Tagged: “injustice”
From your reading, what is the printed origin of person-to-person forgiveness?
It seems to me that the first account of one person forgiving others is in Hebrew scripture, Genesis 37-45, in which Joseph forgives his 10 half-brothers for attempted murder and then selling him into slavery.
You used the term “full humanity” in answering my earlier question. What do you mean by that term?
So often, when people are unjustly treated by another person, they tend to focus only on those unjust actions, viewing the other only in terms of those behaviors. Upon entering the forgiveness process, the people tend to expand their story of the other, seeing this person now more broadly, seeing that there is much more to this other person than only those unjust actions against them.
Even if my view of the one who walked out on me is too narrow, as you say, it is the truth. Why play games with a fantasy of who she might become?
Seeing her as more than the behaviors of walking out on you is not fantasy. I think it is a higher reality than seeing her only in terms of current behavior. As I said earlier to you, would you want all of your family members to define you exclusively by the times when you had a really bad day, with insensitivity to some family members? Do you think this misbehavior is the exclusive truth about who you are as a person?
I read your published article in the journal, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, in which you helped men in a maximum-security prison to forgive people who hurt them. What is your next step, to open all the jail cell doors and let out everyone who has ever been hurt?
You are confusing forgiving and abandoning justice. You can forgive a person and then seek justice. As people in correctional institutions learn to forgive those who brutalized them when they were children or adolescents, this can lower their rage, making them less dangerous. Advocating for their forgiving does not mean advocating for their release from the institution.
Doesn’t forgiving go against our biological nature of the survival of the fittest? Don’t we want to step up with courage and stop bad behavior rather than acquiescing to it?
When we forgive we do not excuse what the other person did. We can forgive, know what the other did was wrong, and take steps to exercise the moral virtue of justice. Forgiving and justice seeking can exist side by side.
