Read my first post, Forgive And Forget? I Think Not.
Most people who promote the concept of forgiveness as a cure for all our ills portray the process as an either-or scenario. We can either forgive those who do us wrong or we can live the rest of our lives eaten up from the inside by resentment, anger, and hatred.
These people want us to believe that the only alternative to forgiveness is living the rest of our lives obsessed with getting revenge on the person who wronged us. The champions of forgiveness want us to believe that we can never find any other road to happiness except through forgiveness.
As I mentioned in my first post on forgiveness, these people almost always fall into one of two categories. The first category consists of those who belong to some sect of Christianity. They have a doctrinal investment in the concept of forgiveness because the Christian religion promotes forgiveness as the solution to our problems.
The second group consists of people who have never really experienced anything bad in their lives. These people haven’t suffered. They haven’t been attacked, abused, exploited, or wronged in any serious way. They haven’t thought the matter through in any kind of detail to find the fundamental truths that might tell us if forgiveness is a good idea or not.
I outlined in my first post why forgiveness might not be all it’s cracked up to be and might actually be a terrible idea in certain circumstances. I’m not going to rehash the main points of that post here. I’m going to go in a different direction and highlight another problem with forgiveness that I didn’t address in that post.
For reference, A Complete Master List of Virtues from the Ancient Traditions by Scott Jeffrey collects all the universal virtues of multiple religious and philosophical traditions from around the world.
This list includes the virtues set forth by Confusius, Lao Tzu, Plato, the Stoics of Ancient Rome, Aristotle, the Buddhists of Ancient India, the Yoga Sutras, Sikh Guru Granth Sahib, the Japanese Bushido code of Nitobe Inazo, Benjamin Franklin, the Old and New Testaments of The Bible, and the Christian theologians Prudentius, Pope Gregory I, and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
I would call this an exhaustive, thorough, and authoritative list.
The most interesting part about this article is that not a single one of these thinkers names forgiveness as a universal, cardinal, or necessary virtue. Some include compassion—which is not by any means the same thing.
Don’t you think that’s telling? Not even the Christian thinkers on this list consider forgiveness a necessary or essential virtue.
Do you want to know what virtue is included in almost every single one of these thinkers’ lists of cardinal virtues? Justice.
Justice is a very real human need. It’s so fundamental to our core as human beings that we’ll seek it out with unbending determination.
If someone wrongs us or someone close to us, we will become single-mindedly driven to get justice. Our brains and souls are hard-wired to make the world fair and to make sense of all of this going on around us. We rail against the world not being fair and evil people getting away with things they shouldn’t.
It’s easy to forgive someone once they’re in jail serving a decades-long prison sentence for what they did. Society has already gotten justice on our behalf—as much justice as we’re likely to get.
The sentence won’t make it any easier for us to recover from the damage the person inflicted on our lives, but at least society recognizes that the person committed the crime and punished them for it in whatever way society can punish the person.
This kind of justice is necessary—not just to keep a society functioning properly but to our very sanity.
The situation gets even more precarious when society hasn’t judged and sentenced the person for their crimes. The worst thing that can happen to a person after they’ve been the victim of a terrible crime is for the perpetrator to get away with it and walk away scot-free.
When this happens, the wronged party simply cannot stop trying to balance the scales. The victim becomes driven to hold the person to account, to find some way to correct this terrible wrong, and to prevent the perpetrator from doing it again.
The thought that the perpetrator might be out there planning to do exactly the same thing to someone else becomes maddening. There is nothing wrong about feeling this way. It’s more than normal. This is the very thing that makes us a good person and the perpetrator a bad person. We want to protect others from harm. We want to preserve the integrity of social cohesion. We want to make the world as fair and good as it can possibly be.
Even suggesting that the victim forgive before society has provided some redress for the crime is an affront to the very fabric of our civilization. It’s an insult to the very nature of what it means to be a good person. The person seeking justice is the good person in this scenario. They’re the person who fundamentally seeks to make the world a better place.
The person suggesting forgiveness is the one working against that aim. We can only question this person’s motives and wonder if they might be motivated by some ulterior compulsion that blinds them to the reality of the situation.
Seeking justice doesn’t mean we live the rest of our lives stewing in resentment, hatred, and anger toward the perpetrator.
Seeking justice doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy life and the company of our friends and family members.
Seeking justice doesn’t mean we can’t find happiness within ourselves and work toward to a hopeful future.
Justice is not just a good idea. It’s necessary for all of us to feel like we’re living in a just society and a just universe. None of us can live in a world where people get away with these crimes. None of us can live in a world where the worst dregs of humanity can do whatever they want and hurt anyone they please and walk away with no consequences.
