Cathal wrote: ↑January 2nd, 2025, 1:43 pm
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Prince Charming in Shrek
A limitation of proving that someone is negligent or has a small bit of malice aforethought in an accident is that there’s no limit to the sources of potential envy and stereotypes. Then the diverse combination of stereotypes can dilute the intensity of any single stereotype causing the most dislike as a form of concealment. For example when my father screeched a knife in a restaurant then it couldn’t immediately infer how aggressive he might have been in producing a jerky arm motion when I didn’t see his initial motion and only his recoil. The way my father as a young adult was thinner than me and then more overweight than me in his middle age meant that I couldn’t rule out how calm he appeared afterwards because he might have been able to move his arm faster than me in spite of me being taller or having slightly more upper body strength. In other words I couldn’t immediately put myself in his body to think of how indifferent I could’ve appeared to produce a similar knife screech. The way I wrote about having an immaterial perception in other threads can be mutual with my father having his own religious faith such that I couldn’t work out how materialistic his own sensory perception could be in how he himself managed to withstand the knife screech. Luckily my father eventually said he was very sorry even though I know in court cases that sometimes the perpetrator of an accident doesn’t want to say sorry in fear of revenge even though the initial sorry would’ve been safe and harmless in and of itself were we idealistic. Perhaps a limitation of Christianity is a risk of hypocrisy as if you shouldn’t promote forgiveness to non-Christians and then demand they still be slightly vengeful in court! So where karma kicks in is if someone doesn’t say sorry for being negligent in an accident then they’re at risk of bearing slight responsibility in how someone else who perpetrated a pure accident might be subjected to needless scrutiny or revenge if everyone became paranoid over negligence. That way forgiveness can always make you nicer and limits a perpetrators capacity to promote evil were they secretly evil. It’s as if Christianity can impose a facetious standard of evil as if the mere appearance that someone cared about being sorry without actually being sorry is itself culpable much like the prodigal son!
This exploration of negligence, malice, perception, forgiveness, and the interplay between personal responsibility and broader moral or religious ideals is interesting.
I have often wondered how proving negligence or intent in an accident is only about insurance. Having been in a few scrapes myself when driving large vehicles on narrow roads, it becomes even more of a toss of the coin. So many factors are involved when trying to prove negligence, and in one case, it was decided that the road had subsided enough to force me off the road. A less thorough investigation might have found me guilty with all the consequences.
Malice or evil intent is quite something else, because it constitutes a grey area in which subconscious thought is almost impossible to ascertain. Many years ago, I read about theories based on accidents that have happened to people in therapy, with evidence suggesting (but not proving) that the people affected may have chosen the consequences of an accident over the consequences of what they were going through. There was even the suggestion of ‘subconscious intent.’
Your father’s knife screech in the restaurant may fit into this category and illustrate how limited information about someone's physical actions or internal state can make it difficult to infer intent or emotion. Although it is encouraged, "putting oneself in another's shoes" involves many factors, such as differences in body type, physical ability, life experience, and demeanour, that further complicate the process of empathizing.
In a religious setting, as you say, these situations are often evaluated differently. The requirement to forgive can prevent us from delving deeper and discovering a potential imbalance that it would be better to address than to ‘forgive and forget.’ That is why we often get the feeling that Christians (among others) whitewash and dilute situations, rather than assessing them. When something goes to court and is investigated, it is often a shock to the system, as we saw when Priests were taken to account for the psychological damage they had inflicted on their victims of sexual abuse.
An apology is, obviously, a welcome gesture, except when it just skims over the issue in the hope of getting to the end of it. Avoiding an apology can remain a burden of regret for years afterwards, whereas the apology might have released the person concerned from that burden, and potential escalating paranoia or cycles of blame. On the other hand, demanding a public apology can also be oppressive and ridicule its aim.
The idea of karma as a counterbalance to negligence, meaning that our deeds will come back to us and reward or punish us anyway, reminds me that many people are perhaps carrying a bundle with them that we can’t see, which is also a factor in explaining their behaviour. I’m not sure, in this worldview, whether an apology affects karma, but its consequences may contribute to a more relaxed society.
Still, the prodigal son story has so many facets besides forgiveness, many of which we overlook because we don’t see the cultural implications.
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