Skip to main content

More on Hatred

And forgiveness Pat Buchanan wrote to Jeff Jacoby and defended President Bush for asking God to forgive Yasser Arafat. Jacoby had criticized the president for doing so. He says of the incident:
[M]any readers defended Bush's reaction. One of them was Pat Buchanan, who replied to my column in one of his own. He began with a jab at the presumption of "columnists who know the mind of God." Then he wrote: "In defense of President Bush, if that was his first reaction to Arafat's death, it bespeaks a Christian heart. As a boy in World War II, I was taught by Catholic nuns that while permissible to pray for the death of Hitler or Tojo, it was impermissible to pray for their damnation. That was hatred, and hatred is a sin."
Buchanan is undoubtedly voicing the Catholic response, which often scandalizes those not familiar with it. It is not unique to Catholics, however, most people who have at least some Christian scruples are familiar with it. Jacoby, however, is Jewish, and he shares with us another point of view:
Jewish tradition holds, with Ecclesiastes, that there is a time to love and a time to hate. The Hebrew Bible enjoins us to love our neighbor (Leviticus 19:18) and to love the stranger (Deuteronomy 10:19), but that love has its limits. We are not expected to love savage thugs or to ask God's mercy on them. On the contrary, we loathe the unrepentantly cruel because we believe God loathes them too. It defies reason and upends morality to claim that God loves both Saddam Hussein and the innocent Kurds he gassed to death -- that He bestows His love on Osama bin Laden no less than on the 3,000 souls he butchered on 9/11. Of course we should pray that an evildoer will realize the awfulness of his ways and atone for his crimes. But to love him even if he doesn't? To bless him when he dies? God forbid! To bless the Hitlers and the Arafats of this world is to betray their victims. That we must never do.
It will shock no one if I say that I find the actions of mass murderers abhorrent. But I disagree with Jacoby when he says we should not pray for such a person if they do not repent. It is impossible to know what is going on in another person's mind. It is a mistake to assume they operate under the same constraints as the rest of us. They may be like child born with only nine fingers, except that their missing finger is all or part of the conscience. And it really is presumptuous to assume that we know what God thinks of the matter. What about the victims though? Is Jacoby right to say that to forgive the killer is to betray the victim? This line of the thought is too obsessed with the here and now on earth, when the ultimate goal of our lives to union with God. The victims, united with God, will understand God's reasons, and I doubt very much that they will have much if any concern for how we treat the aggressor. Lashing out at the killer is very much about us, here and now. Were we to follow Jacoby, we would be using the dead to justify our anger, and our need for revenge, whose source is Pride.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reuters joins CNN on the bench

Makes room for CanWest to join the majors Kudos to CanWest for calling a terrorist a terrorist . Many, including The Last Amazon , will be happy to hear it. Reuters is among the worst of the major western news services, where I would also place the BBC and the CBC. Unsurprisingly, Reuters is not happy about the changes CanWest made to Reuters wire stories: Our editorial policy is that we don't use emotive words when labeling someone," said David A. Schlesinger, Reuters' global managing editor. "Any paper can change copy and do whatever they want. But if a paper wants to change our copy that way, we would be more comfortable if they remove the byline." Mr. Schlesinger said he was concerned that changes like those made at CanWest could lead to "confusion" about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations. "My goal is to protect ...

Wordpress

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...

The One and the Many

Plato's Theory of The Good is still relevant Copelston on Plato's Republic : In The Republic it is shown that the true philosopher seeks to know the essential nature of each thing. He is not concerned to know, for example, a multiplicity of beautiful things, but rather to discern the essence of beauty and the essence of goodness, which are embodied in varying degrees in particular beautiful things or particular good things. Non philosophers, who are taken up with the multiplicity of appearances that they do not attend to the essential nature and cannot distinguish, Eg. the essence of beauty from the many beautiful phenomena, are represented as having only opinion and as lacking in scientific knowledge. ... In The Republic ... Good is... compared to the sun, the light of which makes the objects of nature visible to all and so is, in a sense, the source of their worth and value and beauty. This comparison is, of course, but a comparison, and such should not be pressed: we are...