Loving and forgiving your enemies

[abaris]

Since I never had any enemies and never was in that kind of situation, a what if question of this nature is impossible to answer.

I'm strictly against capital punishment, but I always insert the caveat that I wouldn't know what I would be capable of if someone were to hurt my loved ones. But that doesn't change my general aversion of someone being put to death by the state. And most of all, the state isn't there to carry out any personal revenge but to keep society safe.

So, there's the dilemma. I wouldn't know what I would do to such a person if I could lay hands on them. I only know that I wouldn't want them to be put to death in a ritualised manner by the state in my name.

[Minimalist]

Loving and forgiving our enemies is a fundamental Christian teaching

The commitment to that idea seems spotty, at best.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...press.html

America Snores When Christian Terrorist Threatens to Massacre Muslims

An ordained minister pleaded guilty to threatening to burn down a New York town full of Muslims. Where's the FBI press conference and Fox News panic?

[Divinity]

No, I don't think forgiveness is a moral duty. I think forgiveness is something that's earned, and sometimes can't be earned. I also think if you forgive, it doesn't mean you should forget. Especially something this horrific.

If someone raped and killed one of my daughters, or one of my granddaughters, you'd have to restrain me and keep an eye on the asshole 24-7, because I would not be forgiving Most likely I would combine as many medival torture methods as possible. Something like flaying him alive, cauterizing the wounds, then letting rats devour his body as he's slowly pulled apart. Keeping him awake and conscious for as long as I possibly can. I'm sure my sister could figure it out. Depending on how vengeful I felt, I might take it out on his family as well. Because at that point I'd be a psychopath anyway.

[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/

[Alex K]

If that happened to me, I would mete out revenge until the other person's world is going down in flames. I'll spare the fluffy lovey feelings for everyone else.
I'm still sgainst the death penalty, though.

[Cato]

I oppose capital punishment only because of the chance that innocent people could potentially be put to death, not for any moral appeal that would have me to believe that it is inherently wrong.

If I walked into a room to find someone raping my grandson, it's highly unlikely that person will survive the encounter. The rape and murder of a child (or adult for that matter) is so heinous a crime that I don't think forgiveness is possible. I think a general policy of one-time forgiveness for minor transgressions is harmonious for society, but I can't think of why forgiveness should be considered a moral imperative for major transgression or repeated minor transgression.

[Edwardo Piet]

Forgiveness is an internalized thing, you can forgive someone in your proverbial heart while at the same time not being in the slightest tolerant of their behavior.

As Sam Harris says, criminals still need to go to prison regardless of whether we forgive them or not. For the safety of others, for deterrence and for mitigating suffering. And detainment is a very effective and very necessary way to do that.

[Longhorn]

I don't think loving and forgiving someone who raped and murdered your little daughter is something that can ever come naturally. I think the "natural" response would be to feel hatred and revenge for that person. 

Exactly. That's why I don't think it 'should' be done. That's why I'm saying it shouldn't be considered a moral *duty*.

I definitely think love and forgiveness of someone who has done something so heinous is something that cannot be accomplished without commitment and effort and the conscious decision to do so. I don't see how this makes it insincere, though.

Because, it's (most likely) not because you actually forgive someone, but because you feel you should. It's hard to convey into words. Maybe insincere isn't the best one. But it's not as genuine. It's devalued like Rhythm said. And sometimes, like drfuzzy explained, it can be solely for the feeling of moral superiority, but I'm not saying it's the case with the woman from the OP, I think it isn't.

I have a problem with saying 'you should forgive'. 'You should let go' is a piece of very good advice that can save someone from becoming bitter, but it doesn't necessarily entail forgiving. I haven't forgiven, but I let go, for my own sake. I'm not going around preaching hate against what hurt me. I still hate it, but I don't let that hate hurt me more. I don't take it out and don't let it control me. Maybe I can forgive, but I definitely can't love my enemy. I don't feel that I should.

(Rant over. Time for bed ._.)

[Catholic_Lady]

I attended a rather brilliant group therapy session on forgiveness that has never left me.

Forgiveness, in the Judeo-Christian western sense of the word, is a deliberate act.  It can very easily devolve into a type of one-upmanship and moral superiority stance.  The "forgiver" often is known to say that he's "taking the higher ground" and "being the better man" - - while the "forgiven" is judged as less than, and often removed from the circle of friends and family.  The forgiver really hasn't forgiven anything, he has just chosen to walk away, feeling superior.  This mindset heals no-one.

Who's version of forgiveness is this? Definitely not what I've been taught. 

[drfuzzy]

I attended a rather brilliant group therapy session on forgiveness that has never left me.

Forgiveness, in the Judeo-Christian western sense of the word, is a deliberate act.  It can very easily devolve into a type of one-upmanship and moral superiority stance.  The "forgiver" often is known to say that he's "taking the higher ground" and "being the better man" - - while the "forgiven" is judged as less than, and often removed from the circle of friends and family.  The forgiver really hasn't forgiven anything, he has just chosen to walk away, feeling superior.  This mindset heals no-one.

Who's version of forgiveness is this? Definitely not what I've been taught. 

The leader of the group was studying the psychological works of Virginia Satir, if I remember correctly. It was a bit different from how I was raised as well, but made a whole lot of sense.  If you include the paragraph following the one that you quoted, it describes their alternative re-framing, or perhaps re-defining, the mindset that helps attain forgiveness.  I found it very helpful, since I was having difficulty in that area.  And I found it more supportive of the Gospels, since I identified as Christian at that time.