You have both a right an an obligation to forgive those who have sinned against YOU, but you have no right to forgive a murderer for what he did to the victim. The only person who can forgive the murderer is the victim, but like unborn children, the victim has no voice.
It is because the victim has no voice that it is a moral imperative that the murderer lose his right to live after taking a life.
Your squishy self righteousness to the contrary. Society has an obligation to seek restitution for victims without voices and the only legitimate restitution for a victim of murder is the death of the person who murdered them. Giving them a life of relative leisure away from the obligations of working and providing for themselves is hardly a legitimate punishment for such a heinous act.
Tell me, if a madman had your child by the throat and was ready to stab her in the heart and you had a gun nearby, would you execute the bastard or forgive him in advance and let him go through with his intentions?
Well said P-Marlowe
Great way to differentiate and clarify between forgiveness between a still living person vs. someone who had their life stolen by a murder and society’s obligation to punish them.
Your rhetorical question is easily answered simply because self-defense and the defense of others, like killing in a war, is quite different from the deliberate sentence of punishment by death by a court of law based on a written penal code.