Mercy and Justice

The more unforgiving your society is, the more tumultuous and rebellious it will become. There is a time and place for harshness, but unnecessary and excessive punishment and retribution I've noticed only fuels the bitterness and resentment in both the punished person and the family of the punished person. This in turn perpetuates the cycle of vengeance and hate that fuels crime and terrorism.  

      If you are brutal to a group of people, their children and their families will have vengeance instilled in their hearts, and many will come looking for it as they get older or get the opportunity. This one of the reasons our country gets into so many endless wars. We fuel vengeance and hate. 

Our enemies are often just as unforgiving and merciless as we are, and even if decades go by, many of our enemy groups of people and even enemy ideologies in their own right will scheme and plot revenge against a system they deem to be oppressive and antithetical to their social and political objectives. 

      Excessive brutality from law enforcement creates animosity toward police that is hard to weed out once it is there. A harsh and unforgiving criminal justice system that hands out lengthy sentences and is quick to self-righteous authoritarianism and slow to mercy makes a society both look and feel oppressive. 

       Brutal systems create brutal people, and a system that dehumanizes its subjects and humiliates people consistently is like pooring gasoline on the fire of bitterness and hate, and this serves to continue crime, terrorism, and delinquency on at rather high levels over time.

    This is why mercy and clemency, when practiced responsibly and with clear and reasonable discretion, are so important for a healthy justice system. Merciful justice systems help to mitigate the impression of certain groups in the public that the system of a nation is oppressive. Since lack of forgiveness and lack of mercy are a defining trait of oppressive and authoritarian societies, granting mercy and clemency every once in a while and with a certain level of responsibility reduces the impression of overt brutality and harshness within a system. 

This can have a profound effect on the psychology of both the individual mercy is bestowed upon as well as marginalized groups and even society as a whole. Mercy creates a sense in individuals and groups that the authorities actually care about them. Mercy makes people feel loved and accepted, and even if they did do something seriously wrong, a remorseful person granted mercy, I believe, are less likely to reoffend and most people granted mercy feel an immense amount of gratitude towards the authorities. 

Mercy makes friends out of enemies, brutality makes enemies out of friends. I believe a nation that values human life and its sanctity also knows the beauty, power, and healing capability that mercy has. Mercy is one of the core, essential components of any justice system, government, or institution that strives to and claims to champion the cause and objectives of liberty.

    I know in my heart that God knows that there is more glory in bestowing grace and mercy on a single sinner and criminal who shows true remorse and repents than there is in laying waste to thousands of evildoers on a battlefield. I look at the Christ for an example to live up to that is even greater than what I just said. Jesus forgave those who spat on him, beat him, nailed him to a piece of wood, and left him to die. 

      Those people didn't even show remorse, and the Christ still forgave them. That shows you the extent of God's love, and how God can forgive anyone, no matter how awful they were. God can extend grace and mercy to whoever he pleases, whenever he pleases, and the mercy of God exceeds by a massively wide margin the mercy of our nation's criminal justice system.  It's a shame, honestly, since mercy is such a massive component of liberty. Unforgiving systems always end up being oppressive, which is why mercy is as necessary in a free society as it is.