Category: Random

The world doesn’t end when you’re hurt. In a matter of weeks or months, you will gain a better perspective about why things turned sour. Someday you’ll understand why. Someday, things will become clearer.

But for now, you need faith to believe that despite the pain, the Lord is on your side. You need faith to believe that indeed, all things work together for the good of those who love God. That includes good things, painful things, wonderful things, terrible things. 

Carry on with your life. Move on. Remember that despite your terrible situation, God is still good and it is still a beautiful life.

Today the formula of vicarious suffering is as familiar to us as it is difficult for us to explain. Ever since Kant’s work on religion of 1793, it has been asserted repeatedly that the idea of vicarious suffering is no longer comprehensible because guilt, as an “intrinsic personal failure,” is nontransferable. Guilt, according to Kant, is

not a transmissible liability which can be made over to somebody else, in the manner of a financial debt (where it is all the same to the creditor whether the debtor himself pays up, or somebody else for him), but the most personal of all liabilities, namely a debt of sins which only the culprit, not the innocent, can bear, however magnanimous the innocent might be in wanting to take the debt upon himself for the other.

The difficulties with the idea of vicarious suffering come in this case from a particular view of humanity, namely, from the axiom of the nonrepresentability of the subject: as long as the subject sets the standard for his own responsibility, guilt, too, remains his alone and cannot be taken away by anything or anyone. “Guilt is always one’s own, because it is attached to the ego, and no one can give anyone else his ego (G. Friedrich).” Continue reading Stellvertretung

Only those who acknowledge their guilt can be forgiven. Oppressors must acknowledge that they are oppressors. Otherwise they cannot receive forgiveness. Knowledge of guilt is the beginning of change. Forgiveness conquers injustice at its roots and leads the oppressor to become a comrade, the enemy to become a brother or sister. 

— Carlos Mesters, Die Botschaft des leidenden Volkes

“[Guilt is] not a transmissible liability which can be made over to somebody else, in the manner of a financial debt (where it is all the same to the creditor whether the debtor himself pays up, or somebody else for him), but the most personal of all liabilities, namely a debt of sins which only the culprit, not the innocent, can bear, however magnanimous the innocent might be in wanting to take the debt upon himself for the other.”

—Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason