SubscribeAnd the one thing many on this thread are forgetting is this: we may never have thrown anything or done anything against anyone else because of their race-but any unkindness we have ever shown to others....well, in the eyes of God we are no better than that man at his worst. So we don't have a lot of room to talk.One of the amusing horrors of Christianity is the belief that "Lying to the panhandler about whether you have any money on you" and "Strangling the panhandler in an alley and raping his corpse" are equally immoral. There is a very strong emphasis on the "God thinks you're no better than Hitler" line of thought.
I'm starting to see the problem with trying to discuss Christianity on Metafilter. It appears people have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and are very confident in their ignorance.It's kind of funny how, no matter how much a poster knows about the Church, if they do not like the church it means they do not understand it. Your Scotsmen are the real ones, after all.
I'm with Pater Alethias here (as I find myself being increasingly on these threads). It appears there is absolutely nothing this guy could have done that would not have invited snark.Yes. That is correct. He fucked up a lot of people, then became a powerful man and continued to fuck people up. Now he is about to die and is scared he will face consequences. So he is turning to the people he fucked and asking to forgive him. That is ground fucking zero of snark. He is walking snark bait. No matter how sincere he feels he is, the fact is that his realization is just frightened, last minute cramming.
So how many of you have actually read the parable of the Prodigal Son? Go read it. Particularly the part with the elder brother.Spoiler: It's the story of a rich kid who cashes in his inheritance, spends it on hookers and blow, lives in the gutter for a while, then comes home and asks his dad for a job. His "responsible" older brother is outraged when dad welcomes the screw-up back into the family (not "gives him a job," mind you -- welcomes him back into the family with all the prestige and riches that entails) and throws a giant feast in his honor.
I was takin' my pride in the pleasures I'd known
I laughed and thought I'd be forgiven
but my laughter turned 'round eyes blazing and
said my friend, we're holdin' a wedding
I buried my face but it spoke once again
the night to the day we're a bindin'
and now the dark air is like fire on my skin
and even the moonlight is blinding
"I wasn't ever scared of no one, or nothing," says Wilson, still a tall, strapping man despite his illness.
"You were scared of the ghost of that black man you saw rocking in the chair," his wife reminds him, describing the nightmare several years ago when he furiously beat his fists into thin air.
Wilson narrows his eyes and scowls at her.
...
Wilson finishes his liver and okra and turns on his flat-screen television. He says he's tired of talking about the past. He just wants to watch his favorite true-crime show, "Nancy Grace," and catch the latest on the Florida toddler whose mother has been charged with her murder.
Wilson says he feels like crying when he thinks about the little girl and her terrible fate. "There's just so much bad in the world," he says, shaking his head. "Makes you wonder where it all comes from."
Umm. There is a lot of anger in this thread, and most of it is directed at christianity and the way people who were brought up as christians look at the world. The poor guy just seems to be in the crossfire.No. It's directed at the idea that this man is admirable because he got a case of the nerves when face-to-face with the afterlife. He's not "a poor guy caught in the crossfire" -- he beat civil rights protesters. He tried to get black families kicked out of their homes. His own wife was frightened of him. Then he realized he was dying and decided that he didn't want the burden of hate weighing him down.
While some are insulted at the notion he should apologize and seek forgiveness, it seems like more than a few of his victims are pleased to receive the apologies, and happy to forgive. He also serves as an example that it's never too late to change for the better.I am not offended that he has sought forgiveness. I disagree, though, that he can serve as an example of anything save Occam's Razor. Is what he's doing bad? No. It's a nice Touched By An Angel kind of story, but under all the fluff it's the story of an old, dying, powerless man who wants to be escape the choices he made when he did have the power to hurt others. His comments are not about the harm he did to others -- they're about the terrible burden he carried as someone who was so hateful.
So, this is one instance where christianity actually puts its money where its mouth is, and allows a suffering soul to ease himself - everyone's a sinner in some way at some point, and everyone can atone for their sins.Christianity allows violent sociopaths to ease their consciences after a lifetime hurting people. Got it.
what do you, optimus chyme, have to offer this man that is better than what the christians offerOptimus Chyme never said he was in the business of comforting people who spent their lives abusing others.
Christianity allows violent sociopaths to ease their consciences after a lifetime hurting people. Got it.No, it's a sad, regretful thing. It's something that I've watched happen several times in the lives of people I cared for.
