QUALIFIED FORGIVENESS:

It is necessary for the individual to have clarity as to what he believes as true, and behave accordingly. He should never deceive himself as to what he believes to be correct, for self deception, perhaps, motivated by desire to please authority figures, such as God, is the worst crime a human being can commit against himself and against humanity.

In this regard, let me state my approach towards the central Christian doctrine of forgiveness.

There is no doubt whatever that Jesus Christ taught that love is the ultimate truth. He said that love is the sum of all the prophecies and laws, that each of us seeks love, that we seek love because we are love and when love is missing in our lives we must seek it; that we ought to do unto others, love them, as we want them to do to us us, which is love us. (1)

On earth where we believe in separation and different interests and do bad things to each other forgiveness is the best approximation of the meaning of love.

Love is union. Love or unified state does not exist in the world of separation but in the world of spirit. Only Spirit can unify; matter, space and time always separates.

Jesus taught that forgiveness is what it means to be a Christian. How do you distinguish his followers, that is, Christians, from the rest of the world, non-Christians? He asked and responded to his rhetorical question with the teaching that the rest of the world forgives its friends and punishes its enemies but that his followers, Christians, not only forgive their friends but their enemies. (2) Christians are people who turn the other cheek to be slapped when one is slapped. (3) Christians are persons who give the poor their last cloak; they hoard nothing. The parable of the widow’s mite clearly illustrates this attribute of Christians. (4)

In the parable of a man going to worship God and remembered that a neighbor wronged him, Jesus said that he must first go home and forgive that neighbor before he worships God. How many times should we forgive our detractors? Infinitely! (5)

Jesus went on to teach that God hears all our prayers and responds to them, that he knows our needs and have already met all of them but that before we can receive the answers he had already given to our prayers we must forgive each other.(6)

He said that God entered into a covenant with his Son before the Son went on a journey to nowhere that the Son must forgive all his brothers before God forgives him. This contract is explained in the “Our lord’s prayer”. In it Jesus taught Christians to pray thus: “our father, who is in heaven forgive us our sins because we have forgiven others sins against us”. (7)

In the story about an adulterous woman, Jesus said: let him who has not sinned be the first to stone her. We are all sinners and, therefore, should judge no one a sinner and should punish no one and should forgive other sinners. (8)

The New Testament of Jesus is different from the Old Testament of Moses. In the Old Testament, Mosaic Law required sinners to be punished (stoned) but in the New Testament sinners are to be forgiven and not punished (not stoned).

Jesus New Testament is supposed to replace Moses Old Testament; the Old Testament teachings of punishment for crimes was appropriate for a more primitive stage of human evolution; then an eye for an eye was appropriate, force was necessary to coral people, to make them respect each others rights. For advanced mankind, Christians, forgiveness is supposed to replace punishment.

Our contemporary jurisprudence, however, is still based on Mosaic Law: guilt and punishment; we have not advanced to Christianity, yet.

Jesus walked his talk; he practiced his message of forgiveness by not defending himself when he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane . Peter tried to defend him and he said: “Peter, put away your sword for those who live by the sword die by the sword; turn your sword into plowshares, turn your weapons of war into means of agriculture; use what was meant for war to feed the people. (9)

Jesus said that he came to teach the world a different means of dealing with interpersonal conflicts: forgiveness. In this light, he allowed himself to be arrested, judged and found guilty and did not defend himself. He was crucified and before he died he asked God to forgive his killers, the world that crucified him, for they do not know what they are doing. (10)

Every which way one looks at it, there is no doubt whatsoever that Jesus taught forgiveness as the true meaning of love (love is the true meaning of heaven).

NOBODY PRACTICES TOTAL FORGIVENESS

On earth, nobody practices the doctrine of forgiveness in its entirety. The question is how come no body practices it? How come no one forgives himself and other people their wrongs?

The answer is because it is impossible to forgive and still live on earth. If the individual practiced forgiveness he would die and exit from this world.

People wanting to live in this world, therefore, do not and cannot practice radical forgiveness; they can practice attenuated forgiveness. The only type of forgiveness possible in this world is qualified forgiveness, for if the individual were to practice total forgiveness he would be killed, as Jesus was killed.

Jesus was attacked and he forgave those who attacked and eventually killed him. He did not defend himself; he died and ceased living on earth; he stopped living as a separated self housed in a body.

Jesus permitted his ego separated self to be killed and he returned to the awareness of living in unified self.

