Appointing God as the Gangster

To start with, I'm not trying to be blasphemous here and there is no intention to belittle any religions or showing any disrespect. The title is such because we sometimes are literally doing it but are not aware of it. This article this time is to make all of us aware of such appointment.

It is very natural for humans to react to any bad sources coming from other humans. It could be due to natural reaction to protect ourselves ir it could be a way we solve our problems. This 'reaction' which is usually as negative as the source itself is called 'revenge' and sometimes it tastes sweet.

Now, the word 'revenge' has been modified, packaged, advertised and manipulated into many other forms and words. Some prefer to call it 'punishment', some say 'teaching someone a lesson', some justifies that 'it takes fire to fight fire', some tell you 'it's for his own good'...well, there are many variations and whatever it is, it is actually attempting 'to let out' that little energy that gets accumulated in our heart.

I'm not trying to discuss anger management today. The main subject I want to bring out is the subconscious way a lot of relatively more religious people (or those who want to better themselves) that they are advocating revenge without realising it.

How many times have you heard a guy that says 'for those bad people, let's forget them. God will punish them' or 'those guys will one day receive their karma'. The original idea here is more of 'hey, let me refrain myself from taking revenge as advised by my religion'. But what the idea became finally was 'I will not react or take revenge. God will punish him or karma will burn him'. Basically, we still want to take revenge but in this case we don't have to because we think God will do it on our behalf!'

So as what the title states, we are appointing God as our gangster to settle our old scores with people we don't like. When we are not taking revenge, the purpose is to forgive or to practice compassion. However, it can end up as 'my boss (God) will settle for me' if we are not careful.

So, ask ourselves next time when we forgive someone in the future...we forgive because we are really forgiving or we forgive (or actually close the case) because we believe God will handle it....aah what a fine line :)