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giraffe_lady 5 days ago

That is an interesting view of it. I mentioned this elsewhere but I happen to share a religion with dostoevsky so this idea is familiar to me and no longer jarring. It does violate a certain idea of fairness or consequence that most people subscribe to, and that contradiction is all over the gospels so it really is one of the original ideas of christianity.

And ultimately this view of repentance is kind of unhelpful in a practical way when dealing with incredibly damaging behavior. We can't really judge the sincerity of someone's repentance, ultimately it is between them and god. We can restrain them from being in a situation where they could commit that act again though, just in case.

Something I think about often is an event that occurred in my home town when I was a young adult. A child, 12 or 13, old enough to know better, was playing with the stove and set the house on fire. One of their siblings died in the fire.

How do you react to that as a parent? You love the child, have to go on raising them. No punishment even makes sense, the idea of taking away the nintendo or whatever is simply grotesque, and what could be accomplished by anything proportional to the consequence? The only thing left is forgiveness. I think this is how it is with god and your hypothetical monster.

geoka9 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

While I do understand your point, there's a difference between being irresponsible and being willfully murderous. Personally, having grown up among orthodox christians, I've seen too many cases of self-righteous people lapsing and committing bad things and then finding comfort in their religiousness. "Be afraid of believers, they have gods that forgive their sins" - that kind of thing.

5 days ago | parent | prev [-]
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