits improved those ideas and made them more practical. Leibnits put calculus in more of the equational form people were already used to. So both men deserve significant credit for contributing those ideas to society.
Without calculus, much of what is studied today in Physics and Engineering would not be possible. Calculus is taught to first semester Physics and Engineering students because you can't get through the second semester material without it. Without it, bridges would be far less safe and far more likely to collapse, more cars would fail and cause more deaths, and we probably never would have put a man on the moon. We wouldn't have GPS - that certainly requires precision measurements involving change! Calculus is used to design nearly every technology we use on a daily basis, and even though most people using it have no clue to the math behind it, the people who designed that technology did. Economists use Newton's calculus to determine how healthy the economy is and without calculus, insurance companies might dry up, not having a clue what the odds of events happening in the future are, and thus making it impossible to determine an appropriate rate to charge for insurance. Businesses make decisions based on probability theory that itself is built on top of calculus.
Think about it - the biggest advancements in science, business and economics almost didn't happen because a hater out there wanted to criticize a man unfairly!!!! What if Hooke had succeeded? What if Newton never told ANYONE, including Leibnits, out of fear of criticism?
What if you had to stand before God and be told by God that because of your bad conduct, people in 2050 were riding horses and plowing fields instead of flying airplanes and living the easy life? What if God lets you into heaven .... but gives you the lowest position in heaven because of the damage you did? Yes...indeed...there are more foolish consequences to unfairly criticizing people than just making an enemy. Losing an eternal reward because you discredited someone who was right when you were wrong is even more costly. Yeshua discusssed taking one believer's reward away and giving it to another person in the parable of the talents.
Newton's great math discoveries only got published because he told one person who was not afraid to tell the world. But one hater almost stopped this info from being made public!
Newton's sensitivity to criticism was also why he did not publish much of his theological ideas until later in his life and held some back until even after his death. While I don't agree with all his ideas, his work on Daniel and reconciling that with history was an amazing analysis and well worth reading. Everyone should read it sometime. But he knew there were people who would try to stomp his writings out and never let his books see the light of day simply because they disagreed with his position on this issue or that issue. Some folks feel like no one should be allowed to publish a book unless he is KJV Only or believes in once saved always saved or believes in Pre-Trib or Post trib or whatever. But lets face it, just because you disagree with someone over one issue does not mean they have nothing good to say about potentially another important issue. No one issue makes someone erasable, and think about the possibility that in your haste to discredit someone you think is wrong on issue X, God takes away your part of your reward in the next life because you stopped him from saying what the world needed to hear on another issue.
Perhaps the target of your verbal attacks are not a famous scientist or destined to be one. Perhaps it is someone in ministry, destined to do great things for the kingdom of God, whom you falsely thought was a heretic. Or perhaps he was, but repented later, yet you stopped him from becoming great by your false accusations. Will only he lose a great reward, or will you too? I think you know that answer. Or perhaps it is someone who will, one day, save the life of someone else. What if the President that God appointed to fix all our problems was aborted out of fear of public humiliation and criticism or discredited from running because someone can't stop wagging their lieing tongue? All sin has consequences. If someone is truly a no good bum, they will discredit themselves without your help.
Of course most people who engage the evil tongue THINK they are in the right. But more often than not, when someone tries to discredit an idea by discreditting the messenger, more often than not they are the ones in the wrong. Unfairly accusing someone of evil intent, a secret allegience to jesuits, stupidity, or other attacks, means you are already wrong on one issue, which increases the odds you're wrong on another. And typically people resort to this type of argument because....they don't have any logical thing to say next to refute the person they are debating with. Again....if logic is not on your side, why resort to something illogical?
You don't know what issues you are wrong or right about with 100% certainty. So why commit a sin to convince the world you're right? Just throw out the logic to your thinking and let the logic work or fail. Anything in addition to that may only get you in trouble.
Shalom,
Joe