Matthew 7:6

So while reading Matthew, I came upon the "judgement" section of the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 7:1-6 Christian Standard Bible (CSB)

Do Not Judge

7 “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. 2 For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use. 3 Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye. 6 Don’t give what is holy to dogs or toss your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, turn, and tear you to pieces.

I understood 1-5 easily enough but was always a little confused about verse 6.  It felt as though it did not belong to previous verses, and it definitely did not belong to the following verses about seeking.  Although in a WAY it was a segue...  from Judging to Sharing.

Jesus takes this subject very seriously (well really anything he talks about He is serious about) as indicated by the "Hypocrite!" stuck in the middle.

Basically He is saying stop Judging people for the wrong reasons.  If you are judging to "show that someone has a problem" or that you are somehow better than they are... you have got it all wrong.  YOU (we all) have issues.  Maybe we don't have the same issue as someone else, but no one is clean.  "Take a better look at yourself before you try to 'help' someone else."

But notice that Jesus says NEVER JUDGE... he is cautioning us against judging from a wrong state of heart or mind.  It is something to be very cautious about... and I see it all the time, and no doubt commit the same all the time.

But then we come to verse 6.  I had to read a bunch of commentaries by venerated Christians to try and understand this one.  I came away with two concepts:  The softer of the two is "don't share the truth to people who are not ready for it"... in other words don't preach at them (at least that is what I get from that, I am probably wrong) if they are not in a place to receive it.  The other is a little stronger and that is don't share with people who are just looking for fodder or an argument to fight with you... people who already do not value the Truth (the word of God) and instead want to tear it apart at every turn.  What is the point?  It fuels them in the wrong direction (further away from God) and it bothers you.

Still, coming from a 1st person perspective, does this apply to the part about judging where you are applying scripture, or should I say throwing scripture at someone?  Or does this come from a 3rd party perspective of seeking Truth (or NOT seeking it)?  That is why I am thinking it is actually a segue from smacking people with scripture vs. seeking out Truth.  I am probably waayyyyy wrong.

Anyway, that is what I got out of it.  It pretty much applies to all social media these days.

Why do people never learn and always think they are the exception?

This in a recent news article:

Perry entered the cage -- something she does every day, Bradbury said -- when a Bengal tiger wrapped its paws around her legs, knocking her down. Another tiger jumped on top of her, and the tigers pulled on her until event attendees helped her escape.
"It's never happened before," he said. "She's gone in on hundreds of occasions."

It's never happened before...  they are large, wild predators.  Predators can be "friendly" with animals they are familiar with.  My cats at home are sweet until they feel like taking a swipe at you.  Fortunately I out-mass them by something like 25:1.   And they still leave me bleeding.

...And on to Debian...

You know me, never satisfied standing still and to be honest, Pop!_OS has been less stable of late.  Every update was bringing me more problems, so I figured it was time to try something different.

I waffled between ElementaryOS and Debian.  I went back and forth a couple of times in one day and settled on Debian.  Debian is the base OS for many major distributions, and is more flexible in general than Elementary.

I installed the Debian "testing" version with Gnome preconfigured.  I then installed Nvidia proprietary drivers... and hacked away at odds and ends that I like to have on my systems, including fleshing out a conky.

There were a few issues and in fact two of the security repositories were broken from the start.  I had to disable them in order to do anything with my system.  Once disabled I was able to move on and get my system set up to a more or less stable configuration.

The reason I did NOT choose ElementaryOS was because I knew I would have to do a few backend hacks to get the UI where I wanted it it.  EOS is gorgeous, no doubt, but there are some things I want to have that Elementary does not provide out of the box.  I will probably hang with Debian for a week and then if the whim strikes, install Elementary.

Oh, there is ONE thing that is not Debian-specific... and that is the tracker-miners/tracker-extract processes.  I don't know what triggers it exactly but they wail the tar out of my system (probably indexing everything for the first time)... I end up with a freeze and sometimes even a deadlock/hang because they consume ALL 32 GBs of my RAM AND ALL of my Swap space.  That is absurd and should NEVER happen.  Gnome team needs to work on that.

Fedora pre-Update

So, logged in this morning and saw that Fedora has a bunch of OS updates pending, including gnome/wayland and kernel updates...

This basically means that post update I won't be able to boot properly.   I don't know what it is but Fedora NEVER updates well for me.  :(  I am going to do it though and see what happens... maybe my worry is unfounded this time.