Forgiveness, utopias and change
11
Sep
Not only personally, but mainly socially, forgiveness can move
history in the opposite direction of hatred, war and oppression, this is no different in many religions, after all the “golden rule”, does not make the other here who would not like it was done to you, it is present in the great contemporary religions and cultures.
There are several texts and speeches about forgiveness that are not connected with reality, for example, those who forgive do not always forget, forgiveness must repair the damage, but it does not mean that this is proportional, often it is not.
Each repeated offense should not be forgiven, let us remember Jesus’ teaching: “seventy times seven” (Mt 18, 21), just to say many times, and if we understand that the error is more common than we imagine (see several posts in this week) one can better understand the prayer given by Jesus himself: “forgive our offenses, just as we forgive those who have offended us”, this is the possible way of Love in many dimensions.
I remember that this passage comes right after the passage that Jesus asks for the unity of the people (they don’t need to be Christians, but be “in his name”), “where there are two or three in my name, there I am in their midst” (Mt 18 , 20), so there are no owners of this “presence”, even it may not be among people who are religious.
Karl Jaspers (1883, 1969), who influenced many of the modern thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Heidegger, in their book Introduction to Philosophical Thinking, asked about the path that we had trodden many years ago:
“We irritate each other. Deep psychology appears as an all-obscure refuge. Scientific superstition leads us to resort to pseudosciences for the search for salvation. And they tell us: when all fictions and ideologies have disappeared, man, until now sick and alienated (in etymological sense), will recover health. And health is happiness, the ultimate end ”(Jaspers, 1965, p. 30).
It is clear that there is true science that is not pseudoscience, and that happiness that has no bull or formula, can and should be desired, but the recovery of emotional health depends on reviewing history and then moving forward.
