Forgiveness in a vengeful age | Hacker News Reader

Forgiveness in a vengeful age

newhumanist.org.uk

59 pointskawera35 comments

>>> Committing crime, any crime, was to “sin” – and it appeared that as far as the church was concerned, so long as you were sorry, God would forgive you your sins. For me forgiveness was the sole prerogative of the victim.

Maybe the priest didn't explain this very well, but repentance in Christianity does actually include repaying the victims of your crimes. It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

e.g.

(Matthew 5:23-26) So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

(Luke 19:1-10) He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

It remains though that defaulting to seeking forgiveness from a third party, rather than the aggrieved, was one of the revolutionary ideas that allowed Christianity to spread very quickly from its inception.

pretty sure you're referring to God as the "third party" -- but I'm not sure how it was revolutionary considering Judaism had a very similar system in place where offerings were presented to God for forgiveness. Jesus is just the ultimate offering in that sense for Christianity.

For forgiveness of sins against God. For sins against another person, forgiveness may only be granted by that person.

Judaism does not recognize absolution as part of the process of sin and repentance. There is no designated authority who can dispense forgiveness of sins after confession and penance; rather, sins between persons require the asking and granting of forgiveness by the parties concerned while sins between persons and God require the asking of forgiveness by the penitent and the granting of forgiveness only by God. Finally, Judaism does not recognize reconciliation (the whole-hearted yielding of all inner negative feeling) as a necessary part of the process of sin and repentance. Although reconciliation is known and even desireable, rabbinic Judaism realizes that there are other modes of rapprochement that are fully adequate and, perhaps, more realistic.

http://www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Repentance.html

I'll underscore the point that sinning against your neighbor is also sinning against God. You actually have to ask for forgiveness from God and the victim, not use religion to skirt the responsibility to make amends.

In both Judaism and Christianity, if you need to ask forgiveness from your neighbor, you need to ask forgiveness from God as well. If you knocked over a toddler at the park, would her dad be a third party? No.

Bible says that reparation needs to compensate the victim for the loss, and then an additional fifth.

However, in the current system, there is no compensation to the victim. On the other hand, 3rd parties ( us, the tax payers ) spend additional money to keep the criminal locked up.

When the criminal earns in prison, it should pay the victim theoretically.

Problem is that prisoners get paid next to nothing, they get next to little job training, and when they're dumped into society, they're denied job by pretty much everyone.

Kinda hard to pay reparation when you can't feed yourself.

> Bible says that reparation needs to compensate the victim for the loss, and then an additional fifth.

Not exactly. Or at least, I'll need a citation on that.

Christ specifically said to go above and beyond when someone demands something of you. If they want you to walk a mile with them, walk two. All of this is out of the motivation to love others as yourself and value relationships over rules. Or, to look at another way, if you ask God "so what am I supposed to do here?" then you're asking the wrong question. You should be asking "how can I honor You and love my neighbor in this circumstance"? It may seem subtle, but intention and relationship is 100% the point of Christianity.

And, on the other hand, if a Christian is victimized, they should be at peace with being under-compensated since having your debts forgiven by God while demanding repayment from others is hypocritical. Anyway, what can another person give you that God couldn't provide ten times over?

And in the old sanctuary laws up until the 17th century you were immune to arrest if you reached a place of religious refuge - but would lose all your wealth and be exiled as a pilgrim. Given everyone in other countries knew what it meant when a foreigner arrived in those circumstances they didn't tend to have the best of times.

I think, generally speaking, society's morals have improved over the ages (glossing over the whole "what is morality?" debate — but you get the gist of what I'm trying to say). There's a theory known as collective rationality which posits that, as individuals, we are highly irrational beings, but as a holistic group, we eventually arrive at the most rational conclusion to an issue (even if it takes a very long time).

Collective rationality explains why we no longer have slavery, public executions, torture, etc. Women's rights and minority rights aren't quite where they should be yet, but the situation is certainly a lot better than it was a century ago.

I've tried to imagine how society will be different in the far future, and my best guess is that forgiveness will be of tantamount importance to society. The whole notion of "getting revenge" will be considered an ancient and barbaric concept, along with the whole prison system (punishment vs rehabilitation). The death penalty will almost certainly be gone. I think crime will be considered more of a mental illness or a physical brain defect that can be fixed rather than something that makes someone inherently evil (if someone is born with a damaged amygdala, is it really their fault that they turn out to be a sociopath?). I also think a lot of things that are currently considered taboo will no longer be considered as such, barring anything that brings harm to others.

"Can a country's democratic institutions survive when the primary emotion underlying so much of its social policy, and determining the allocation of a sizable proportion of its annual revenues, is revenge?...We will in short become a community in name only, an increasingly atomized continent in which the primary role of government is to instill fear of the law rather than respect for its integrity."

Good book on the topic of punishment vs. rehabilitation:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Furies-Punishment-Vengeance-I...