That's a pretty hateful thing to say.
Now, while I was raised Episcopalian, which isn't the most high-and-mighty bunch of Holy Rollers out there, and I didn't really pay all that much attention in Sunday School, and haven't been a churchgoer since I was 16 or so, but I'm pretty sure that it's absolutely not the story I'm telling you.Perhaps you should listen to your own story, then. We have here a man who spent his entire adult life abusing those around him, and even seeking out people to abuse because of their skin color. He takes great pride in this, and his family lived in fear of him. Now, when he's an old man, he realizes he's dying and he's afraid that he's been a bad person and will go to hell. He talks to a friend.
If you're an evangelistic atheist, then I suppose it's OK. Lord knows there are Christian and Muslim and What-have-you fundies that take great pleasure in throwing their belief system in other's faces, and make big shows of sneering disdain for anyone who believes differently. Why shouldn't atheists get in on the fun?I spent decades of my life spreading the gospel of Christ. It is one of my single greatest regrets. This is not sneering disdain. This is outrage that an abuser is being called a hero.
It's better to apologize, than not apologize.AFAIK, no one has quarreled with that single point. I concur that it is better!
That's it. Nothing more.
How anyone can quarrel with that single point is just perplexing to me. Not stupid, not hateful, just perplexing.
I offer him nothing except my hope that his pain is unbearable, indescribable.What a brilliant use of hope. An eye for an eye, right? And since there's no eyes around, we'll take a tooth.
I have no problem with him apologizing, but the statements I hear in this thread are staggering. He's an innocent old man caught in the middle. He's a hero. He's an inspiration.Innocent? No. Hero? Absolutely fucking not. Inspiration? Only in that even racist fuckwads have the capacity to see the evil of their deeds and attempt to change their ways.
AFAIK, no one has quarreled with that single point.1 2 3 4 5
because the people who find it galling have nothing more to offer than hate and spite and they know that's an inadequate response - they know that they can be right as rain about their social and political beliefs and yet they will not be able to persuade their enemies, because they have nothing to give to themI think you might be projecting Optimus Chyme's anger at this man on all of us who find him less than inspirational. I don't hate this man, and I don't believe that I've said anything to indicate that. I see him as a brutal abuser who is hedging his bets as death approaches -- a pattern that anyone who's dealt with abusers can say is a familiar one. Could I be wrong? Obviously. It's just a freakin' article. But I'm not going to apologize for seeing the story that way based on what we know.
verb: related to that--I don't think you should throw around words like "sociopath." Antisocial personality disorder is a condition with real psychiatric implications for whether a person is able to change (and, by extension, how morally culpable he is for his actions).
I'm aware. Obviously I'm not a psychologist, and obviously we have nothing but a newspaper to go on -- I wouldn't pretend to know the man's inner workings. From what we do know, however, the pattern -- callous disregard for people that he sees as unnecessary, remorseless abuse, and a quick change of heart when consequences appear on the horizon -- is very familiar. The question of 'moral culpability' in the Christian faith is a complex one and the default answer in most branches of the faith is, as St. Alia has pointed out, "Everyone deserves hell and is going to go there, period, end of story."Some people do get off criminal charges by way of the insanity plea, you know. But actually, Wilson does not fit the profile, as he evidently has the ability to empathize and to recognize the harm he has done (maybe?). In that sense, he's a person for whom we can hope for a genuine transformation of his outlook.Recognition of the harm that one has done is not incompatible with sociopathy. Disempathetic socipaths in particular are perfectly capable of relating emotionally to spouses, friends, and others they consider worth their attention, while others are objects to be treated with profound cruelty. Obviously, we have very little to go on and his relatively inability to explain complex motivations doesn't help us much. But from the story I see little to indicate that he has fundamentally changed -- he just became worried that someone that has power over him (God) would punish him, and he made a pragmatic decision to treat a swath of previously objectified people differently.Christianity, btw, does not suggest that verbal repentance is a get-out-of-jail-free card. The repentant sinner is told, "Go, and sin no more." Whether a person's heart is truly changed, I don't think any of us can know. On the question of a final judgment of some kind, I'm agnostic. But the fact is that the change called for by Christianity is one of the heart, and that if it's genuine, it will become apparent in a person's future actions. True Christianity doesn't naively assume that a person's "sorry!" will make everything okay. But it does hold out hope--always hope--that a person's heart can truly change.The reason deathbed confessions and their variants are inherently suspicious is that there's little chance to see whether there will be a "genuinely transformation" and little chance for change -- those doing the confessing or apologizing are, you know... dying. For the purposes of the Christian faith, that's fine -- God can decide if they were sincere or not and they will either be saved or not saved depending on that judgement. Those of us on Earth sift through the temporal consequences.
