We were saying God wants us to lead a selfless life. God also wants us to act in a just manner, right?
So I’m thinking blind forgiveness is a good example of why we can’t do both. To instaforgive seems unjust. To instaforgive is also selfless. Either way we go we have wronged God. Is this not a problem for theists?
Is it selfless to forgive someone who doesn’t deserve or ask for forgiveness, or am I using selfless too loosely?
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I would think that forgiving is not just the act of ignoring what happened, or cleaning the slate. There is the saying “Forgive, but not forget.” I think that forgiveness is a tool for society to make mistakes, and learn from them. I would like to also amend that earler saying into, “You are forgiven, but don’t forget.” This means that the forgiveness is a second chance. How does all of this relate to selflessness? I think it is impossible to become truly selfless. We may at times do things that approach selflessness, but we all recieve some sort of reward (accepting the Judeo-Christian outlook). In Judeo-Christian doctrine, there is almost someting akin to a karmic attitude, the more good you do, the better life will be. The worse one does, the harder life can become. If there was not some sort of reward, whether it is happiness, pleasure, heaven, or righting wrongs to even out the abbacus of the Judaeic scales to be able to live a good life AND get into heaven, there are these rewards that make doing good things a thing that is rewarded.
How can someone be selfless? Only somone who has no knowledge of any kind of positive feedback for doing ‘good’ and then doing ‘good’ would be truly selfless, since they have no justified belief, whether subconcious or actively aware, of any postive returns.
This leads then to what is ‘good’. What is ‘good’? Is ‘good’ something that is innately known, an essential part of humanity, or is ‘good’ simply a series of learned traits that dates back to the earliest of memories based on communal survival, or a mother’s tiny lessons about anything?
If and only if Good is innate, and there were no expections of Rewards (Happiness, pleasure, recompisation, heaven, karmic gain), then Selflessness would truly exist.
All in all, I would have to say that true selflessness cannot exist in a normal socialized human, but the illusion of selflessness, especially to the actor of selflessness can be attained.
I think it really depends on the way you define selfless. When I think about ’selflessness’ I imagine volunteer or charity work, or at least doing things for others without putting your own interests first. In the case of forgiveness, you might be doing several people a favor by not instantly forgiving. The person who wronged you might not know that they did something wrong, and by not just ‘letting it go’, you teach them that it was wrong, and prevent them from repeating what they did. Also, if you hold someone accountable for a wrong action, such as theft, and they are punished with a prison sentence, they will be unable to steal from someone else, at least while incarcerated.
I don’t believe in “forgiving, but not forgetting.” That defeats the point of forgiving. For one to truly forgive one must forget the wrong that has been done or else you have partially forgiven and still harbor some sort of grudge towards the one who has wronged you. Is it not fair to give a person a “clean slate” and allow them to start fresh? That is the key to building stronger relationships or for that matter restoring broken ones. One reason why friendships/relationships tend to back fire is because the person who was wronged never “forgot” the wrong that was done and as a result, the problem was never completely fixed. Sure, apologies were exchanged and forgivingness filled the air, but in the back of the mind, that wronged made its bed and soon or later it’s bound to wake up and stir problems (just a little metaphor).
And on the note about “selflessness,” I don’t think anyone could live a life that is completely selfless. After reading Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, she made the point that ‘no one owes any man a second of their life.’ However, where would this world be if we followed her philosophy? We can care for others and love our neighbors dearly, but at the end of the day our individual needs will always rise to the top of our priority list.
To play around with regu0674, in the first part of the post, there was the forgiving and forgetting. If one were to forgive, and then forget, as regu0674 says, then how would one remember that the original subject was forgiven in the first place? To forgive and not forget would imply that remembering that one is forgiven gives the special status of ‘forgiven’ to the one that needed forgiving.
I would have to agree with the previous statements that there can be no such thing as a purely selfless person. I think the act of forgiving is just a tool for people to move on with their lives. If no one ever gave forgiveness, people would be stuck in situations for the rest of time, always holding grudges and unable to move forward in their relationships. Forgiving, in my opinion at least, is simultaneously both selfish and selfless. Selfish in that you are giving yourself the chance to move forward and alleviate negative feelings. It is also selfless because you want the person you are forgiving to feel better, you are giving them another chance, whatever number chance that may be. Whether that person be friend or family, you have to care more about your overall relationship with them, than a single act or event in order to forgive them, this in itself is both selfish and selfless. I think it’s hard to split these two qualities. Often, despite how it might seem on the surface, if you dig deeper one might find that both of these traits, selfishness and selflessness, can exist together in the same situation.
Considering that God wants us to act in a just manner, and be selfless, there must be some compromise that we are overlooking. While it is selfless to instantly forgive someone for their wrong doing, it follows no atonement process, so justice is not served in the literal meaning of the word. But what if the wrongdoer insists on being able to atone for their wrongs by making reparations, repenting, apologizing and giving penance? Well then it would be selfish to forego the process involved in gaining forgiveness. It comes off that one would want to instantly forgive a wrongdoer because it is simply easier than allowing them to atone. That is not just, and it is not selfless at this point. I guess it depends on what the specifics of the circumstance are, and how the wrongdoer acts after the situation. It is definitely possible to be selfless and just at the same time, it just might be a bit of a burden.