FORGIVING THE PERSON IS NOT THE SAME AS
APPROVING OF THE ACT
Draft, but all the ideas are here.
"Love the sinner, hate the sin."
How often even those who are religious forget this way of looking at and interacting with others, for we all commit "sins" and would best forgive those sins but then also choose to do our best to never repeat the sin.
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STUCK IN ERRONEOUS THINKING
Often we get "stuck" in an erroneous thinking process, where we are trying to forgive a person but just cannot let go of it because we think that it means that we are making the "bad" action "ok".
In order to understand this, let's use a few easy examples.
If a child is playing and uses a gun to kill another child, can we forgive the child for not yet knowing better?
Of course, we are not approving of killing another child or of the use of guns or their inappropriate availability. We are only forgiving the child, for not knowing better, for not knowing how to make a better decision and/or having good information.
The child, given what he was exposed to and his level of logical thinking, had no other higher choice because he lacked the information and lacked the learning necessary to make better decisions, to think them out well.
BUT, THEN AT WHAT AGE SHOULD WE KNOW BETTER?
But, then, if there is a young teenager who murders, we have most often made the judgment that he just didn't know enough to be held accountable for the bad choice.
So, then, when is the point at which we "know better"?
"Well, hmmmphhhh! It is when a person is an adult!"
Really.
So that means it is strictly based on age then? At a particular age the person "should" know better. And that means the person "should" be punished in some way if he does not do better - for after all he "knows better!"
NOW REVERTING TO LOGIC AND REALITY...
But, if we think more deeply, we might conclude that a person cannot know better in all things, but only in some of them.
If they have not yet learned true effective thinking, like many people have not, should they then be expected to do effective thinking the right way?
If they have not learned math, would they be expected to be able to do high level math?
Certainly not.
While it is clear in the case of math, it get murky when it is in more abstract areas.
But it is, if one thinks objectively about it, also clearly true even in abstract areas - enough knowledge is enough and not enough knowledgg is not enough.
People cannot do what they have not yet learned to do, unless it is something so simple that we can figure it out with what we already know.
LOTS AND LOTS OF EXAMPLES
If we are expected to "know better", why are we so overweight or food addicted or alcohol addicted or critical of other people? Surely, all those people know they shouldn't do those.
But if they know they "shouldn't", does that mean that they know enough to be able to control themselves effectively enough to not do those things?
Apparently not! Wouldn't you agree that they are missing something in their knowledge base or they would be getting the right results: being healthy, with no addictions and not being at all critical of other people. Only if one gets the right results does one "know better". If one doesn't get the right results, we can only say that he probably knows that he shouldn't produce the bad results - but unless he is a complete imbecile, he would not produce those bad results if he knew how to produce the good result?
Ya? Yavol? Truth? Si?
The sequence of knowing (learning) in steps cannot be bypassed in any way. If a person learns how to add, then should we expect him to know how to do geometry or does he have to go through the steps? Should Salman Khan have expected his intelligent, generally smart niece to have known how to do those math problems? As it turned out, she was simply missing a necessary understanding earlie on in the process of learning. His expecting her to "know better" than to not make the math mistakes would have been a foolish expectation and possibly a judgment. (See Mastery Learning - Not Allowing Cumulative Misunderstandings, Misknowing & Missings To Persist.)
If you picked a poor spouse, are you then an evil doer, doing harm to yourself when you should have known better - and are you "bad" for that? Or did you simply not know better - and maybe not even know better than to go without expert advice from someone who knows better? Yes the action was not a good action, but does the bad action make you a bad person???
I believe completely that if you chose to learn enough about the "no fault" and "no blame" paradigms you would then be able to not blame (and/or at least forgive) all persons, regardless of how bad the acts were. And you could at the same time, recognize fully how harmful and "bad" the acts were - and that evaluation would not change because of having forgiven the person.
Of course, an example of this understanding early on in history was Jesus when he was about to die: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." They were missing enough information to "know better" and to make a better decision. Can we not be as "big" and as understanding and wise as he was? (The same ideas are seen throughout many of the religions of the world.)
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SOMETIMES, WE CANNOT UNCOUPLE THE TWO...
Admittedly, even for people who realize that the person simply did not know better how to not do the heinous act, we have trouble uncoupling the person and the act. So be it, for there is no personal persisting problem in hating Hitler or Saddam Hussein for the heinous acts they did - and it is hard to say "well, they simply did not know better".
You would be one unpopular dude to say "I do not blame Hitler as he did not have all the correct knowledge to have made a better choice and what he knew was the determinant of what he did - and that was simply the result of his childhood exposure to certain ideas, what his child made up, and what the world around him taught him, including what he read." Yes, that may be a true statement in a mathematical sense, but it may not "compute" emotionally, with the flurry of fear and hate involved in the heinousness (word?) of it all.
