(October 6, 2017 at 3:07 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote:(October 6, 2017 at 3:00 pm)emjay Wrote: Okay. With that correction in mind, I'm not sure I understand the question. Remorse for letting him down on top of the inherent remorse?... ie sorry to him as well as sorry to whoever I wronged?
Yes.
I imagine decent people already feel remorse for those they have wronged. But when we believe in God we believe in apologizing to the person we have wronged as well as expressing remorse to God for violating His commandment to love others and treating one of "His children" badly. That's where I was going with that.
Take the commandment 'honour thy father and thy mother'... what if those parents are abusive, what then? The problem with the commandments in the Bible is that they are absolute and literally set in stone, if the story is to be believed, and as such they can never cover all cases nor can they ever evolve.
True remorse for something... that is compassion for the person you've wronged rather than self-serving remorse because you are being punished... can only come from understanding what you've done wrong, why it's wrong, and how it impacts the person you've wronged... ie it comes from empathy. If you are obliged to follow a set of arbitrary rules that don't make sense... in some cases at least (eg honouring an abusive parent)... then there can be no such true remorse; all it can be in that case is a self-serving remorse that comes out of fear of or actually being punished by God. So as I see it, there can never be anything but self-serving remorse involved in blindly following a set of absolute rules that you do not understand, and that do not make sense in all cases, and never can, by virtue of being absolute and set in stone.
So I guess what I'm saying here is that remorse doesn't seem the right term for the saying saying sorry to God part. Compassionate remorse only comes from empathy, and anything else is just self-serving.
