LaDorissima

As a newbie, I'm not sure if this is the best board for this but here goes:

It seems to me that one of the great wrongs done by Xtianity is its perversion of the concept of forgiveness. In the Xtian version, it works this way:
Person A does harm to person B. If B can manage it, he forgives A as a kind of favour to A (or because his god tells him he must.) And even if B doesn't do it, A can still get forgiven by god if he repents.

IMO, the way it really works is like this:
Person A does harm to person B. If B takes responsibility for his life he recognises that he needn't carry the harm around with him for ever and he'd be happier if he stopped bearing a grudge against A so he forgives him. B moves on & recovers from the injury and, as a side-effect, A can start feeling less guilty (assuming he had repented & felt bad about it) because he can see that he hasn't actually blighted B's whole life.

The problem with the Xtian way is that the person who's been hurt finds it much harder to forgive because it all looks like a big favour he's doing for the bastard that hurt him. He doesn't get to see that he'd actually be doing himself a favour.

And what good does it do a genuinely repentant person to be forgiven by god if he can see the poor guy he hurt still hurting as much as ever?

LaD

pescifish

I'm going to give this a try over at Moral Foundations and Principles.

It's an excellent point of discussion and very interesting and I hope it gets some good action over there.

yahwehyadayada

The way I've always heard it works is this: Lets say A murders B's child. A then claims to have been forgiven by gawd. B cannot find it within himself to forgive A & so is going to hell. Pretty neat, hey?

LaDorissima

Ha! Yeah, it does look that way.

I arrived at my conclusions about the way forgiveness really can work after years of suffering from wrongs I felt had been done to me and from guilt about wrongs I'd committed against others. Learning how to forgive came after I was in therapy for a while & grew from there.

Eventually, I realised that most of said wrongs came about through people (including myself) making mistakes, some of them pretty bad ones, and there was no need for me to continue being a victim of them. I'm so much happier these days!

It took me years but I can't help feeling it could have been a much swifter process if I hadn't grown up with that Xtian concept of forgiveness twisting things up for me.

LaD

[ August 13, 2002: Message edited by: LaDorissima ]</p>

Plump-DJ

Well maybe we should ask the Christians how it really works. I mean Jesus preached forgiveness, and god dammit he was right.

Forgiving people is one sure way to make you're like a much more enjoyable experience. It's amazing how much better you feel when you forgive someone. As for the Christian reasoning behind *why* we should forgive, i'd really like to hear the Christian response to this from someone in "da know?"

As a start i don't see anything intialy wrong with "cause God wants you to" all though that would probably be a little bit simplistic an answer i think. I mean God has your best interests at heart supposedly and with all that wisdom-n-stuff he has under his belt it might be wise to pay attention. I'd also add that because it's borne out by experience (forgiveness = better for everyone) God was right in this case. So that would be my not very knowledgable-christian christian response to that.

[ August 15, 2002: Message edited by: Plump-DJ ]</p>

Infinity Lover

The qualities of one subject, equal the lack of qualities of it's opposite.

The purpose of forgiveness is the same as the pointlessness of not forgiving.

The latter means your hearts consumed with hatred, a hunger for vengeance (we tend to call that justice, which is a way to justify it I guess, but it does always seem to boil down to "you hurt me, so now I want to see you hurt"), and remaining stuck in the negative scenario.

Forgiveness means allowing yourself to let go, move on, and hopefully positively impact the others behaviour.

It has NOTHING to do with approval!

(Perhaps you could try to philosophy a bit more, and study philosophy a bit less. There's a whole lot of people who think they know the answers out there, but ultimately the real answers ARE inside you. You just gotta ask yourself relevant questions, and have the courage to profide them with honest answers. It's getting Socratic with yourself, and it works)

RogerLeeCooke

I'm with you. The healthy thing to do if somebody has harmed you is to move on as quickly as you can manage. Recognize your anger and let it die away. That's not the same as forgiveness, but in practical terms it amounts to almost the same thing. And if somebody apologizes, I'm ready to forgive and forget instantly.

Even when the person doesn't apologize, I don't hold grudges. More often I find myself in the position of apologizing to people who play the game known as "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch." An old Chinese proverb goes, "He who will not forgive burns the bridge he must himself cross some day." But I've learned to deal with unforgiving jerks. I apologize only once, and do what I can to make amends, then (again for the sake of my own mental health), I move on.

Contrast this with the kind of morbid forgiveness-seeking in Tolstoy's "Resurrection" or Gandhi's autobiography or St. Augustine's "Confessions." I submit that these three guys, whatever other good they did, have been major stumbling blocks to a rational and healthy psychology.

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: RogerLeeCooke ]</p>