You Are Not Forgiven
What the hell is forgiveness? My mom and I were listening to NPR (shamefully, that's code for watching Oprah), and there were guests on the show who were good examples of forgiveness in action: a woman who was shot in the head for pretty much no reason, rendering her unable to think, speak or walk like the normal person she was previously; and a survivor of the London Underground terrorist attacks who'd had both her legs amputated. Both women said they forgave their attackers.
Bullshit.
I'll say it right now: I don't believe in forgiveness. There is no such thing. Dictionary definitions of forgiveness tend to be unhelpful: "to grant pardon for or remission of; to absolve." The idea behind these definitions is: "It is okay. Whatever you did, it's okay." But short of changing your moral system, there is absolutely no way for that to be true. Either what someone did was wrong or it was not (putting aside for a moment the very real gray areas of morality and ethics). Forgiving someone cannot entail being okay with what they've done. If such a thing exists, it exists in the following sentiment: What you did was wrong, but in order to be a happy person, I have to move past my resentment towards you.
Even Christians can't get around this one: either the God-given moral laws are true or they are not, and there is no way in which even God could say of some evil you commit, It's okay. They do try to get around this by moving into the other definition of forgiveness, that of forgiving debts. Accordingly, because I halfway agree with that notion, here is the other way in which forgiveness exists: What you did was wrong, but I'm not going to kill you or maim you because that really wouldn't make me feel any better and it's probably wrong anyway, so I'm letting you off the hook.
What the hell is forgiveness? Can you guys make sense of this word? I sure can't, and I'm okay with that. Who am I to absolve someone of their deeds?
12 comments:
I think it's probably important to distinguish between the different uses of the word first. There's so many circumstances where someone could forgive or be forgiven that it really means significantly different things in each of them.
I think the most natural meaning for forgiveness is when one person is wronged by another and the wrongdoer expresses remorse. The victim can forgive the wrongdoer, which in that instance basically means their relationship can be restored. I don't believe this is an absolution, but instead an acceptance of the wrongdoer's repentance. In other words, it doesn't spare the wrongdoer of the negative consequences. If a friend lies to me and then later apologizes for it, I may forgive them and remain friends with them, but that doesn't mean I will trust them the next time they tell me something.
There's also a kind of forgiveness which involves absolution. This is more of a pardon than actual forgiveness. An example of this might be a man who's wife repeatedly cheats on him, but he stays with her and continues to "forgive" her. There's no remorse and a pardon seems to be a disservice to justice and ultimately a disservice to himself.
I think it's another forgiveness altogether though when dealing with someone "forgiving" a terrorist. This isn't an act to restore a relationship and it's not a pardon. I'm not sure that this is even an act of forgiveness because it really doesn't have anything to do with the terrorist. I would consider it more a decision against bitterness than an actual forgiveness of a person.
Another is self-forgiveness, which I think is also valid. For much of my life I was unable to forgive myself for mistakes I had made. I would dwell on them and they would continue to cause me anguish for years. Being able to forgive myself for those mistakes entailed moving on. I suppose this is very similar to the first definition i gave, since this is similar to a restoration of a relationship.
I'm sure there are other definitions, and many more valid and invalid reasons to forgive.
Besides having acquired a socially significant meaning, I think the word "forgiveness" doesn't mean anything at all. As you mentioned, I can say something like the following:
"You are remorseful (or not) and I am glad for that. Our relationship may or may not be restored, depending on your future behavior."
"I probably know what you're doing is wrong, but I value something else (e.g. a relationship) more than punishing you for or failing to move past what you've done."
"What you did was wrong, and I am choosing to not be bitter about it so I can be a happy person."
"What I did was wrong, but past behavior does not dictate my character or future actions."
"Forgiveness" seems to have no place, as far as I can tell. Sure, it makes someone feel better if you say "I forgive you," but it's really not an accurate thing to say, and could easily be misinterpreted.
I must admit that I've never before considered forgiveness for any length of time, and I appreciate this topic. For the sake of brevity, I'm only going to address the topic of forgiveness in the case of the women on Oprah's show--forgiveness of horrible crimes that effect great physical and mental harm.
The idea of forgiveness seems to me to be another way to make an already suffering victim feel like shit. I imagine a woman sitting in church during a sermon on forgiveness after she's been raped. If she still feels anger toward her attacker, and knows she will not forgive him, she is made to feel as though she has sinned, instead of simply being the angry victim she is.