While we may not have reached the depraved depths of some past civilizations, the 20th century was by far the bloodiest century in human history (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Kim il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un, ...) The vector is not towards any higher morals.

"There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade." http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0309/feature1/

Torture is alive and well.

Forgiveness is the key for all of us. But this does not bypass justice. Forgiveness can not simply be sweeping atrocities under the rug. A price has to be payed. Fortunately it was and forgiveness is offered freely to whoever wants it. But generally few seem to care.

One big problem with using these stats as a morality vector is that they are not adjusted for population growth.

Its difficult to measure if brutality, genocide, tortures is waxing or waning, but its long way from being non-existant.

Although the 20th century wasn't peaceful by any means, there is some evidence that violence has decreased proportionally to the population. Steve Pinker's well researched The Better Angels of Our Nature is a good tome on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

The 20'th century was probably the bloodiest only because of advanced technology.

Just imagine Attila the Hun with tanks and nukes.

Genocide has always been a thing. The Romans wiped out god knows how many tribes. I'd say a 100% death rate for a particular tribe or nation is much bloodier than, say, 50%, wouldn't you?

I would say both are beyond the threshold of horrifying. For someone to say these don't exist anymore is mind boggling.

I don't think that most crime will be considered more of a mental illness, unless we're willing to consider selfishness as a mental problem too. Serial murderers may be getting treatment, but a lot of crimes (especially white collar) happen out of plain old willingness to pursue your own interests at the expense of others. There will need to be a form of enforcement that will keep people in line - the will to game the system seems to be far too common to consider it as an abnormality.

Then if you take into account that with large populations people seem to follow incentives quite strictly. Nobody can recall they didn't buy bottle of jack because of additional 5% tax. But that tax increase shows in alcohol consumption statistics.

But I'm not advocating overly harsh punishments either. At some point you hit diminishing returns.

> I think, generally speaking, society's morals have improved over the ages (glossing over the whole "what is morality?" debate — but you get the gist of what I'm trying to say)

I think you're bordering on the tautological there. To say society's morals have improved demands an eternal natural law to evaluate it against. As society's view of what is the natural law changes, it's difficult to say whether we've improved rather than simply changed.

Fair point, and it's something I stumbled over a bit in my original post. I should have used a more objective definition of "rationality" — something that is independent of anyone's particular philosophy on morality. I believe if you Google "collective rationality", this has already been somewhat formalized, but I don't know too much about the theory other than the general idea behind it.

Most concepts of modern rationality --at least the kind you're talking about-- presume some form of materialism, which is a giant jump to conclusions in a discussion about morality. This is especially interesting if we want to talk about objective concepts and measurements.

Who decides what's objective? Do we decide that collectively? Are we collectively rational enough to figure out if we're collectively rational enough to decide?

"Collective rationality" by itself feels a bit circular because it doesn't come with an absolute way to measure how rational a conclusion is that doesn't ultimately loop back to what we've concluded now.

Perhaps if you used the idea to compare against some abstract scale (like, for the sake of argument, utilitarianism) it would be an interesting conclusion but without it it feels like "what's popular is right because what's right is popular", and popularity really isn't a great measure of quality[1].

A big part of the problem is that this vaguely teleological process, to the extent it exists, is almost certainly not monotonic. Even if we agree to, hmm, eventual consistency, it's hard to believe things are always improving and never getting worse. But this means that the idea all of a sudden has surprisingly weak predictive power. It's easy to analyze history and come up with an argument for many trends we like, even contradictory ones. We can say that, hey, there's this general trend, but we took a step back in the 1950s and we took a step back during the War in Iraq and hey, maybe we're taking a step back now, but the global process exists.

Honestly, it reeks a bit of rationalization.

A concrete example I've thought about: freedom of speech. It's a value I, like many others here, hold dear. And you know, I can make a pretty strong case that we're moving towards more and more freedom of speech both legally and culturally. The government censors less and less, our neighbors tolerate more deviance and obscenity and lots of taboo topics aren't taboo any more. Of course, some new topics become taboo every now and then, and people constantly clamor against freedom of speech, but on the whole we're getting freer and freer. On the face of it, this is a plausible argument.

But I've heard exactly the same reasoning but for ideas that, naturally, are at odds with freedom of speech, like certain notions of "human dignity" (which makes certain things unsayable). And hey, they can build a case just as well!

And perhaps I'm just seeing signal in noise. Taboos change but instead of progressing it's a cycle: old words that have been taboo for too long lose their sting while new ones acquire it. We can actually observe this with words describing less-favored positions like "secretary". It used to be that "secretary" was a perfectly reasonable job description; now we call them "executive assistants" and while "secretary" isn't a taboo per se it's certainly jarring. (There's a name for this cycle, actually, but I forget what it is.)