My experiences and beliefs in this regard are certainly shaped by my past experiences in the context of Christianity. I have close friends who were sexually abused for years by a respected member of the local church, for example. When he was eventually arrested, it became clear that he had been abusing dozens of children over decades.
Eventually, while dying of stomach cancer, the abuser was overcome with remorse and repented. Other members of the church felt hat his remorse was sincere. Perhaps it was. What I do know is that his victims -- people I know -- have spent the better part of their lives sifting through the real, tangible consequences of his actions. They have lived with the aftermath, and have also had to live with being told that their abuser was going to Heaven while they -- if they did not forgive him -- would go to Hell.
I understand that most Christians would not express it that way, but this is what I meant when I said earlier that Christianity offers sociopaths a way to soothe their consciences while everyone else has to sort through the rubble of their abuse. In the real world, this happens. It is not the online bleating of amateur theologians. And when I see people lauding the power of deathbed confessions to soothe the consciences of abusers, I am troubled.
why would you ever let anyone out of prison, everFor all my statements in this thread, I disagree. I think that forgiveness is definitely possible, for anyone. I think that there are far worse and more dangerous people in prison. And I think that if we view prison as a place where people work off a debt to society or are punished for a crime, we would of course release someone from prison.
because almost everyone in prison is a nicer, more decent human being than this man. Theft isn't cool, but it's not the relentless pattern of hate this man laid down his entire life. There's a lot that can be forgiven, but not this man.
It sounds like most of you here would deny a man on death row access to clergy. How dare he be allowed to repent?I think there's a lot of "Someone said X, Everyone who disagrees with me says that too" going on. I'm as guilty of it as the next guy -- projecting the "He's a hero! He's an inspiration" bits recounted in the article to some of the people in this thread. That was incorrect, just as your statement above is incorrect.
Holy shit. I finally get it. A bunch of the posters in this thread are simply pissed off that this man subscribes to a religious belief that would allow him to mitigate some of his guilt at the end of his life. You WANT him to suffer till the end. And you're upset that he found a "loophole" and may feel some sense of relief before he passes on. You are not willing to grant any quarter, so you want to deny him the ability to seek solace in any arena.No. I simply object to the idea that his pursuit of it is anything other than his own attempt to mitigate his own feelings of guilt as death approaches. If you fuck up peoples' lives, God can forgive you. People can forgive you. But what you did doesn't go away, at least not here on Earth.
If you don't forgive you don't get forgiven.It is not my place to forgive him. He did nothing to me, and he has not asked for my forgiveness. Also, you've overgeneralized: if one doesn't forgive, God will not forgive them. Don't worry, I'm familiar with the maxim. My friend, the one whose pastor molested her for a decade, had that explained to her quite a few times as she tried to work through the repercussions of it in her life. Human relationships are, by definition, far messier things than the rigorous world of theology.
That goes for all of you who want to condemn this man. Only God can see his heart,and see how sincere he is-and to my mind only God could have gotten him to see his error to begin withCuriously enough, I know people of many faiths and no faiths at all who have recognized things they've done to hurt others, decided to change, and done their best to make amends. "Seeing the error of one's ways" is not an implicitly Christian activity; one can argue that if fear of hell was the motivating factor, and thus the only way this man would have stopped his hatin'. That, however, just brings us back to the sincerity thing.
But his actions started with his heart, and his hate. Many of you feel justified in YOUR hate because you believe he deserves it. Maybe he does-but God won't give you a pass for your hate because of it.I don't hate him. But I think that the attitude of some religious believers towards his story is indicative of unhealthy fundamental attitudes. After decades in the church I came to the conclusion that I would, if I was honest and faithful to my beliefs, spend eternity in hell. If Christianity as we (and you) understand it in our culture is true, I will die and endure timeless, unending torment beyond imagining. I've accepted that and I do what I do because I believe it is good. If I am wrong, I will work to correct it where I can and live with the consequences where I can't. That, to me, is what being whole and human is about.
