TRUE FORGIVENESS IS DONE FOR THE SAKE OF THE ENEMY

Jesus on the cross supposedly forgave his torturers.  He asked God to treat them as if they knew no better.  That only makes sense if God would hurt them if they did know.  And he was not doing it to feel better for he couldn't really feel any better then.

The teaching he gave in the Sermon on the Mount is that we must not love and forgive others just because they love us.  He told us to forgive the enemy so in that light we forgive for the sake of the enemy.

Free will conflicts with the doctrine that pardoning is a duty.  That implies trying to force or pressure you to pardon when pardon should be totally free and unpressured.  In so far as pardon or forgiveness are forced they are not real. 

It is taught that you can only forgive a person who freely did wrong. Now, you are more certain that the person did wrong than you are that he or she is sorry when the apology comes. The person could fake repentance to avoid the results of their actions. Thus it follows that forgiveness is degrading to the person who is asked to forgive and so it is really another act of wickedness. To forgive is to reward the person for insulting you. It is more moral to punish that person and never forgive and to deal with your bad feelings in a way that is good for you so that you will feel no pain. The Christian faith is erected on the cornerstone of forgiveness so the faith is all error for its foundation is error.
 
If forgiveness is about abandoning the desire to punish and punishing is about reforming as well as about paying for the evil you did then forgiveness does not care about the wicked person at all. It does not care what that person owes society so it does not care about society either which raises the question of what the wicked person was resented for in the first place.
 
The condemnation of crime is more important than the punishment of crime. Therefore if you may forgive and still punish you are doing wrong for you are putting more emphasis on the punishment. Forgiving is ceasing to condemn. If you can do that then the punishment could also be shelved. Indeed it ought to be if it is less important. You do not really forgive anybody you punish or who you allow to be punished. One of the greatest marks of Christian hypocrisy is the way they bless people who forgive and who still support the legal retribution system.
 
In most cases, it is easier to do wrong if you are confident you will be forgiven for we fear people wishing us evil. The amount of time most of us have spent in doing harm when we were confident we would be pardoned adds up in damage to many things that people have gone to jail for. So there is no doubt forgiveness is indeed making an excuse for non-criminal evil, provided free will is accepted as true, though it is dressed up as doing the opposite. The gospel of forgiveness of Jesus Christ logically implies you should hate yourself and let others walk all over you. When non-criminal evil can do as much damage as crime then when we let it go unpunished we should let crime go unpunished too!
 
It is hypocrisy to claim that there is a difference between forgiving and condoning when most forgiveness does not exact a punishment or restitution and does not need to. I mean if X smashes your window and you forgive him and make him pay for the repairs you are not making him pay because you forgive him or because you don’t but because you want the money so his wrongdoing is still being condoned. It just looks as if it is not being.
 
The real reason we like forgiveness is that in most cases it does result in us getting away with the evil we have done. That is the real attraction. It is about us and not other people.
 
We are told we are all sinners. If that is true then we deserve whatever evil others to do us. It would be unfair to condemn them for hurting us. If we take an eye for an eye it leaves us all blind but we could gossip about one another and run one another down because we deserve it and we do that a lot at times anyway.
 
The doctrine that we all need forgiveness from one another and from God and that we need to forgive ourselves is harmful because it implies we all deserve to suffer and be condemned. One way it harms is this. When you get a reward or a compliment you want it to remind you that you are a good person. To be a good person is the same as deserving only good. But to believe that we are all sinners and deserve suffering and need pardon is saying that anything anybody does for us it is done for any reason but not to really convey to us that we are considered good. Only a delusional person would be happy with such blessings. They are Black Widow bites.
 
When we forgive our enemy we declare ourselves to be his friend. We are going to help him if he is in trouble. It would be bizarre then if you could send him to jail for a crime against you and couldn’t refuse to give him a hot drink for his flu symptoms. If we really are his friend we will not want him to go to jail and even more so if we feel he has really reformed.
 
A lot of the time, if you send a person to jail they will be worse when they come out for jail is a brutalising experience. It is utter hypocrisy for Christians to say they have forgiven enemies they send to jail. The boast, “We don’t want revenge. We just want justice”, seems hollow. If they really meant it they would not be able to send hardened criminals to jail for they will resist changing their attitude and use jail to harden their hearts. Punishment is to reform not to make worse.
 
You would need to be clairvoyant and know the criminal exceptionally well to be sure that sending him to jail would be best for him and other people. When you are simply guessing that it is the right thing to do it is clear that you have not forgiven him at all. You are getting your own back and using the law to do it. You never know what the future will bring – end of story.
 
When we cannot forgive for our own sake or the sake of the enemy we can’t forgive for both at the one time either.
 
All the reasons for forgiveness fail. What they really do is excuse evil.

People are alarmed at our deterministic teaching and yet their own teaching implies that it is true and they live like determinists themselves.  Their teaching implies it. Our exploration of forgiveness helps make that clear.
 
Belief in God or gods or spirits who can help us is madness for forgiveness is madness. We can live happily, safely and normally without forgiveness and without the notion that anybody deserves to suffer. The sinister truth about forgiveness is clear proof that God, if he exists, invents morality and morality does not really exist. It proves that theism in all its forms, monotheism, henotheism, monism, polytheism is bad. Any good it does is caused by ignorance and people not thinking but no more makes it good than taking arsenic to cure a health problem is good. It is a deep attack on human rights – and one of these rights is the right not be deceived and not to be made to think that a bad product is a good product. Ignorance does not get people off the hook for they are still doing wrong because they are not thinking and not trying to learn though they should. And we have all met people who see that forgiveness is rewarding sin so faith in forgiveness is blindness and there is no excuse. Anybody that teaches the existence of a forgiving God is furthering a bad fruit. This includes the legendary Jesus who said that you can tell fake prophets by their bad fruits. Bizarrely this young man would have known of false prophets who did not produce bad fruits and yet he said that!
 
Forgiveness is an egoistic act. You deny the evil person the dignity of receiving what they deserve or choose. You do it so that you will feel better. It is a clear proof to psychologists that we are indeed psychological egoists most of the time or nearly all the time at least.