First, a confession: I could not resist the "Lock Up" marathon. Just couldn't. The glimpse it offers of life in prison fascinates me, and the trainer in me finds useful the systems of rewards and punishments and levels and responsibility, and it reinforces for me the notion that people do what works for them, even if it causes them pain. But that's for another post.
They were interviewing a man who was on death row. Robert Fry, serial killer. He had killed four people, brutally. And, while in prison, he "found God."
He talked about sin, and being forgiven, and how he has been saved. He said, "What's worse, killing someone or stealing a cracker? It's all the same to God."
What caught me was this idea that stealing a cracker or killing a man were both equal sins in the eye's of the Lord: a sin is a sin, period. And that he had been forgiven by God, which gave him the right to ask the families of his victims for forgiveness.
That's about when my head exploded.
Okay, shall we break this down? I don't know what moral sense could equate eating someone else's cracker with killing them. The levels of harm are absurdly divergent, and I would think an inherent sense of justice wouldn't punish the cracker eater the same as the mass murderer. But, how convenient for him. This man can kill four people and feel like he did the same level of wrong as a cracker-stealer. He can sleep easy, safe in the knowledge that what he did was no worse than what a starving man stealing bread might have done. How awesome to think that the very worst thing I could do is no worse than the very least bad thing I could do...
So, why not kill the guy holding the cracker? They are the same, right? So no harm in upgrading the sin.
Along with this goes the sense of absolution. He feels he has been forgiven, and so he feels morally superior to his victims, to the point where intruding on their lives to ask them a favor seems completely appropriate.
(I have no issue with a victim making the choice to forgive--or not--a perpetrator. But it is their choice, and one they have a right to make on their own, and without requiring communication with the perp.)
Can you imagine, after burying your spouse/mom/son, the murderer thinks it is appropriate to, oh, send you a letter. Not one apologizing, but one asking for your forgiveness. Without a single thought to how you have healed, how you are grieving, how this intrusion might rip open slowly healing wounds.
Because it is still all about him. This murder didn't care about his victims, and "finding God" hasn't given him empathy or sympathy or compassion or insight. All it has given him is absolution and a bizarre removal of responsibility or need for atonement.
If that's what 'finding god' is about, I'm content to leave him lost...
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