Honestly, on the whole, I think any strong view of "collective rationality" is, well, too strong. (Just like the efficient market hypothesis—a good point of comparison, in fact.) More importantly, regardless of how true it is as a general trend, I think there is way too much noise to use it to come to specific conclusions. Even with a general upward trend, the variance in what is and isn't taboo is going to dominate unless we have some other scale to value it on.

And, gratuitously, I'm going to link to my favorite of PG's essays which is pretty relevant to the topic if somewhat orthogonal to my point: "What You Can't Say"[2]. It's worth a read.

[1]: Second time today I'm linking to this comment, because it covers an idea I find quite powerful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567962

[2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I will hesitate to wear these rosy glasses. The West has had somewhat peaceful 60 years, that's about it. See how liberal countries like Sweden suddenly close because of Syria? Revenge, hatred, and love are perennial notions, and they will always be part of the human psyche. The battle between good and evil has no ultimate victors or losers. Rationality does not explain what is at work here, it is not a deep enough human motivation.

If this sounds unconvincing, the Buddha and Christ preceded Hitler. Ashoka established a chain of veterinary hospitals in India in 360 BC, proclaiming that animals required equal treatment as humans do. [1] Are we "better" than these humanitarians?

Another example: India had no slavery in Greek times, and now has the largest number of slaves in history. [2] [3] I think similar cycles of rises and downfall can be seen in all the great civilizations, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China etc.

I don't know the answer, but history does not seem to be a linear progression from barbarism to civilization. It seems more like revisiting the same questions on good and evil, each time with more potent technology. The morality is the same, the technology progresses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashoka#As_administrator

[2] http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/arrian-bookVIII-In... paragraph X

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Distribution

Sweden is almost 5,000 km away from Syria. What specifically relates these two countries in your comment?

Why downvotes?

Oh, my point was that countries liberal at one point in time may close down later. The original poster was trying to say that conservative -> liberal is the trend of history. I was trying to argue that the back-edge is also possible, and witnessed often in history. Even for long-term trends, the general direction seems not all that clear.

I think you misinterpret collective rationality, as Weirich never try's explain a historical progression for western morality.

And as mentioned there have been other cultures with strong rational traditions that have come to far different moral conclusions than today - e.g. soviet/communism, Islamic societies,etc.. Pure reason thought doesn't go one direction, it can take you to very different and uncomfortable places.

Great. Murderers lecturing victims on forgiveness. That's it. We're all officially victims now!

Forgiveness is certainly a valid path for some in some cases, but a person doesn't have to forgive to move on. We simply hold on to the light in our lives and forget the broken, narcissistic individuals who hurt us. No forgiveness to the perp needed. You're already forgotten.

Indeed, how narcissistic for a perp to believe he/she has any remaining power over us, and can "help" us? What New Age hogwash. Of course the perp wants forgiveness. But they're really only thinking of themselves.

And if you're a murderer, there is no forgiveness until somehow you get let off the hook by your victim. Since they're dead, methinks you'll have to wait a while.

> Forgiveness is certainly a valid path for some in some cases, but a person doesn't have to forgive to move on. We simply hold on to the light in our lives and forget the broken, narcissistic individuals who hurt us. No forgiveness to the perp needed. You're already forgotten.

Forgiveness in Marshall Rosenberg's view is all about moving on. It means letting go. If you keep on hating the criminal who stole your money or killed your kid, you keep feeding it energy. That energy can be used for other things, and it keeps you from living your own life. It doesn't mean that you should forget that it happened. It doesn't mean that you approve of what the other did. It just means - in his view - that you let go.

Forgetting - as you say - will not work. Well that's what I think. It depends on what has happened of course. If you were called a bad name in school (not systematically mentally beaten down but occasionally called stupid or something), then forgetting is a real option. When your kid is killed, forgetting is not a real option that allows you to move on. Forgiving can be. It will mean a lot of work, especially in saying goodbye to what once was.

So, let's say someone kills a close friend. Does moving on require forgiving them for that crime?

Of course not. You can choose to let go of anger and have a good life, celebrating your friend. But that doesn't require you to say "it's okay" to the individual who did it and "forgive them". You can be relieved that the person will rot in jail til the end of their days. And you can forget them.

Maybe Marshall Rosenburg needs to forgive to move on, but luckily we're all different and I'm perfectly content with my friend's killer living with the consequences of his crime. I'm not angry - I honestly haven't even thought of him for well over a year. I'm perfectly content not thinking about his circumstances but thinking about my beautiful friend and carrying on his legacy.

This reminds me of a book:

Insert the last chapter of Alexandre Dumas' book called The Count of Monte Cristo.

Assuming you were Edmond Dantes and have read the book by Dumas, would you still be on the path of vengeance or would you heed the advice of the article and the last chapter of that book? That is given the scenario that you were in Edmond's shoes and just beginning your journey again right after you escaped your falsely convicted time in prison?

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