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You wrote: “Mat 6:14-15 (NIV) “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But, if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.””

WHEN FORGIVENESS IS A SIN
By Dennis Prager
http://www.dennisprager.com/forgiveness.html
(Reprinted in Reader’s Digest, March 1998, from The Wall Street Journal)

The bodies of the three teen-age girls shot dead last December by a fellow student at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., were not yet cold before some of their schoolmates hung a sign announcing, “We forgive you, Mike!” They were referring to Michael Carneal, 14, the killer.

This immediate and automatic forgiveness is not surprising. Over the past generation, many Christians have adopted the idea that they should forgive everyone who commits evil against anyone, no matter how great and cruel and whether or not the evildoer repents.

The number of examples is almost as large as the number of heinous crimes. Last August, for instance, the preacher at a Martha’s Vineyard church service attended by the vacationing President Clinton announced that the duty of all Christians was to forgive Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who murdered 168 Americans. “Can each of you look at a picture of Timothy McVeigh and forgive him?” the Rev. John Miller asked. “I have, and I invite you to do the same.”

Though I am a Jew, I believe that a vibrant Christianity is essential if America’s moral decline is to be reversed. And despite theological differences, Christianity and Judaism have served as the bedrock of American civilization. And I am appalled and frightened by this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness.

This doctrine advances the amoral notion that no matter how much you hurt others, millions of your fellow citizens will forgive you. It destroys Christianity’s central moral tenets about forgiveness. Even by God, forgiveness is contingent on the sinner repenting, and it can be given only by the one sinned against.

” And if your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him,” reads Luke 17:3-4. “And if seven times of the day he sins against you, and seven times of the day turns to you saying, I repent, you shall forgive him.”

These days one often hears that “It is the Christian’s duty to forgive, just as Jesus forgave those who crucified him.” Of course, Jesus asked God to forgive those who crucified him. But Jesus never asked God to forgive those who had crucified thousands of other innocent people. Presumably he recognized that no one has the moral right to forgive evil done to others.

You and I have no right, religiously or morally, to forgive Timothy McVeigh or Michael Carneal; only those they sinned against have that right, If we are automatically forgiven no matter what we do, why repent? In fact, if we forgive everybody for all the evil they do, God and his forgiveness are unnecessary. We have substituted ourselves for God.

I host a talk-radio show, and when confronted with such arguments, some callers offered another defense: “The students were not forgiving Carneal for murdering the three students. They were forgiving him for the pain he caused them.” Such self centered thinking masquerading as a religious ideal is a good example of the moral disarray in much of religious life.

Some people have a more sophisticated defense of the forgive-every-one-everything doctrine: doing so is psychologically healthy. It brings “closure.” This is therapy masquerading as idealism: “I forgive you because I want to feel better.”

Until West Paducah, I believed that Christians will lead America’s moral renaissance. Though I still believe that, the day those students, with the support of their school administration, hung out that sign I became less sanguine. If young Christians have inherited more values from the ‘60s culture than from their religion, where can we look for help?