The Christians would tell us that forgiveness is compatible with justice and that forgiveness doesn’t mean letting someone get away with hurtful or criminal behavior.
Here we see the fundamental contradiction between what the Christians say about forgiveness and how it actually functions within Christian doctrine.
The basic tenet of Christianity is that, by accepting the divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God will forgive our sins and we’ll find salvation through Jesus’s sacrifice. The Christians use words like “having our sins washed away” and “being made clean and whole” despite whatever grievous sins we may have committed in the past.
This language confirms that the Christian religion does indeed view forgiveness as letting the person get away with their misdeeds without consequence. God is expected to make the person clean, whole, and new as if they had never sinned in the first place. The sinner can begin anew with a clean slate. The Christian doctrine doesn’t require the person even to apologize to the victim for whatever the sinner did wrong.
Christians use the forgiveness of God to get out of feeling remorse for their sins. Christians seem to think that they don’t have to feel remorseful at all now that God has given them a clean bill of health as it were.
This is exactly the opposite of how we should be thinking of both sides of the argument. No one should ever stop feeling remorseful for their misdeeds regardless of whether you think God has given you a second chance.
At the same time, the injured party in any serious crime or wrong shouldn’t stop seeking justice until they get it, either from society or karma or whatever you want to call it.
The injured party should never stop believing that we live in a world of consequences and that the chickens always come home to roost in the end—which they do. Evil people sow evil for themselves as much as for others. No one ever really escapes the consequences of their actions.
It might take time for the boomerang to come twirling back to bite them in the backside, but it will always come back eventually. We all know in our heart of hearts that none of us is getting away with anything—not really.
Justice is a fundamental human virtue. None of us should ever—EVER—let criminals get away with their crimes—under any circumstances. We should all hold these people to account wherever possible.
Justice is also one of the core bedrock foundation pillars of our society and our psychology. None of us should feel in any way guilty for seeking it out and putting right whatever someone might have done wrong in our lives. We owe it to society and to ourselves to make sure of this.
Forgiveness is not a fundamental human virtue. It’s a propaganda tool wielded by dogmatic people to stop you from doing the hard work of holding society and other people to the necessary standard of human behavior.
You can be happy, fulfilled, contented, connected and hopeful about life while you’re doing this. You can pursue justice without feeling even the smallest hint of resentment toward the perpetrator. You can understand the circumstances or personal traumas that might have led the perpetrator to commit the crime. This is called compassion.
You must seek justice regardless of all these factors. Seeking justice isn’t optional.
Years ago, a case came to public attention in Australia when a young man mowed down a whole group of primary school children with his pickup truck. The children happened to be walking down the sidewalk on their way to the store to get ice creams.
The young driver was drunk and on drugs to the point where he didn’t remember the details of the wreck. He only found out what he’d done when he saw speed camera footage of the wreck. He came around a corner too fast, lost control of his vehicle, and killed five children. Three of them belonged to a single family.
The young driver was arrested at the scene and put in prison for multiple counts of vehicular homicide. He will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
The story gained public attention because the parents of the three children who had died were devout Christians. They forgave the young driver within a few days of the incident. Their influence affected the driver so much that he got sober in prison, turned to God, became a Christian, and sincerely repented of his actions and past behavior.
The father of this couple visited the driver in prison, became friends with him, counseled him, and even looked after the driver’s elderly parents while the young man was in prison.
A TV interviewer asked the father if he thought such a severe sentence was fair considering that the young man had changed his ways and dedicated himself to living a good life.
The father stated, “If it was up to me, I would let him out right now.”
There is a very good reason why our criminal justice system doesn’t allow the injured party in any crime to decide the perpetrator’s fate. The wronged party of any crime is incapable of making impartial decisions related to the case, both in assessing the evidence of the perpetrator’s guilt and in deciding what a fair punishment should be.
The wronged party is likely to exact a punishment that is way too harsh or, if the wronged party has any close connection with the perpetrator, a punishment that is way too lenient.
We don’t even allow the wronged party to decide if the perpetrator should be charged with the crime. Society decides that based on the evidence. If the perpetrator committed the crime, they should be charged. The victim has nothing to say on the subject one way or the other for exactly the same reason. The victim is incapable of making an impartial decision about the based on the facts.
Justice is required in a fair society. We could argue that is the single most important bedrock requirement of a civilized society. We can judge how civilized and advanced a society is by how justly and appropriately it deals with lawbreakers.
Letting people off with little or no punishment is not just. It breaks the fundamental rules of civilization and leads to the breakdown of the social framework. Forgiveness might have a place in your private thoughts and prayers with God, but it has no place in society at large.
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