A friend asked my opinion on forgiveness. My answer was long and sufficiently general that I figure I\u2019ll share it here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I very much feel that some kind of contrition has to occur for there to be forgiveness. I don\u2019t buy into the Christian form which is, by my understanding, saying that it\u2019s ok the person (who needs to be forgiven) totally screwed you over and that the mean or bad or evil action doesn\u2019t matter anymore.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n My philosophy is a selfish one: I want to experience lasting happiness and to avoid suffering. I also want to help others if I can. At the very least I want to avoid causing more suffering. When someone hurts me, it\u2019s entirely normal and reasonable that I get angry and want to hurt them in return. That said, I think that\u2019s clearly a gut-level reaction: I want to hit back and see them suffer in the same way that I did. My experience is that the sooner I can get back in my thinking brain, the sooner I\u2019ll be calm and happy again. I think this is true regardless of whether or not they show contrition. It makes it easier if they do \u2026 but I think that my anger is my job, not theirs, to deal with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That said, we\u2019re playing with different definitions of \u201cforgive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think it\u2019s possible to \u201cforgive\u201d someone and still keep in mind that you can\u2019t trust them anymore, at least in the domain where they hurt you. I certainly don\u2019t think that we should pretend that anyone gets a magically clean slate with forgiveness. You\u2019ve got to protect yourself, and sometimes that means staying away from someone, not doing business with them, or even involving the law to keep them away from you. If someone hurt you physically, you\u2019ll probably have a physical reaction when you see them. That means that if you want to be happy and calm, you probably can\u2019t see them anymore \u2026 at least until the body has settled down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So when I talk about forgiveness, I think I mean: \u201cgiving up on the desire to hurt someone in return for how they hurt me.\u201d For one thing, there\u2019s no guarantee that I\u2019ll succeed in hurting them. I might fail. I might end up hurting the wrong person. Even if I do succeed, I don\u2019t think that it\u2019ll really take away my suffering. I\u2019ll just have put myself in a mindset of trying to hurt, rather than trying to be happy. The longer I stew in that anger, the worse it is for me \u2026 no matter whether I actually hurt the other person or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that forgiveness, for me, is \u201cdeciding not to be angry anymore.\u201d This is an entirely internal decision. The question seems to me to be whether there is value for my own lasting happiness in holding on to the perfectly reasonable flash of anger that arose when someone hurt me. So yes, perhaps I won\u2019t trust them in the future. Maybe I\u2019ll still try to get them locked up or executed because I know that they\u2019re a risk to me and others \u2026 but the key to forgiveness is that I need let go of the angry desire to hurt them and exact revenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It helps a lot that I try not to divide the world into sinners and saints anymore. We\u2019re all messed up. We\u2019ve all got some incredible amount of history that brought us to where we are, and none of us has the faintest idea about other people\u2019s situation. Given that I think it\u2019s better to not get too stuck on anger \u2026 if at all possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A friend asked my opinion on forgiveness. My answer was long and sufficiently general that I figure I\u2019ll share it here: I very much feel that some kind of contrition has to occur for there to be forgiveness. I don\u2019t buy into the Christian form…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1250,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions\/1250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}