"Merciful, Nonjudgmental, and Kind"

Of course this applies to those suffering from mental illness, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if mental illness was the context in which this quote was given, but I wonder if this quote also applies who suffer from a far worse mental condition: being wrong.

I don't mean being mistaken about some minor, inconsequential thing, like whether or not pineapple goes  on pizza or what the best or worst Star Wars movie is. I mean being dangerously, politically wrong about a matter of critical moral importance.

For example, let's say, (totally not) hypothetically, that there was a group of people who actively promoted and celebrated the murder of children. Would God still want us to be "merciful, nonjudgmental, and kind" to them?

I suppose the answer to that question depends on what, exactly, we mean by those terms. Of course, we should be merciful in that we should extend forgiveness and not seek vengeance for past sins, but we should also do what we can to prevent future sins against the innocent. We should be nonjudgmental in that we shouldn't judge them to be bad people, but we should also justly judge and correctly identify bad behavior. And while we should be kind enough to gently teach them the error of their ways, would it truly be kind to allow them to go on in those errors, knowing that they are (perhaps unwittingly) doing the work of the devil and condemning themselves to hell? I mean, it's their choice, right?

I think Aristotle had it right. Almost any virtue, if taken to too great an extreme, can become a vice. It may be possible to be too merciful, it's certainly possible to be too nonjudgmental, and it is downright easy to be too kind. Yet, those virtues are still generally virtues, and while it's possible to go too far with them, it is also possible to make the opposite error. It is easy to be too unmerciful, too judgmental, and too unkind. We should be careful to avoid both extremes.

What does that mean for those who promote child murder? I'm not sure, except that we should probably try to prevent our response from being "extreme," even in the fact of such an extreme example. Perhaps we should be mostly merciful, not terribly judgmental, and at least somewhat kind. That's probably not what Elder Holland intended, but I'm taking his quote out of context anyway, so I'm already in for a penny. I think it's generally better to have more of any given virtue than less of it, but even with virtues such as these, I think it's possible to take them too far.