The problem with the relative of Mrs. Sweeney is that he doesn’t understand the difference between forgiving behavior and excusing it.
Forgiveness implies that you acknowledge that the person did evil. Justifying it with “mentally ill or emotionally disturbed” is not forgiveness. It is excusal or condonement.

I think that it is commendable to forgive people such as these in the personal sense. However, they still need to be brought to justice and punished. They cannot be forgiven in the sense htat their crimes are not punished.

btw, I lost a lot of respect for Pat Robertson when he asked that Karla Faye Tucker not be executed.

There seems to be a fudamental inability on the part of those subscribing to the liberal (used in the VFR broad definition) mindset to admit that there are individuals who are evil, who habitually indulge in evil acts. Non-judgementalism is now a basic dogma that goes unquestioned in modern liberal societies. It’s the same thing we see when Euro-elites cozy up to people like Khaddafi and Arafat, two individuals whose hands are dripping in innocent blood. Ditto for those who held up the Columbine killers as “victims.”

Apart from the occaisional unprincipled exception, the only time liberals will use the term ‘evil’ is when they describe someone or something within their own culture that stands in opposition to liberal dogma. Liberalism is a religion, a counterfeit one to be sure, complete with dogma, excommunication of the unfaithful, etc. - though perhaps anti-religion would be a more accurate term. It is now the de-facto state religion of all western countries.

Well, I would hope - it is probably a vain hope - that I would have the personal sanctity to forgive the assailants. Of such things are saints made. “Love thy enemies” is not an optional part of Christian doctrine, properly understood.

On the other hand I would be utterly against exempting them from the temporal consequences of their acts. Doing so is not doing them any spiritual favors; and forgiveness is a spiritual act of charity.

I have encountered many people in my personal circles who literally do not know what it means to be sorry and, perhaps more importantly, to forgive. Forgiveness is not the same as pretending that something never happened in the first place, although that is how moderns have come to understand it. Acts have consequences, both eternal and temporal.

To forgive someone is to release him from a personal debt. If someone dropped a rock on me and injured me, I could - which is to say it would be in my authority to - forgive him the personal debt that he incurred to me thereby. But his debt to society, God, and even to himself are not mine to forgive. His very soul depends on his being able to face the consequences of his act; true charity will not take that from him.

Moderns are so used to thinking in terms of consensual contracts between individuals that there is no longer a basis from which to understand forgiveness, eternal consequences, temporal consequences, repentance, and all the language of sin and repentance that we have inherited from Christendom and boiled away to the oily framework of contract and individual rights. Moderns do not possess or understand Christian forgiveness; they have only its bleached and dried skeleton, staring back with empty eye sockets.

Matt writes:

“If someone dropped a rock on me and injured me, I could … forgive him the personal debt that he incurred to me thereby. But his debt to society, God, and even to himself are not mine to forgive.”

This clarifies the issue wonderfully. I feel as though I had never really understood this tricky question until this moment. When we forgive another person, what that means in practical, psychological terms is that we have no account with him anymore. There’s no outstanding balance to be settled. To give remission of sins means to release a person from the guilt or penalty of his sins. I had already understood that. But what Matt points out is that we can only do this with regard to another person’s debt to _us_. We cannot do it with regard to that person’s debt to society or God. The reason that people nowadays believe that their personal forgiveness of someone’s crimes against them means that the criminal should get off of any punishment is that we’ve lost the larger sense of a public world and a transcendent moral order. There is _only_ the personal. Therefore if you forgive a person personally, he is forgiven, period.

Also, I think that for people to say something like this about the killers of their relative (I’m also thinking, for example, of Amy Biehl’s parents forgiving her killers) does not really show forgiveness. I think it shows a lack of love for the deceased, and a lack of aliveness in oneself. The reaction of any normal person would be the absolute determination that the criminals be brought to justice.

Mr. Auster wrote:
“The reaction of any normal person would be the absolute determination that the criminals be brought to justice.”

I think that would be the proper response of a saint, too (saints never merely “react”, of course!)

For a person to commit a terrible crime and never face temporal justice is a virtual guarantee of damnation. Rather the prayer of the saint ought to be that the person is brought to justice, faces his wrongdoing, and repents.

The modern age demands its faux-forgiveness without repentance. This is the same as embracing damnation. A saint forgives his enemies and prays for their conversion; a conversion rendered highly unlikely when temporal consequences can be simply avoided. Happy is the criminal who is caught and made to face his crimes here and now. Better to be the Good Thief than Barabbas.

Did people talk in public like this about forgiveness of evil in the 40’s and 50’s; I think not ?

Send the “youths” over to Iraq to serve as IED sweepers.

This is a sad but a wonderful philisophic issue/story. I recall in college, one of my “guru” professors told the class that “these are the kinds of stories/topics that pose questions, that make us think and reason, that stretch the envelope of the mind”, or something like that. After reading Mr. Auster’s and Matt’s superb summary, I must agree with my old professor.

