Well put… I love Chesterton here, in Father Brown:
“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”
“There are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he said; “and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues.”
Human is made up of two vastly different groups that have no real commonality other than they have a human body.
The humane have a conscience and love thus they also have a form of love which is empathy and sympathy.
The inhumane have NO conscience and NO love so they also have NO empathy or sympathy.
There are sheep and there are wolves and yes, they are both animals but we need to distinguish between them if we are to avoid being eaten.
Solzhenitsyn is plainly wrong. Or, perhaps he was equating being “bad” with being “evil”. A person can do some bad action, but on reflection they will see their error and have remorse and want to make amends otherwise they live with a bad conscience.
To do evil, a person has to first deaden their conscience. On some other thread I discuss this but I can’t recall where so I will repeat it here. To deaden the conscience, according to my late, psychopathic husband, it takes two steps.
The first step is to do harm to others (human /animal) until they feel nothing, feel indifferent to the pain and suffering of the other.
The second step is to do harm and get pleasure from seeing the pain and suffering of the other. At that point the conscience is dead.
This is a conscious, free will, deliberate choice and action and it has spiritual implications because they sever the connectivity or love between their own soul and other souls. Thus they have hate or are disconnected from others spiritually. This chasm is irreparable. They have cross the abyss from whence there is no return.
I don’t know Chesterton and his Father Brown character, but I do know that people do not need to renounce the devil because the devil is not in them as a matter of course. Those that have the devil within them are part of the evil spirit and they have purposely invited the devil into their lives. Once a person invites the devil, he or she is stuck with them forever. They have sold their souls to the devil. There is no renouncing possible.
I believe that Chesterton alluded to that in that when we take our own way, we are not following God’s–similar to the way the Devil rebels against God.
What I find is unless I can forgive others, I can’t forgive myself. It takes a lot of practice. Thanks be to God who shows forgiveness as an example.
Methinks Solzhenitsyn has had a bit more reflection and experience with this (on all those fronts - whether merely ‘bad’ or outright evil) than you have perhaps had. But that isn’t to deny the presence of very serious and pernicious evil that can take over a person’s life. It sounds like your own experience too has been formed and shaped by some extreme exposure. That must be a terrible thing indeed. May Christ’s mercy prevail in the end, as I have faith that it will.
God’s way, regardless of what religion you care to name, is the Path of Righteousness and God has given us a conscience and love so as to be able to follow that path.
To forgive one’s self, as also to forgive others, there has to be a confession of wrong doing, remorse and a change of heart and a willingness to make amends. That means that the person doesn’t have to be brought kicking and screaming to the “negotiation table”,
God is not universally forgiving. After all he kicked Satan out of Heaven. He didn’t say “no worries mate, you’re forgiven”.
Forgiveness is a process. If another person is not even willing to admit to wrong doing and/ or has no remorse for their actions, then forgiveness is inappropriate action. It would not be what God wants us to do.
I don’t know what experience Solzhenitsyn had when he wrote his books. I, however, was born into a family of inhumane people, call them psychopaths or sociopaths or malignant narcissists, it doesn’t make any difference. I survived them. Then unknowingly I married a psychopath, who finally, after 24 years of marriage admitted who he was. And he told me about how “his people”, meaning other inhumane people operate. Well of course I wasn’t going to keep this information to myself, which has earned me the name of “the loose-tongued bitch”. And for the last 20+ years there is a war waged against me by inhumane people, to “make me go away permanently” to put it in their jargon. And they have caused me a great deal of harm but I have, by God’s Grace, managed to survive and continue my efforts to expose them. So I do have some experiences up close and personal.
Wow. I’m sorry to hear of anyone having to go through such a long travail - it sounds miraculous that you have survived even as you have. A life of war will shape and color anyone’s perceptions for sure. Of that I have no doubt.
But you know every dark cloud has a silver lining. The experiences have taught me plenty that I couldn’t have learnt in any other way. So I have been able to help others and that make me very happy.
Tell God - I’m sure he’s take notice of your opinion … assuming you believe in God.
Furthermore, many atheists want nothing to do with God, so by eternally removing them from his presence,God is simply giving them what they want. Pray tell, how is that “unjust, inadequate, nasty and illogical”?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
156
Justifying the God of an ancient text is easy isn’t it? But seeing God as He is, through eternal, infinite creation first, takes a change of perspective. From the heart.
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
That ancient text is the one that Jesus used to rebuke Satan in the wilderness with. Its that text that foretells of His coming. Its that text that He obeyed. Its that text that condemns the whole world of their sins and its that text that points to the Lamb of God for the salvation from sin and condemnation for all who put the whole confidence in Jesus. Those who dont will be outside the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus’s death and our death does not place us in a default position of safety from condemnation. It is through repentance from sin and self and placing our trust in Jesus’s death and resurection that will deliver us from sin and wrath. If you dont trust that text, you dont trust in the Almighty or His Son.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
159
