Post by Erasmus on May 26, 2011 22:38:59 GMT -5
May 26, 2011 15:46:53 GMT -5 @mikemarshall said:
In the first place, Jim, I would like to express my sympathy at the sad loss of your mother. I know you were a good son and that you will miss her deeply.
On the issue of punishment and forgiveness, I respectfully beg to differ from you.
If you believe that justice involves punishment then that necessarily entails an element of revenge.
If you prefer a word like retribution I am happy to substitute it
Forgiveness however does not entail any absence of punishment.
Do you remember the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son, Jim?
The father welcomed his prodigal son back home but reminded both him and the thrifty brother that all he had belonged to the thrifty brother.
So the father forgave his errant son but he was still punished by the consequences of his actions.
Like most Biblical ideas it's taken entirely out of its time and context, but it's not only a Biblical concept, it's there in all religions sometimes when least expected. It was one of Julius Casar's characteristics to forgive enemies and it made him look big and them look very small and in his moral debt.
There is one culture that traditionally would rather die than be forgiven and that's Japanese (of course - they always are the weird ones) for just that reason of bearing the burden of intolerable shame to be seen as having your life depend on an enemy whom it would be ungracious to attack - or perhaps thinks you too insignificant to bother about. That's it, credibility gone.
So the context is a revenge society governed by extensive law that to some extent is part of the revenge system. "Vengeance is mine" saith the Lord - but it is still your duty to bring the malefactor to have the this vengeance pronounced and performed publically according to the divine code.
I read the whole Christian Thing as part of a development to change from obedience to an external system of tabu to an internal one of conscience, and that is for your own good. Today we call it closure. Once the Law has done its business, you should get on with yours instead of festering with resentment at any wrong done to you.
There is naturally a higher interpretation too. I've been looking for Terry Pratchett's novel Hogfather in writing. I can't find it but I know the Youtube of the film. Since it's at the end of the clip, I won't bother with it. However, many a very true word is spoken in jest and TP speaks most of them, in this case through the character of Death, who has been desperately playing Father Christmas (Hogfather) to keep the myth because without the small myths we cannot come to believe and thus to create the big myths.
What are the big myths? Justice, fairness, honour, trust, respect. Where, asks Death, do these exist except in the human mind. Where is an ounce of fairness or justice in the universe except that somebody somewhere thought that they might be a good idea? There might, at a pinch, be Karma but that is not really Justice because cause and effect do not always balance out perfectly. That is what keeps the wheel of existence spinning.
So there is another side to this too. The question of forgiveness only arises for mature human beings towards mature human beings. In order to forgive there must be a sense of wrong. But Nature known no wrong or right. Because we have created morality out of chaos, we both expect better than Nature and resent more than Nature. An animal may turn against what has harmed it but that is protection, not a feeling to get its own back. We see that just developing in chimpanzees where it's borderline between I'll make you scared to ever threaten me again and I'll get you for that. With us, it has definitely moved to I'll get you and it can eat us up.
So there's a contradiction. Forgiveness is in one way a partial return to the more primitive animal state of amorality, even for our own safeguard. In another way it is coming back to it at a higher level able to let go of resentment, ultimately not to feel it at all. We have created systems of Law to institutionalize revenge and not always then. Vikings had the option of revenge but they preferred a compensation culture. All the talk there has been about the death sentence never considers that Alfred the Great effectively abolished it in 800 for a fixed scale of compensatory Wergild. The same compensatory principle is still a legal option in some Arab states. The downside is that if you can afford the fine, you can afford the crime. We saw in South Africa, that African traditional concepts of justice imply a kind of forgiveness in that the past is past, we set things right as far as we can now and we move on. Africa is a tough place: animals might attack you, people might attack you; that's how life is and you dour life is worth more than wasting it on revenge against any of them.
I think forgiveness still lies in the realm of external imposition requiring obedience to a formal moral ideal for those unable to free themselves from developing emotions of resentment eating them up. All the same, it is an improvement on personal revenge whether sanctioned and enacted through a court or not. An earlier improvement was "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth" limiting revenge to compensatory balance, no "You knocked my tooth out, I kill you". Compare the number of hanging offences in 18th century England!
Some people might like to talk about God giving all these abstract concepts of Justice and Forgiveness. That's fine but for one little thing that priests and most believers recoil from admitting. God never built any of those into 'Creation', it is purely within us that these ideal exists. So if we are going to ascribe them to any God, then that God manifests and is intelligible only in the human conscience. That conscience puts the ethical values of Good and Evil it ascribes to God on destructive and constructive influences. It is absurd to call an animal evil no matter what it does. At the worst it might be deranged. Yet we expect a different standard from our own kind: we expect awareness of their innate divinity. We don't always get it. Should we harbour a grudge for life or should we regard them as dangerous animals?
Would we put moral judgment on dinosaurs rampaging through a hole in Time? Would we talk of forgiving or punishing them for attacking people? Would we put practical assessment on the danger they present?
We are creatures of darkness, of primordial chaos that we have evolved enough to call sin and evil when we let them overcome our glimmers of the light we develop towards and no longer expect to control and need the conscious repression by fear of retribution that kept our ancestors in check. Ironically, it is only the most 'religious' types who seem to feel they actually want to behave as most of us would be appalled to do, and need their faith to give them a reason for restraint. They could be right (for themselves) since it is often True Believers of some kind or another who are the most inhuman humans!