The society we live in would be more tolerable to me if criminals deserving of punishment—the O.J.s, the Ramseys, the Michael Jacksons (although he MAY be “getting his”, but many doubt it), the Susan Smiths (drowned her children in her car, then reported a car-jackers stole the car) et al were truly brought to justice. Something indeed happened in the ’60s— in the movies, for sure, and that with the power of Hollywood and television had an effect. Even before Steve MCQueen’s “Thomas Crown Affair”, there was a “immortalizing” or “idolizing” of criminals who got away with murder. The society “fell in love with criminals, about the same time as LBJ opened up the floodgates and let illegals flood the country. Gone was the memory of putting the Rosenbergs to death. The law and order types were now “the evil doers”. Sen. McCarthy warned the country about subversives/Communists in our State Dept. and in Hollywood. Did the country listen? No, it villified McCarthy.

The most popular tv soap of the late 50s and early 60s was The Fugitive. We “collectively fell in love” with accused killers, especially if that had Clark Gable-like ears and were “likeable” on-screen characters like David Janssen. Up until then, we had put people to death as a state (here in California under Pat Brown), and then it stopped. That “collective guilt” and perverted “love for the criminal”, the bad guy many of us fell in love with in the movies and tv, made it difficult for us to want to kill or punish guilty personsin real life (By “us”, I am NOT speaking for anyone at VFR!). I know this sounds a bit farfetched, but I believe that’s exactly what Hollywood—the writers and directors of this stuff (which was and still is decidely anti-death penalty and anti-justice)—hoped would happen—where “evil” becomes “the victim”.

Love for the Anti-hero. I wonder if we are truly getting back to the 40s and early 50s.

CNN today interviewed the father of one of the many victims of that “male” “nurse”/serial killer. He said he was opposed to execution in this instance because the man was still young and he wanted him to suffer a long time.

Now that’s an interesting choice. Have the man suffer decades of sodomization, perhaps sending gifts to his tormentor, or indulge the even less Christian desire to ensure his damnation by dispatching him before he can repent.

The killers deserve contempt, of course, but to forgive them in this manner is to deny them their humanity, their ability as created humans to make evil choices.

I recently read Stuart Banner’s (fascinating) history of the death penalty in America. I was very struck by the atmosphere of public hangings in the nineteenth century. The community gathered to see justice done, and the guilty usually admitted their guilt, expressed their hope that others would learn from their mistakes, and prayed for salvation before their end. Although I think Banner is a liberal, he very clearly shows that the movement of executions into secrecy and much agitation against the death penalty resulted from this sort of denial of the humanity of criminals. The problem is that this implies that we ourselves could never choose evil; by making criminals a breed apart, we are really celebrating our own ability to glide above good and evil.

Matt’s distinction between a victim’s personal forgiveness (I would note that it cannot be given by proxy, as the late Mrs. McSweeney’s kin seem to think) and a criminal’s duty to discharge his debt to society is well-stated. I, too, hope I would be Christian enough to forgive. I don’t know.

Given where this murder happened, as a cynical New York resident I have to wonder which subset of immigration’s many enrichments of our diversity produced the perpetrators… HRS

Did anyone else notice David Levin’s sleight of hand? He started out lamented our country’s “‘immortalizing’ or ‘idolizing’ of criminals who got away with murder,” then pointed to “The Fugitive” as an example of the rot, in which we “‘collectively fell in love’ with accused killers,” then explained that “[t]hat ‘collective guilt’ and perverted ‘love for the criminal’, the bad guy many of us fell in love with in the movies and tv, made it difficult for us to want to kill or punish guilty persons in real life.”

The whole point of “The Fugitive” was precisely that Richard Kimball was *not* a killer, much less “one who got away with murder.” When viewers rooted for Dr. Kimball, it was because they wanted justice to be done. That’s a far cry from being unwilling to punish the guilty. In fact, I believe the viewers were just as anxious to see the one-armed man caught and punished as they were to see Dr. Kimball go free.

I don’t think Mr. Levin engaged in any kind of sleight of hand; he just has the facts wrong on The Fugitive. The Fugitive (which ran from 1963 to 1967, not from the late fifties to the early sixties) is highly interesting because, on one hand, it does touch on a Romantic/counter-cultural/victimological sensibility in which the System is wrongly chasing and seeking to execute an innocent man (the series was based on Les Misérables, after all); while, on the other hand, it completely affirms traditional morality and virtue. There is one great episode in which Richard Kimble gets caught up with an escaped, dangerous, criminal, and Kimble has to figure a way to turn this guy in while evading the police himself.

The Fugitive was a very rich program, one of the best ever on television. I was (and am) a great fan of it.