First posted February 16, 2015
We live in a world where all too many people purposefully contribute to the harm of other human beings either by action or inaction. Most violence emerges with some kind of rationale to legitimize its use. Based on his work with extremely violent offenders, the psychiatrist James Gilligan argues that even the most seemingly pointless acts of violence still have some justification in the perpetrator’s mind.
Supposedly rational uses of violence like warfare and capital punishment follow their own self-conscious logic. At the core of this logic rests a commitment to the necessity of retribution. When the moral order is violated by wrongdoing, ‘justice’ requires revenge.
Throughout the world, religiously-based violence draws heavily on the logic of retribution—think of the struggles in Northern Ireland, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the Sri Lankan civil war. The legitimacy of retribution is also a common cultural reference point in the United States, but where does it come from? In the U.S., it links directly to a particular brand of Christian theology. Deeply ingrained in the religious consciousness of the United States is the belief that retribution is God’s will.
According to the logic of retribution, holiness governs God’s behavior. As a holy God, God cannot stand to be in the presence of impurity—of human sin. Human beings invariably violate that holiness because all of us are sinners. God is bound to respond to sin with punishment, because to forgive would violate God’s holiness. Compassion without satisfaction is not possible for God in this tradition…
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/violence-as-theological-problem/
Albert Camus’s lecture ‘The Human Crisis’, New York, March 1946
After the truth-shower 