What Is Repentance?

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Chris Hedges wrote a great piece for Robert Scheer's site, Truthdig.com, about the prison-for-profit system that's turning our country into a heartless gulag.

And there was one comment I really liked I want to reprint.

I'm going to follow it by a song by Bob Mould, because I've been listening lately to Workbook. Late 80's music.

Here's the comment:



waytoomanybottlesofspicedrum • 15 hours ago −
The reverend says that repentance is about more than feeling sorry; it must include action to rectify the wrong. Here's my problem with this sort of thinking.

Lots of assholes do a few good things - giving to charity, volunteering somewhere etc. - which amount to feel good activities for themselves and which also gain them respect from idiots who too quickly overlook the fact that they were assholes in the first place. (People who are quick to forgive are quick to forget the wrongs that led to the forgiveness, and so quick forgiveness reinforces an unjust system.)

It's like if a rotten person makes a few gestures, suddenly that person becomes the center of a feel good narrative playing out in other people's minds, and so that person is suddenly commended for starting out as a scumbag and then changing. Meanwhile, their victims lead lives of constant disrespect and degradation. They never receive such honor as the supposedly converted scumbag does.

Sorry, but I think true repentance is much more substantive and much less self-centered. And I don't mean religious repentance, as I'm not religious. I just mean sincere regret and rituals of atonement for one's rotten behavior that dehumanized others.

Here's how true repentance should be. It should present a real imposition on one's lifestyle, so that if the asshole who degraded others wants to repent, he or she can't be seen to have changed if they remain within the comforts of their existing lifestyle. They have to make sacrifices: of time, energy, health, happiness, money, social status, peer groups and so on.

The person undergoing repentance must be genuinely transformed, and this only happens - sometimes - when a rotten turd finds himself suffering in such a way that he or she reevaluates their personality, values, way of life, and habitual behaviors.

I think having a person kneel on a hard floor for four hours, begging for forgiveness from a symbol representing all those who were wronged, is better than going to an hour-long rally and receiving positive attention for supposedly "changing one's ways."

Someone might argue that kneeling alone and begging at the feet of a symbol achieves nothing, while going out even for an hour to feel good in a political demonstration at least does something. But that's wrong. In repenting alone in a way that makes you suffer and strips away your pride, you excise yourself from feel good forms of protest and receive no attention or honor for being a dick who claims to have seen the light. So you break a small part of the system that reinforces meaningless feel good forms of protest in which privilege persists despite pretensions of seeking justice. Plus, in suffering alone by carrying out acts like kneeling for four hours and begging, you are more likely to achieve a real, deep-seated, and lasting change of heart.

Only then are you fit to rejoin the decent people and protest alongside those who haven't committed horrendous misdeeds.

Here's my rule: No reconciliation and reintegration with the mass of humanity that you helped fuck over until you've repented deeply and suffered for it. Only then have you earned the right to rejoin the world.

If you ever see a Wall St. fucker protesting for social justice because he did horrendous things, chase him away and tell him to repent in his heart through deep soul searching, isolated contemplation, and rituals of self-sacrifice to break his or her ego. All the ill-gotten gains should be given to the poor - all of them to the last penny - and he should spend the rest of his time in the world living humbly and, after his isolated repentance is done, helping others. He must do it until the end of his days, and then, posthumously, is he forgiven.

Don't let such people go from being assholes who used power and privilege that demeaned others and put their kids through expensive colleges to being attention-grabbing converts who've supposedly seen the error of their ways (while their kids still enjoy the finer things in life from their parents' ill-gotten power and privilege). A repentant heart is more important than hollow gestures, and a truly repentant heart only comes from suffering that induces a long, lonely period of self-examination.

That's an atheist version of repentance, and it is closer to the right and the good than the hollow religious version, where a few words of atonement suffice to wash a dirty conscience clean, then you go on with fucking people over to aggrandize yourself, perhaps by making yourself a center of attention among morons who think that a supposedly converted asshole is more worthy of honor and attention than those who suffer day in, day out.





Bob Mould
Sinners and their Repentances
Workbook



All those things I've done before,
It doesn't matter anymore.
I see the errors of my oh-so-humble ways
Better run before

There's no way that I can cover for
All these things catch up to me
We've all sinned before
I have sinned before

These sins, they seem to fit you well
Since I have known these sins so well.

All these sins I've known before
They just don't concern me anymore
A secret voice in my sleep
Better speak before

Know there's someone right behind the door
I don't seem to speak with ease
Falling, falling down..

I see these words don't work so well
I see these words so well
See me saying, "Oh, well"
It's easy to save face in this world.

How can you qualify
Difference between a sin and a lie?
I see my silver lining in the sky
But now I can't decide
If you told the truth or you lied.

You seem to sin so well.
This light's so bright
It seems to hurt my eyes
You seem to sin so well...

If the crush of your emotions
Leave you lying in the dust
Well, then take it all right out on me
And leave me in the rain to rust.






Meteorite Over Russia