Loving and forgiving your enemies

[Edwardo Piet]

Who needs religion for compassion and forgiveness when you see things from Sam Harris' point of view?

[...]In the US we have 13 year olds serving life sentences for crimes..not based on any sane assessment of whether these children can be rehabilitated, it’s based on the sense that they deserve this punishment, they are the true, sole cause of their behavior which was so heinous that they deserve this as a matter of retribution.  That doesn’t make sense when you relax this notion of free will. You have to admit in the final analysis that even the most terrifying people are at bottom unlucky to be who they are, and that  has moral significance. And the existence of the soul wouldn’t make any difference: anyone born with the soul of a psychopath is profoundly unlucky.  Walk back the timeline of Udai Hussein’s life, he became a psychopath through no fault of his own. If we could have intervened at any point in his life to prevent this, that would have been the right thing to do, and compassion would have been the motive.  If you want not to hate your enemies, like Jesus said, one way into that is to view human behavior through the lens of a wider scientific picture of causation.

I’m not saying it would be easy to adopt this perspective if you or someone close to you was victim of a violent crime; this is how we need to see the world in our more dispassionate moments.  But these moments are the source of our thinking about public policy and scientific truth.  To see how much our moral intuitions would shift, imagine we had a cure for evil and psychopathy. We can make the necessary changes in the brain safely and painlessly and easily. At that point evil is a nutritional deficiency. Imagine the moral logic of withholding the cure for evil from someone as a punishment for their evil acts. He was so bad he shouldn’t be given the cure.  Does that make any sense at all?  That it doesn’t reveals that the urge for retribution is actually born of not seeing the causes of human behavior. When you see them, if you could trace them in a fine-grained way,  this notion of vengeance, that people deserve what they get in this way as punishment would disappear.

[this]Leads me to religion, since of course the notion of God’s justice is entirely a matter of retribution. People deserve what they get since based on their own free will they are misbehaving. The religious answer to the problem of evil is free will. Free will creates sin: people as the sole cause of their behavior can turn away from god. But this can’t be true, and it seems impossible to describe a universe in which it could be true. There’s no mix of randomness and determinism that gets you free will.

Ironically one of the fears that religious people have is that this way of viewing the world dehumanizes us, but rather I think it humanizes us. What could be more dehumanizing than to say that most people throughout human history are in some crucial way responsible for the fact that they were born at the wrong time to the wrong parents, given the wrong beliefs, given the wrong religion, wrong influences and as a result of that they deserve to be punished for eternity?[...]

Source, transcript from Sam Harris' talk on Free Will, transcript taken from here:

http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/2013/...will-talk/