Those who still want to live as separated ego selves, live on earth, cannot do what Jesus did, forgive those who attack them, for if they so do they would be killed.

To live in this world it is necessary to practice only qualified forgiveness; this is the truth.

To believe that one can practice full forgiveness and still live in this world is to believe a lie.

It is simply impossible to practice unconditional forgiveness and still live-in this world. It is also impossible to live in this world and not judge other people.

It would be nice if one were unconditional in ones acceptance of people but the fact is that human behavior has effects on other people and there are certain behaviors that people cannot accept, not if they want to live. For example, no society can accept murder and pedophilia. No society can accept criminals as having the right to inflict harm on other people.

Criminals pose a threat to people’s physical survival. Society therefore cannot totally forgive and permit them to walk the streets. They must be arrested, tried and sent to jail and, if possible, rehabilitate them and get them to behave in a pro-social manner.

Murderers have no business living for if one takes another person’s life what makes one want to live? Society has the right to kill murderers in self protection.

The point is that whereas it would be easy to talk about total forgiveness at the abstract level, the realities of this world rules out unconditional forgiveness.

THE BENEFITS OF FORGIVENESS

Of course, forgiveness has many advantages: it gives peace and happiness to the forgiving person but one must live to enjoy that peace and happiness. If you forgive murderers and they kill you, you are no longer alive to feel peace and happiness.

(Unless, of course, you are talking about the permanent peace and joy of spirit existence; if one dies one experience that kind of peace; but we are talking about peace on earth.)

To be in this world there must be reduction in forgiveness; this is the truth. We do not need to hide this truth in highfalutin metaphors that few readers understand what they mean.

Metaphysics does not have to be so obtuse that folks have to twist their thinking, their minds to understand it and adjust to it. Metaphysics ought to be as plain as day and folks know what they are accepting.

OUR ORIGINAL NATURE AND STORY OF CREATION

I believe that originally (and still so) people were (are) spirit.

One Spirit (call it God, if you like) extended itself to all of us. All of us are the extensions of one Spirit.

For analogy, imagine one Sun spreading its rays to everywhere on earth. The sun and its rays are one. But it is easy to mistake a particular ray of light as separated from other rays of light and the sun. In truth the sun and its rays are one and the same.

While the sun and its rays of light remain the same, the rays somehow believe themselves separated from the sun and from each other.

While Spirit and its parts remain Unified Spirit, the parts of Spirit imagine themselves separated from Spirit and from each other.

Our world is, if you like, a sleep-dream where the parts of one spirit see themselves as separated from that Spirit and from each other. Each of us is part of Unified Spirit (aka God) and part of each other. But on earth we seem separated from each other.

On earth, we seem to be housed in bodies and live in space and time. But body, space and time are like figures in a dream.

The idea that the world is a dream in our minds is called solipsism. Solipsism is part of the philosophy of idealism, the opposite of the philosophy of materialism. There are basically two approaches to philosophy, to knowledge, epistemology: idealistic versus materialistic monism. See George Berkeley, Arthur Schopenhauer, David Hume etc. (11)

Spirit appears sleeping (it is really not sleeping; only parts of it seem to be sleeping). In his sleep spirit sees parts of itself seem in bodies and live in space and time.

Dreams are not real. When the sleeper wakes up he recognizes that at no time did the world of dreams he had believed was real in fact exist. But as long as he sleeps what he sees in his sleep seems real to him.

As long as we are on earth, in the dream of separation, everything we see in the world seem real to us. But they are like dream figures and when we wake up we recognize that we are parts of Unified Spirit.

We are all in an overall Spirit (aka God); he is in us and we are in each other. Where God ends and each of his parts/sons begins is nowhere and where each of his sons end and others begin is nowhere.

We are all extensions of God and of each other. We are literally in each other and are each other.

Of course, on earth, this eternal truth is not known to us; it is not known to us for as long as we sleep and dream that we are separated from each other.

We are entitled to sleep and dream. Spirit is freedom; God is freedom. The parts of Unified Spirit, the children of God have the freedom to seem separated from their father and from each other. In reality, they are not separated; they just seem so; it is a pretense game.

God being perfect freedom cannot prevent his children from having freedom; God cannot prevent his children from seeming separated from him. For one thing, he knows that they cannot separate from him and from each other; he knows that they are merely pretending to have done so; he knows that their world is a dream, and is not bothered by that make belief world.