Forgiveness

Dostoevsky wrote in Brother Karamazov (you already know this is going to be an awesome post) that people tend to either love Humanity with a capital H but hate one's neighbor (i.e. the people in the immediate vicinity) or love the neighbor and hate Humanity. But rarely, if ever, are we capable of both (thanks to Yuri for this information). I personally belong to the former-- I understand what is good for humankind, but when "humankind" becomes "Mary" telling me that her favorite restaurant is Quaker Steak N' Lube in the Goodwill checkout line I just don't know what to say. Mary and her little universe are so far away I can't tap in to the conversation between us and just start musing vaguely about the value of education to myself. A large part of this dislike comes, i think, from an inability to accept the humanity of anther person-- an inability to forgive someone for the flaws of her character. This feeling arises when you wish someone would think like you, feel like you, or do like you, and many people seem to be constantly correcting the behavior of others to the standards by which they personally judge the world. I've been curious about this for a long time and increasingly fed up with myself (and my neighbor) over this sort of selfishness, to put it one way, and wondering how to move beyond such pettiness. One answer Christianity offers to this question is forgiveness.

An initial comparison of texts:
"For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins" (Matthew 6:14).
Once a Confucius's student asked him, 'Is there a word one can act on for one's lifetime?'
Confucius said, 'That may be forgiveness. Do not apply the things you don’t like yourself to others.' (Analects, exact citation unknown)

I think the "sin of man" is not a spiritual debt but the human condition. Just as individuals feel guilt for their weaknesses and shame over their deficiencies, so humanity as a whole finds fault in itself. The reaction to this dissatisfaction with the self are similar in both humankind as a whole and people as individuals: various neuroses, self-disgust and self-doubt, insecurity, etc. The nature of the sin of man spoken of in Christianity, and which can be found to varying degrees in varying forms in many other religions, can be taken, in a sense, to point at precisely this shame over the human state. Just the other night mother said that when she was young she used to wonder why people wanted to be friends with her and experienced a weird kind of guilt toward other people. Indeed, the fall from eden indebted humans not only with a spiritual sin but a spiritually deep feeling of guilt. This regret for a mistake that removed us from Paradise carries with it an equally onerous sense of shame for the weaknesses that caused our banishment. Paradise, then, is not simply a perfect, transcendent realm of in the lap of God from which we have been irrevocably cast, but a state of human perfection idealized into another world. Many religious and spiritual traditions describe similar degeneration from states of flawlessness toward deficiency:
"The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go? To the point where some of them believed that things have never existed--so far, to the end, where nothing can be added. those at the next stage thought that things exist but recognized no boundaries among them. Those at the next stage thought there were boundaries but recognized no right and wrong." (From Zhuangzi's Discussion on Making All Things Equal, 37)
Chinese religions (mainly Daoism and Confucianism) are similar to Christianity in the belief in a perfect past where men were complete in understanding. The difference between "the men of ancient times" and Eden is great but the idealization of the past, the process of devolution following a break from this past, and the remedy are all common between them. The essential fact of the matter (which I suppose could simply be what I personally believe) is that the past, like the future, is unknowable in the present, insofar as we cannot go experience other times. One possibility is that the human flaws sensed by ancient peoples, a sense we still possess and around which psychologists build careers, were superimposed onto their theories of human nature. The diagnoses these traditions make are certainly similar. A line from the Bible key to this issue, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). The first words Jesus spoke upon the cross are an appeal to God for acceptance of the folly of man based on his innocence, regardless of the consequences of this folly. Forgiveness eventually became a cardinal virtue of Christianty and absolute, all-accepting forgiveness likened to Godliness, for only God is magnanimous enough to acknowledge sin and let it be. As we come into constant contact with other people, other flawed manifestations of humanity, we are confronted with the same dilemma: to accept a person exactly for who they are, to forgive them their deficiencies, and to allow an imperfect being it's place in existence. the absolution of others must begin with a complete acceptance of a subjects own human condition, individual to each case, before such forgiveness can be extended without.