While letting bitterness go is a good thing, I'm not sure that absolving someone of their crimes (especially heinous ones that do serious harm) is necessarily a useful or even moral thing to do. I know I keep quoting the guy, but it's still fresh in my mind, so please bear with me as I repeat a story from Sam Harris' End of Faith. Toward the end of chapter 6, he tells an anecdote about a night in Prague. He saw a woman being abused by a group of men. Not knowing what else to do, he (not knowing the language) asked the men for directions in broken English, hoping to distract them so that the woman could get away. His plan worked--the woman was able to escape, and Harris avoided a violent confrontation. Rather than being satisfied with his behavior, Harris was upset. The gist of his argument was that while he succeeded in freeing the woman from her attackers, he did so in a way that failed to point out to the violent men that they were wrong, and thus failed to do the moral thing in the situation. Harris believed that he should have confronted them in a manner that would bring to light their wrongdoing, even if it meant risking his own physical safety.
I think the notion of forgiveness as expressed on Oprah is in some ways the same. While I do not believe the victims are wrong in forgiving their attackers, I do think it wrong that as a society we laud such forgiveness. I don't think this sort of forgiveness does anyone any good, because it fails to take a true stand on morals. While I think it important for victims to heal internally after a crime, I don't think that absolving criminals is necessary to preventing bitterness. Saying, "I'm going to move on with life and put this out of my heart" is enough.
I also believe that we as a society need to find a balance between vengeful anger and the concept of forgiveness as it is presented in Christian theology. Bitterness, or more violence helps no one, but neither does our culture of condemning people who refuse to forgive a criminal.
I'm not trying to say that forgiveness of serious crimes is a moral wrong. What is wrong is the fact that our society makes a wrong out of not forgiving someone. Also, while forgiveness may make the victim and the criminal feel better, does it do any good in the long run? I certainly don't want to live in a world in which mistakes I've made, even serious ones, are not forgiven. However, I'd shudder to think of a world in which no one is held truly accountable for their actions.
I really don't know where I stand on this issue. I do appreciate the chance to think about it, thanks again for the discussion-starter.
One of the therapists I once visited for a while told me that the only way I can grow up is to place the blame where it is due and only then move on. I don’t know much about forgiveness, in itself. I do remember it was considered an ultimate virtue when I was a Christian. It was God’s ultimate act toward me, the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sinner that I was. And so, obviously, I should and would do the same to every person that needed my forgiveness. Religion aside, though, I think that you have a point, wyd, that forgiveness, in and of itself, doesn’t really exist, that maybe the real reason anyone “forgives” is to move on, to take care of themselves. “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you” (Lewis B. Smedes taken from one of those quote sites). Tcd divides several different kinds of forgiveness—forgiveness within a relationship, absolution, forgiveness to a distant unrelated party, and self-forgiveness. Still, the idea of the word eludes me, the more I try to think of what it might mean, the less concrete the idea becomes.
In terms of forgiveness within a present relationship (not one with yourself), I can understand the word by looking at the opposite side of the coin. When B and I were first together, we fought often which is pretty normal. We were two strangers trying and hoping to establish the deepest kind of trust in communication from scratch. You mess up a lot, anyway. And I found myself throwing out “I’m sorry” frequently. Growing up my dad forced us to say it every time we were in a fight. Then he forced the response, “I forgive you.” For us kids it became rote. A habit or a natural part of the process of miscommunication. Those two phrases didn’t carry within themselves any actual significance or emotional resolutions. Needless to say, B saw right through my little phrase and would become even more aggravated. For him, words mean very little unless the action is there to root the words. Words are like pretty flowers, but if they’re not attached to their bush or tree, they die quickly. It took me a while to quit spitting those words out, to break the habit, but I saw his point. Now neither of us ever (maybe rarely) say that we’re sorry or we forgive. Instead we explain how we know we’re wrong and in the period following that, we simply don’t act stupid again or hurt the other person. We prove ourselves to each other with actions, not words. All that to say, both the words sorry and forgive are unnecessary, maybe frivolous, melodramatic words in our language. (Like so much other Christian speak, although it wasn’t necessarily born with religion, that I hated for its nonsensical, useless, offensive, self-righteous meaning). I’m not saying there is never a time to say I forgive or I’m sorry but wyd said it in her first comment, you can pretty much make your point, and generally make it more clearly, if you leave those words out.
As for remote forgiveness, like forgiving the terrorists that killed all those civilians in 9/11, the only reason that one should “forgive” them is for personal release from anger or bitterness or any other negative feeling that keeps you from moving on. Because there’s really very little an individual can do in a case like that. When I was in counseling, I blamed my parents for hurting me all those years, for being stupid young kids having so many babies and moving to Africa, for being clueless and trying to change the world when they couldn’t really take care of themselves and their own. But what ultimately made me trust them again was not my act of blaming and then “forgiving” them, but was their humility before me, the personal changes they made in their lives, and their act of trusting me to be my own person, to respect my ideas and my values even if they disagreed with these values. So I only forgave them, I guess you could say, after they showed me that they indeed loved me exactly how I needed to be loved. If you look at it that way, then, you can take forgiveness right out of the picture because it never happened. They just changed and so I changed my reaction toward them. If they were still hurting me I believe I would still not feel much forgiveness toward them for what they did in the past let alone what they would be doing now.