I think that when his consciousness ceases, he'll have died without comprehending his destructive role in our society. It's a bit of a bummer, but also pretty much irrelevent: nothing is going to undo the damage he did. The only real shame of it all is that he isn't dying in jail, removed from the society he harmed. At least then we could say that we did the right thing. Instead, we allowed him to get away with it. Shame on us.One of the things that I've contemplated a lot is the portion of Scripture where it talks about everyone being judged after the world ends, and all hidden things being revealed. In many circles this is treated as a case where hidden sins will be revealed to all onlookers: the moment when secret wrongs will finally be made public.
I think some of the Hurrah! posts you're seeing here are not celebrating or diminishing his horrible acts but celebrating that he may be redeemed - the same way you would be happy if, for example, a brother who suffered from alcoholism went on the wagon and started getting treatment.I can definitely understand that; as I've mentioned before it was how I saw things for a long time.
I became convinced of Jeff’s sincerity by one happening. On a certain visit we came to the end of our study time together. The prison guard had given us the signal, but right then, before I stood to leave, Jeff bared his soul.While the same questions of sincerity and intent apply in Dahmer's case -- it's even easier to come to the conclusion that he was a dangerous manipulative psychopath smart enough to play the system -- he seems to have at least grasped the enormity of his crimes and was thinking about the profoundness of the societal consequences (his own death).
“I feel very, very bad about the crimes I’ve committed. In fact, I think I should have been put to death by the state for what I did.”
“I agree with you,” I said. “You should have been put to death by the state for the crimes you committed.”
He replied, “If that is true, am I sinning against God by continuing to live?”
it's not as if christians haven't been struggling with this issue for a good long time, you know - see also the parable of the workers in the vineyards - yes, people are going to come in at the 11th hour and get the kind of understanding that we've slaved for all day - but would we really be happier if they were tossed into the outer darkness to wail and gnash their teeth?This, I think, is one of those moments where those on opposite sides of the 'Christian conception of the afterlife' fence are talking different languages. It leads to interesting disconnects.
but i'm not the one who used the phrase moral hazard to express discontent with the idea of people being forgiven for bad things - i don't see how one can use that phrase about an earth where bad people are often rewarded and good people are often burdened down - if you say the reward of a deathbed confession is imaginary, then it can't be an rewardI have the feeling I'm going to need to use some charts. If Person A believes that they will be punished for eternity for hurting other people, they may decide they will not hurt other people in order to avoid that punishment. This sort of arrangement is most effective for individuals who do not have the capacity for empathy with others -- sociopaths and psychopaths respond primarily to threats of punishment, not concern for fellow human beings.
the whole point of invoking moral hazard is to say that people get what they deserve because if they don't, things get out of balance - and i'm just not seeing that balance happen on this planetI think there's some confusion, then, about the meaning of 'moral hazard' -- it is not sour grapes about someone else not being punished. Quoth Wikipedia: "Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk." A party that believes they can do wrong and apologize later, thus avoiding the consequences, is a party insulated from risk. I am not suggesting that this 'disproves Christianity' or 'proves that Christians are bad' or even that it suggests most Christians are doing that. The theological structure of it does create a moral hazard, however.
By the way, it has been my experience-and one borne out in Scripture-that typically people who are sinning and think they will repent later will actually be more likely to get more and more hardened in their sin.That's practically the definition of a moral hazard. I'm not discussing the theological implications -- whether someone will actually make it to Heaven or not. I'm talking about the impact on behavior in the here and now.
And what I can't understand for the life of me is why do you fucking care? If you do not believe in a God, and certainly do not believe in a Messiah, and CERTAINLY don't believe in a paradise in the afterlife, then why on Earth do you give a shit?Because I, like you, find the here and now to be important and I believe that treating him as a hero reinforces the moral hazard that I've discussed above. Pretending that it is a non-issue seems as strange as railing against the man himself and demanding that he be executed. It's about as obvious a case of end-of-life supernatural bargaining as you will ever find. The man explicitly says that it is. And when we celebrate cases of supernatural end-of-life bargaining we encourage others who would not be affected by empathy to use the same tactic.
Your argument is with (some? most? all?) Christian theology, not this one man.Well, yes. I thought that was obvious. Wilson's story is a bit of a seed around which issues of forgiveness, consequences, responsibility, and so on can coalesce. I'll admit that I was unperturbed by the story until several of the posters here started talking about how it was a an inspiring story of redemption, a case of Christianity "doing its job," and so on.
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