https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=77yqqwxI5hQ
How do you reconcile acting out the Christian ethic of forgiveness with the need to be disagreeable and punish free riders? Well, forgiveness is complicated. It’s not just blanket. Everything you do is always okay. You don’t ever forgive anyone like that, or you do it rarely. You know, maybe if you had a parent who abused you and that parent has died, it may be that it’s in your best interest psychologically to forgive. Although the process is a lot more difficult than the utterance would indicate, right? You should forgive. Well, how? Well, generally, if you’re talking about forgiveness within the confines of a relationship that’s ongoing, there’s judgment that goes along with forgiveness. I don’t think those two things can ever be separated, you know, because you might think, well, to forgive is the opposite of judging. It’s like, no, it’s not. They’re the same thing. You know, if you and I have a fight and we’re trying to reestablish peace, we want to discriminate. We want to differentiate. We want to figure out what the hell happened, right? Who was the fool and how and why exactly? So we don’t do it again. I mean, that’s the hope. And so that requires an unbelievably differentiated judgment. It’s like, not that, not that, no more of that, no more of that. We’ll keep this, we’ll keep this. And, you know, to the degree that we’re able to engage in that honestly, then we can let bygones and reestablish trust and move on. But I don’t think you do, I don’t believe that you do that in any real sense without that capacity to differentiate and discriminate. And then even if you have to forgive someone who’s no longer with you, you can’t just do that like laying a blanket over a corpse, you know? You still have to understand what happened. As far as I can tell, I mean, I’ve worked with people who were traumatized. They can’t just let go. Like people who are traumatized, for example, especially if they’ve been betrayed, they often have to develop a very sophisticated philosophy of evil before they can move past the traumatic experience. So, so the dichotomy was forgiveness and… Yeah. Forgiveness with the need to be disagreeable and punish free riders. Right, right, right. So, you know, forgiveness and you can get away with everything, those aren’t the same thing. And it’s a foolish society that conflates them. You know, our society is trying to tilt hard towards mercy, compassion, forgiveness. You know, we’re at a point where even the idea of judgment is somehow regarded as unethical. Don’t be judgmental. It’s like, no. You know, what’s the saying? Judge not lest ye be judged. Fair enough, man. You know, you use a sword like that at your peril because what you apply to others will be used to apply to you, not least by you. But that doesn’t mean that you can just dispense with judgment altogether and that that all of a sudden makes you moral. That’s utterly preposterous. It’s ethically lazy as well. You know, you want to separate the wheat from the chaff and most of it’s chaff. And so, I mean, that’s how life is, right? The things that are of highest value are rare and it requires careful differentiation to separate them from the things that are less worthy. And so that judgment is, it’s utterly necessary. And there’s no true forgiveness without that piercing judgment that differentiates between what is worthy and what is not. And if we want to live in harmony, we abide by the peace that judgment brings. Are you still planning on a series of lectures covering proverbs? And if so, what’s the tentative timing? No, I don’t believe so. Well, when I was trying to get back on my feet, I thought that might be an entry point rather than to jump to Exodus, let’s say, which is what I really would like to do. But I think that the plan at the moment, you know, the best laid plans of mice and man and all that, but the plan at the moment is to pursue the Exodus, an Exodus investigation, and then to do a series of public lectures on Exodus.