So I guess I agree with wyd. Forgiveness is a word that can be thrown out of the English language.
sorry for the delay. my introduction is here: http://www.xanga.com/mamamiamurphy
It feels like you are all working towards a consensus that forgiveness as a word has no meaning, but that just doesn't seem to be true to me. I'm not convinced of either side, and so I'm going to put my thoughts on the other side out there to hopefully get more feedback on the issue.
I think it is true that the word forgiveness is often applied when other words are more appropriate. But I do think there is an appropriate use for the word, and a real and legitimate action of forgiveness.
It's hard to define it or describe it, but it's certainly a feeling. It is closest to this sentiment that wyd offered: "You are remorseful (or not) and I am glad for that. Our relationship may or may not be restored, depending on your future behavior." However, for me, the definition of forgive isn't as fickle as that statement. I think when forgiveness takes place it's a real thing where the transgression is put behind the parties involved. It's literally let go, and the relationship is restored. WYD's sample statement seems to indicate that there will be a trial run and depending on the offenders success, the relationship could eventually be restored.
If there's some sort of "trial run" that needs to take place before the victim is willing to restore the relationship, then the forgiveness didn't actually occur until the end of that trial run when they legitimately put it past them.
I do find the word forgiven to be useful, because I can think about my relationship with people I have known in the past, and acknowledge that there are certain people who I have forgiven for how they have wronged me, and there are other people who I have not forgiven. There's a very clear distinction between the ways I treat and even think about each of them.
After reading a bunch of different articles, essays, and definitions on forgiveness, I have come to the conclusion that the word "forgiveness" is an idea word. That is, it encompasses many different emotions, forms, ideas, meanings, connotations, etc.
In terms of behavior related to the word forgive, one abstract (whose author and url i did not record-couldn't read the full dissertation without paying) defined three different dimensions of the word which seem thorough to me: "orientation (self, other), direction (passive letting go of negative experiences, active enhancement of positive experiences) and form (emotion, cognition, and behavior)."
Other articles defined the word in comparison to other words like "revenge" and "reconciliation." Still others compared varying psychologists' views of the word.
My favorite dictionary website notes the translation of the word "forgiveness" in 36 other languages. Less than half of them, according to how I understand the site, have the word "forgive," as we would define it, in their language. Instead the words the site mentioned were comparative to “pardon, condonation, grace, remission, absolution, amnesty, oblivion; indulgence; reprieve” among others.
I say the word “forgiveness” is an idea word because it engenders high thoughts and moral ideals and acts as an umbrella covering so many differing social, political, religious, moral, and emotional understandings of what it means “to forgive” someone.
Practically speaking, then, I still stand by my earlier conclusion, that the word is not a necessary part of the English language for perfect communication (if there were such a thing). And I rarely, if ever, use it or will use it. On the other hand, idea words are useful and help us to categorize.
This discussion is fun but I feel highly undereducated and unqualified to understand or define or condemn any word, especially such a heavy one.
Thanks, WYD, for this topic. Forgiveness, indeed, is a hot topic of late. A friend of mine recently defended her dissertation on just this subject: "The Nature and Limits of Forgiveness".
I have only one small thing to add, from my exposure to her engagement with the topic. This is the idea that forgiveness is a purely religious concept. In fact, mostly a Judeo-Christian topic. It's religious nature presents problems when we try to apply it in other contexts. Forgiveness, ultimately, means that Jesus died on the cross to wipe away our sins. Granted, there is the Jewish concept sacrificial forgiveness: "if I offer sacrifices to god, he will forgive my sins". But, this ultimately relates to Jesus in the end.
According to the Christian tradition, we are to forgive others BECAUSE jesus forgave us. So, when we take god and jesus out of the picture, what reason do we have to forgive others? And what does it mean to forgive? If we don't believe that we've been forgiven by the maker of the universe, then why should we believe that we can AND/OR should forgive others (or ourselves)?
In short, I would put forward a third alternative: that 'forgiveness' is confined to religious discourse. If language is a game, and you're not playing the game of religion with language, then yes, 'forgiveness' is meaningless.
Further, I would suggest instead, as I believe forrest was suggesting, concepts such as reconciliation or amnesty. These seems to have more meaning in a wider variety of contexts.
I saw that Oprah, too.
