The Sunflower Dilemma - Could you forgive?

[Ben Kenobi]

Stray:

Don't forget your sxn games

'Testing' repentence is always a tricky business because of the limited human perspective. We cannot look into the hearts of men to tell whether they truly have repented. This is why the safest position is to accept the repentence, or as Christ says, how many times must you forgive your brother, not seven times but seventy-seven times.

It is better to be taken advantage than to reject someone truly in need.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Sten Sture

Like how Marlow handled telling Kurtz's wife about his death in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 'he spoke your name' when he really said 'the horror, the horror'

Perhaps they were one and the same.

[Sikander]

Were I in Weisenthal's place I seriously doubt that I could have forgiven him. But I hope that I would live long enough to do so. There seems to be some misunderstanding of the value of forgiveness on this board. Just as apologizing is an action taken to eventually make the actor feel better about some misdeed, so forgiveness is an action taken to make the person who grants it feel better eventually.

The key is to understand that all the transgressions against you are burdens that you carry, sometimes after whatever you lost in the original action has long been made irrelevent. Granting someone forgiveness is a means of letting go of your anger / hatred or whatever. When you are ready to let it go, it is a relief to be freed from it.

All this is true regardless of the moral code you live by, and IMO it is one of the reasons that Christianity has proven so successful, as it is one of that religion's major tenets. It is useful to have the tool of forgiveness available to you, whoever you are. Life is hard enough without having to carry around a lot of anger from 20 years ago into the unforeseeable future.

[Gangerolf]

Someone once said "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us".

"Do to others as you would have them do to you" comes to mind as well.

hallelujah