[cajungirl]

I agree. And what irks me to no end is when I say "bring the butchers to justice", people dare to lecture me on forgiveness. As if they have the right, yes the right, to forgive the butchers of other people. I guess that is their right, to forgive other people's killers, but that is not how justice works. No one has that right. Only the power to bring them to justice and let the law have it's way with them. After it is all over, God gets to decide. But to abrogate the rule of law in the name of being forgiving yourself is perverse.

[Wilhelm Tell]

It would be the height of presumption for me to say that on the behalf of God or on behalf of a victim of injustice I forgive the person who did wrong. Such cheap grace does nothing good and it costs the "forgiver" nothing.

I remember years ago hearing a teacher in a Sunday School class say that Moses did wrong when Moses saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and Moses became enraged and killed the Egyptian. The teacher said we shouldn't let ourselves become angry because anger makes us do bad things like what Moses did, blah, blah, blah.

I thought at the time that the same man who killed the Egyptian was the same man that God used to liberate Israel, and that if Moses had simply looked the other way when the slave was being beaten, he would not have been the sort of man God could have used to stand against the Pharaoh and liberate Israel. My thoughts have not become much more nuanced than that over the years.

I think that while we live on earth and not in heaven we have a dark side that we have to accept in order to control, and that either celebrating the dark side or denying it exists goes to one extreme or the other and misses the mark. At any rate, that is how I understand the admonition in Proverbs to "be not righteous overmuch."