I don’t believe that forgiveness means condoning negative or hurtful behavior; forgiveness means recognizing a wrong has been committed and not responding with punishment and condemnation.
The concept of forgiveness is definitely not unique to Christianity. Jesus aped the message of philosophers before him. Plagiarist.
I have been reading Gandhi’s autobiography, and, in it, there is a good example of what forgiveness is—-at least partially. Gandhi returns from India to Natal (South Africa) where rich, white people are upset at him, falsely believing that he set out to spread lies about them abroad. When he arrives in Natal by boat, city officials prohibit him from docking and getting off the ship. There are riots; people are pissed, etc., etc. Eventually he gets permission to leave the boat but sneaks off anyway to avoid the mobs. Unfortunately, the mobs find him and beat him up.
The point is that Gandhi has the opportunity to press charges and doesn’t. His reasons for not pressing charges, I realize, are most likely more political than moral. Still, I like what he says in defense of his decision to move on: “I do not want to prosecute anyone...what is the use of getting them punished?...I do not hold the assailants to blame. They were given to understand [something false about me]. If they believed these reports, it is no wonder that they were enraged.”
Earlier, while still aboard the ship, a friend asks him how he will stand by his principle of non-violence if attacked by the mob. He responds, “I hope God will give me the courage and the sense to forgive them and to refrain from bringing them to law. I have no anger against them. I am only sorry for their ignorance and their narrowness. I know that they sincerely believe that what they are doing today is right and proper. I have no reason therefore to be angry with them.”
I do think that stable society requires punishment of behavior that is not socially acceptable. I also think it is a lot easier to forgive (and, perhaps, to apply a more reformative punishment) when we understand the motives of the ones who have wronged us.
Of course, I am assuming, optimistically, that people act with good, somewhat logical intentions, which isn’t always true.
I definitely didn't mean to credit Jesus or the Bible with originating the idea of forgiveness, so thanks for clarifying, LL. Knowing most of the people on this thing, though, almost all of us were, at one point in our lives, Christians with a particular understanding of forgiveness.
It still seems like we're moving toward a consensus that that particular kind of forgiveness does not exist. In other words, saying "I forgive you" never means "You are absolved of your action" or "What you did is okay with me." Then, if forgiveness is "recognizing a wrong and not responding with punishment or condemnation," then the word still has no place. Gandhi did not "forgive" as an active verb, he only didn't do something he would have been justified doing, referring back to his philosophy of nonviolence more than a notion of "forgiveness."
To say "I forgive you" can be a social sentiment used to appease people who feel like this means something, but I still think it is not useful in describing what is actually happening.
I feel that forgiveness is an action, though. Perhaps the phrase "I forgive you" has lost its meaning, but in my opinion, the underlying concept still exists.
I can review my life and the people who have wronged me most, and I can immediately identify those who I have forgiven, and those who I have not. There is a significant difference in the way I treat them and even think about them. I don't see this as the same thing as absolution or reconciliation. I suppose it overlaps those concepts, but I've been able to forgive people when it involved no absolution and when it involved no reconciliation.
I suppose in a sense forgiveness is a pardon or absolution of what I feel that person owes me. For instance, if a drunk driver were to crash into my car and injure me, I might forgive them, but still expect them to stand trial, cover my hospital bills, and I may have no desire to ever have a relationship with them. What does it mean then? It means I stop looking at them as if they owe me something. I let go of the bitterness and anger.
I hear the objections against pardoning someone, such as it is a disservice to justice, but pardoning someone in this way isn't a disservice to justice, because the wrongdoer will still suffer the consequences of their action. Even if the drunk driver hires an expensive lawyer and escapes jail time, or neglects to pay my hospital bills, they will forever have to live with their action, and no amount of forgiveness, absolution, or reconciliation from anyone will permit someone to escape their consequences.
If anything I would assert that Gandhi's assailants suffered a different kind of consequence because of his forgiveness. Were they sent to prison they may have still considered themselves heroes, and their consequences may have come only in the physical realm. Having been pardoned from the physical punishment, they are forced to acknowledge their mistake. The contrast of their hatred to Gandhi's forgiveness would be very powerful. I would be surprised if they did not regret their actions for the rest of their lives. It also would've been appropriate for Gandhi to press charges, but still forgive them. This would come in the context of them owing society for their crimes, and being punished for that, but Gandhi himself not expecting anything more than what the justice system determines. This would not be absolution nor reconciliation, and I can think of no word for this other than forgiveness.
The word may have originated in religious circles, but there is no other word for this concept (that i am aware of).
Wow, this is going to take me a while -- I'll need to have a think. My initial thoughts are that forgiveness is useful as a way for releasing negative emotions, whether it can be logically defined or not.
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